David Gough

Dr David Gough is Professor of Evidence Informed Policy and Practice and Director of the Social Science Research Unit and its EPPI-Centre at the Institute of Education, University of London. Previously he worked in the University of Glasgow and Japan Women’s University. His areas of research interest are research synthesis to inform professional and public decision making in policy and practice of social interventions, including child health and social care. He is Editor of the journal Child Abuse Review and Associate Editor of the journal Evidence and Policy.

Presentation Title: Giving voice through demand led production of knowledge and its use: the role of systematic reviews

If we wish to make any decision, to take any action, it can be useful for these decisions to be informed by the knowledge acquired by our fellow human beings. There are many types of knowledge and one of these, research knowledge, has particular value on providing declarative generalizeable knowledge that can be applied to new situations.

Knowledge from individual studies can not always be relied upon and firmer conclusions can be made from considering all the relevant research studies. Bringing the evidence from different studies together is itself a form of research with explicit methods of review with accountable results and conclusions in systematic research reviews. These reviews are often associated with experimental research but can be used to ask any question and thus include any type of research and data. The findings of such syntheses are often used to provide the research evidence for knowledge translation activities to increase people’s understanding and use of research. The logic of systematic reviews can be summarized as:

• What do we want to know (and who wants to know and why)?
• What do we know (from reviews) and how do we know it (from what type of research in reviews)?
• What more do we want to know (unanswered or further questions) and how could we know it (what primary research would help address this)?
  

This paper considers how enabling members of the public (and other user of research evidence) to be the main drivers of the questions asked by systematic reviews leads to demand led and thus relevant research evidence production. Such communities can decide ‘what we want to know’ and thus determine what the reviews conclude that ‘we know’ and thus also determine ‘what more we want to know’. Community based drivers of the systematic review process thus become managers not only of what we currently know but of what we can know from future primary research. As managers of the process, they develop relevant understanding of the nature of research and its use rather than technical knowledge of academic researchers.

The paper considers:

1. The role of systematic research synthesis to produce accountable syntheses of research knowledge to inform decision making by individuals and organisations.
2. Approaches to encourage use of such research evidence such as knowledge transfer and knowledge mobilization and the research evidence on the effectiveness of these strategies
   Lessons from community based research on the identification of issues and questions that research needs to address.
3. The implications of such thinking for user led research synthesis where the consumers of research evidence determine the review questions and the review process.
4. The power of such demand led approaches to the review of what is known and what is not known and what more needs to be known as drivers for the creation of knowledge products and thus demand led knowledge use.
5. The extra leverage that such involvement in reviews has compared to individual community based studies
6. Other ways of including people’s views in reviews
7. Making this happen

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