English This article uses the experience of reviewing the evidence on the financial support available for defaulting home owners to consider the opportunities and challenges systematic review methods present to social policy. It addresses concerns about examining the strength of given evidence, and perceptions of it being a purely technical method to review existing research. It argues that there is merit in utilising the method to provide research users with transparent summaries of the most robust evidence with minimum bias. The article outlines the challenges presented and suggests that social policy researchers have a valuable contribution to make to the developing methods.

The recent turn towards evidence-based or evidence-informed policy making has generated interest in systematic literature review techniques. Systematic reviewing is increasingly being adopted to address questions in complex social policy areas, but the methodological development lags behind. Drawing on the experience of undertaking three systematic reviews of housing related topics, as part of a project designed to empirically test the transfer of systematic review methods to social policy and social care, this paper reflects on the use of the systematic review methods in housing research and considers how our experience accords with recent methodological development of reviewing in other areas. The paper first examines wider methodological developments occurring during the course of the three-year project, before considering changing review practices in housing studies. It then goes on to examine the key methodological challenges that remain unresolved, in particular: searching for literature, quality appraising studies, interpreting old research against shifting contextual factors, and providing an actual synthesis of diverse material. It calls for a more thoughtful approach to the method and more careful consideration of when systematic reviews may be appropriate.