Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Roundtable: Many Voices, One Song: Capturing the Impact of Research on Policy

(Public and Non-Profit Management and Finance)

Research and analysis have an important role to play in making government more efficient, effective, and responsive. Indeed, the gold standard for many researchers and the funders who support them is the ability to produce findings that inform policymaking or lead to policy change. An essential step in this process is ensuring that research findings are communicated to key decision makers at the right time, in the right format, and on topics that are relevant to current policy priorities. Yet even when these criteria have been met, researchers, funders, and their intermediaries struggle with documenting whether and how their work has impacted policy. Likening this relationship to voices in a chorus, it can be difficult to determine the impact of one voice from all of the others in the group. Amid this perennial challenge, there is a growing interest and an emerging field of study that aims to systematically track the impact of research findings above and beyond academia. This roundtable will explore the state-of-the-art in research impact assessment and present diverse perspectives on opportunities and challenges for more effectively measuring the impact of research and other evidence on policy and government. The roundtable discussion will focus on what researchers and funders are doing to reach policymakers and encourage the use of evidence in decision-making. The discussion will also explore researchers’ and funders’ strategies for tracking their impact on policy; the challenges/barriers that inhibit more effective impact assessment; and recommendations for others interested in more successfully tracking the impact of evidence on policy and practice. Megan Collado, M.P.H., is a Senior Manager AcademyHealth, and she will moderate the discussion among the speakers as well as introduce the topic and triage questions from the audience. Kathryn Graham, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of Performance Management and Evaluation at Alberta Innovates – Health Solutions which is a Canadian-based, publicly-funded, not-for-profit, provincial health research and innovation organization. Drawing on her 20+ years of strategic evaluation experience in health care, research, and innovation, and her position in a funding organization, Graham will comment on the range of strategies that can be employed to assess the impact of research on policy. Matthew Trujillo, Ph.D., is a Research Associate with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Research Evaluation and Learning unit. He will describe the Foundation’s approach to funding policy-relevant work and measuring the impact of funded projects, including the challenges to doing this effectively. Khalilah Brown-Dean, Ph.D., Quinnipiac University, and Donald Taylor, Ph.D., M.P.P., Duke University, are multi-disciplinary, policy-engaged researchers who will discuss their efforts to influence policy (beyond traditional academic outputs) and how or whether they track the impact of their work on policy and government.