Using Data to Support Child and Family Social Services: 10 Strategies for Applying Research Findings

Écrit par : Kapria Lee, Senior Policy Associate, Social & Economic Mobility, APHSA

Child welfare agency leaders and staff are consistently asked to stretch scarce financial and workforce resources. This is often done by applying the best available research on policies and program models.

Participants in the National Research Agenda for a 21st Century Child and Family Well-Being System (Research Agenda), an initiative led by several philanthropic foundations, began to track the research addressing those gaps and discovered a pressing issue: even when research findings exist, they are often underused in practice. In response, they’ve partnered with the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA) and other national organizations to elevate the visibility of powerful and practical strategies for maximizing research utilization. After reviewing over 2,000 articles and reports we’ve identified ten actionable strategies to strengthen research use in:

• Aiding future knowledge generations.
• Improving accountability (e.g., performance measures, impact evaluation, and required reporting by research organizations).
• Informing actions, decisions, and changes in thinking to guide a realistic understanding of why the problem exists or what is causing it (research on advice utilization can inform this aspect).
• Directing the application of research to help solve a problem or to more fully understand a challenge at hand (Kim et al., 2018).

Without proper safeguards, research applications can be harmful—through its framing, partial reporting, and data manipulation. Despite these and other barriers to use, child welfare leaders and practitioners are highly motivated to provide high quality service, and using research is part of that.

The strategies below are one attempt to aid the integration of professional research expertise and advice from people with lived experience to enhance how human services support children and families.

Strategies to Maximize Utilization of Research Findings

Until recently, there was relatively little guidance about how to synthesize large amounts of often disparate information—and how that process might be different for policymakers versus other stakeholders. As part of a new journal article we organized ten strategies into three broad categories: 

Increase Relevance of Research

Increase Organizational Capacity to Use Research

6. Build research into part of organizational strategic learning. Organizations need data and research findings to evolve and thrive: “Strategic learning occurs when organizations or groups use evaluation and evaluative thinking to learn in real time and adapt their strategies to the changing circumstances around them.” Organizational learning is increased when Continuous Quality Improvement systems create real world research data that incorporates real world context to provide a strong foundation for designing and sustaining new programs.
7. Leverage implementation science and systems change strategies as part of the core of ensuring that research findings are used. The consistency and effectiveness of child welfare services in the United States, in part, has been held back by the poor scale-up of evidence-based practices, including interventions that have been established as effective through culturally competent community-based evidence (Echo Hawk, 2018; Hutchful, 2024; White Bison, 2001).
8. Identify and engage champions and change agents to create opportunities for joint problem framing and review of relevant research. Because political barriers and systems dynamics can block or delay needed change, the sector needs champions, change agents, and other kinds of advocates. A change agent is an individual who influences innovation within an organization. A champion or change agent can be a policymaker, health professional, front-line worker, local leader, or member(s) of the intended population (Jaramillo et al., 2023; Roberts et al., 2017).

Increase Accessibility of Research

The National Research Council of the National Academies of Science, the William T. Grant Foundation, and others have invested significant resources in developing research utilization strategies. DuMont (2024), in explaining some of the key dynamics, highlights four actions:

• First, strategies to improve the use of research evidence need to incorporate what we already know from studies that shed light on conditions that nurture the use of ideas and findings from research (Bogenschneider, 2021; Cooke et al., 2023; DuMont, 2015; Dunn et al., 2023; Gitomer & Crouse, 2019; Tseng, 2022).
• Second, strategies to improve the use of research evidence need to attend to the operating context, i.e., designing approaches that navigate, leverage, and compensate for the existing capacities, routines, actors, resources, and politics affecting a system (Chorpita & Daleiden, 2014; Chuang et al., 2023; Coburn et al., 2020; Crowley et al., 2021b; Doucet, 2021; Farrell et al., 2018; Gándara et al., 2017; Metz et al., 2022; Neal & Neal, 2019; Ozer et al., 2020; Scott et al., 2017; Shirrell et al., 2023; Weber et al., 2023).
• Third, strategies to improve the use of research evidence need to be mindful of the underlying conditions that affect what research ideas are funded, how the research is conducted, who conducts the research, the assumptions undergirding the call for proposals and research questions, and who is likely to benefit or be harmed if research is used (Chicago Beyond, 2019; Doucet, 2019; DuMont, 2024a; Jackson et al., 2024; Kirkland, 2019; Michener, 2019; Miranda-Samuels, 2022; Welsh, 2023).
• Fourth, beyond attending to the above contexts and conditions, researchers, advocates, and communicators must also respect the multiple forms of evidence and expertise necessary to provide consequential insights about how all children, families, and communities can thrive. From this more comprehensive perspective, strategies that improve research use will grow. 

How Child Welfare Practitioners Can View & Use Research

A recent study of 86 systematic reviews of strategies to increase the use of research into clinical health care practice emphasized the need to shift the focus away from isolating individual and multi-faceted interventions. Instead, practitioners need to better understand and build a more situated, relational, and organizational capability to support the use of research in clinical practice (Boaz et al., 2024). This involves drawing on a wider range of research perspectives and diversifying the types of synthesis used in exploring the real-world context in which the new clinical strategies will be employed. Community engagement is not simple or easy for most researchers. 

Finally, child welfare agency leaders and staff should have realistic expectations of the direct and immediate policy effects from research. Policy decisions often occur through multiple disjointed steps. This means that looking for blockbuster impact from research results is a misunderstanding of the nature of policy making. If some or all of the ten strategies are used, more child welfare policymakers, administrators, and practitioners can utilize research findings by fostering a holistic approach. As part of this more holistic approach, researchers should create and sustain strong community–academic partnerships that will result in more timely research. That’s in addition to an increase in accountability and fairness between the partners through an ongoing, authentic collaboration.

Review the references cited in this post ici.

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