Research for Real

Recently I was at the same event as Jackie Killeen, Director of the Big Lottery in Scotland.   It was great to hear her say this:

“At BIG we have some positive experience of being able to find and utilise evidence to inform both our priorities and our funding approach. For example, our recent funding programme to support victims of domestic abuse saw us use evaluation findings on effective approaches to helping women and children affected by domestic abuse, and fund the roll-out of these approaches into many more areas.  We think this is a good way of replicating proven examples of good practice.”   See more here.

She was talking about the Cedar evaluation.  We’re delighted that the evaluation evidence was useful for the funders – and doubly delighted that it was also useful at the time for those who were implementing the programme.

We know that multi-agency partnership working is difficult.

“Collaboration is by nature inefficient.  It is only sensible to collaborate if real collaborative advantage can be envisaged.  The strongest piece of advice, therefore, is ‘don’t do it unless you have to’”. 

The reports are available on the FASS website.

•Quote from: Doing Things Collaboratively: Realizing the Advantage or Succumbing to Inertia?  Professor Chris Huxham and Siv Vangen, Organizational Dynamics, Vol 33, No 2 2004, University of Strathclyde

I’m just back from a very interesting gathering of folk who find evidence use fascinating and want to see more of it.    We at least seemed to agree that we want to create more of an appetite for evidence and want to do more sharing of examples of promising practices.

So here is an example based on a conference paper given last year. 

Creating a community of reflective practice– It’s based on the CEDAR evaluation but goes into more detail about the approach.  You might like this if you:

• want to see better use of existing evidence both from elsewhere and the stuff that we’re already swimming in;
• think that the evidence doesn’t ‘speak for itself’;
• suspect that hearing the voice of the consumer or service user might well provide very valuable perspectives on the nature of the problem and generate new solutions;
• suspect that much could be learnt by sharing of the rich experience of practitioners;
• would like to see those practitioners get more feedback about their work – both what’s good and what needs to change;
• think that if research is to be worthwhile, it should contribute to changes in practice as well as report the outcomes of the programme;
• like the idea of a community of reflective practice, but are not sure how to make a start.

For a short visual explanation of some of this you might also want to have at look here.

See this short creative storyboard – with thanks to IRISS for their support

How action research can help to deliver better services from iriss on Vimeo.

This is well worth a look……The Public Petitions Committee of the Scottish Parliament   An important call for us all to talk about our assumptions, share our thinking and adopt a more experimental approach to the design and delivery of public services.    We’ve been arguing much the same thing here.

See this new page with a short article about the important debate about redefining the relationship between public services and communities and the role of research and evidence.  It would be great to hear your responses.