Dissertation Proposal Announcement Ph.D. in Education Program: Kevin Crouse, “Understanding research use, misuse, and non-use: A study of the characteristics of evidence considered during the decision-making process and the accuracy of broker translation”

The public and health sectors rely on evidence to inform interventions and decision-making, but the Use of Research Evidence (URE) is still a relatively young field of study. The proposed dissertation will describe new frontiers within URE over the course of three papers. Interviews will be conducted with instructional leaders who are expected to use evidence to support their decisions. These interviews will collect instances when educators made decisions in which they considered specific research evidence alongside other evidence that suggested an alternative response. The research products that the practitioners considered for each decision event will be extracted and analyzed; these “research products” may be original research studies, derivative artifacts such as research summaries, or the descriptions of research provided during presentations, conversations, and other interactions.

The first study will describe the research products that instructional leaders ultimately used as well as those that were considered but not used. Numerous studies explore practitioner use of research, but this study is novel for its examination of the legitimate non-use of research. The second study will analyze the research products’ source research through the lens of its continued relevance for current practice. The methodologies of most URE studies do not distinguish between current and outdated research, and so identifying whether practitioners instrumentally use evidence that is no longer relevant would inform future work. In the third study, the research products will be analyzed to determine if they are accurate representations of the source research. Most URE studies do not distinguish between the use of original research and derivative products translated by brokers, and so determining if the translation process substantially changes the meaning of the research evidence would be illuminating.