Building National Infrastructure for Improving the Use of Research Evidence For Children & Families

Congressional policymaking about issues affecting children and families occurs in a complex and dynamic environment with constraints on staff capacity. Improving research use in this context requires strategies that are relational, agile, and responsive to legislative workstreams. Prior experimental trials of the Research-to-Policy Collaboration (RPC) model, which provides a supportive infrastructure to integrate research evidence in policy, have demonstrated an increase in congressional use of research evidence. But scaling the model to sustain long-term policy engagement requires institutional change. In this study, the team proposes a new Research-to-Policy Collaboration Institution (RPC-I) model that integrates institutional interventions with the existing RPC approach to build research use infrastructure to facilitate researcher policymaker engagement. The team will examine whether stronger institutional leadership at research intensive universities, targeted programming for institutional leaders, improved engagement incentives, and equity-focused recruitment lead to more effective and sustained research use by Congressional staffers. The study uses a dual community randomized-controlled trial to experimentally evaluate the RPC-I’s impact on research use. They will use multilevel modeling and mixed-effects models to assess outcomes at the institutional level and congressional level. Findings will contribute to literature on scalable institutional interventions to improve and sustain the use of research evidence in children and family policymaking.