Socio-contextual Determinants of Research Evidence Use in Public-Youth Systems of Care

Abstract

Recent efforts have been devoted to understanding the conditions by which research evidence use (REU) is facilitated from the perspective of system leaders in the context of implementing evidence-based child mental health interventions. However, we have limited understanding of the extent to which outer contextual factors influence REU. Outer contextual factors for 37 counties in California were gathered from public records in 2008; and child welfare, juvenile justice, and mental health system leaders' perceptions of their REU were measured via a web-based survey from 2010 to 2012. Results showed that leaders with higher educational attainment and in counties with lower expenditures on inpatient mental health services were significantly associated with higher REU. Positive relationships between gathering research evidence and racial minority concentration and poverty at the county level were also detected. Results underscore the need to identify the organizational and socio-political factors by which mental health services and resources meet client demands that influence REU, and to recruit and retain providers with a graduate degree to negotiate work demands and interpret research evidence.

Strategies for effective dissemination of research to United States policymakers: a systematic review

“…Three studies (about 11%) focused on local-level government. Dissemination channels at the local level had little consistency across the three studies with channels including public education [45], reports [37], and print materials [49].…”

“…Two studies (about 7%) did not specific the geographic region or state in which the study took place [43,44]. Of the remaining studies, four examined policymaking in the Northeastern United States [45][46][47][48], four in the Western US [49][50][51][52], and one in the South [53]. The geographic regional groups used similar channels to disseminate evidence to policymakers including publications and presentations.…”

“…The majority of studies focused on health topics (n = 12) [29,30,33,34,38,41,42,45,47,55,56,58] and child and family well-being (n = 6) [27,36,46,49,52,57]. The remaining studies covered the topics of education (n = 4) [39,43,53,54], guns [56], veterans [44], and general social research (n = 3) [31,32,48].…”

“…Researchers examined in-person meetings and communications as a channel to disseminate research (n = 9) [30,32,33,39,44,48,53,56,57]. Research and research summaries were also studied (n = 7) [30,31,42,47,49,52,54]. Both traditional (n = 6) [31,33,47,[52][53][54] and social media (n = 2) [47,53] were examined as channels to disseminate research to policymakers.…”

Factors associated with program effectiveness in the implementation of a sexual risk reduction intervention for female sex workers across Mexico: Results from a randomized trial

“…However, using the same fidelity measure we published data showing how fidelity is related to behavior change, suggesting good predictive validity for the measure [ 2 ]. We did not include other types of factors that may also facilitate or hinder implementation and effectiveness of Mujer Segura , including socio-political factors (police policies, community empowerment) and government funding [ 45 , 46 ].…”