How can state governments most effectively use research evidence when deciding how to spend tax dollars?

States spend trillions of dollars every year, and a significant portion of that budget is allocated for families and youth. However, there is limited research on if and how research evidence is used as part of these budgeting decisions. Yokum and colleagues propose to use a convergent mixed-methods design to empirically examine the routines, tools, and practices that foster research use in the state budgeting process. The team will conduct document review of budget guidance from the past 10 years, Governor’s budget proposals for the last 25 years, and appropriation bills from the last 25 years. They will conduct interviews with state budget directors, their senior leadership teams, and two staff members to understand existing budget processes and decision-makers’ knowledge of evidence use in designing the budgeting toolkit. The team will also review over 500 decision packages submitted by 55 agencies in Rhode Island for Fiscal Year 2022. Based on the findings, the team will lay the groundwork to develop and validate a model budgeting toolkit with a suite of budget instructions, submission templates, and evidence definitions and process recommendations, yielding insights about how to increase the instrumental, conceptual, and symbolic use of research evidence in state-level budget cycles.