Introduction:Debates on educational disinformation typically target false content in curricula or online. This study reconceptualizes the phenomenon as the discursive reconstruction of education's purpose, the strategic redefinition of its values and social functions that becomes naturalized as common sense. Existing scholarship documents Hungary's institutional capture but neglects the discursive mechanisms transforming political rhetoric into educational meaning. The study asks how Viktor Orbán's speeches construct education's societal role and how these representations become embedded in curricular content. Methods/Data:The primary corpus comprises Orbán's official speeches (2022-2025) from the Hungarian government website; an education-keyword search yielded 110 speeches, from which 236 relevant segments were retained. Purposively sampled grade 5-12 textbooks (civics, history, literature) and selected 2015-2021 speeches provide illustrative, intertextual triangulation. Analytic Plan:The study applies Fairclough's three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis, examining discourse as text, discursive practice and social practice. Through iterative open and focused coding of speech segments, three discursive representations were derived inductively and analysed across all three dimensions. Results:Orbán constructs education through three interlocking representations: national preservation (schools as guardians of Christian-national identity), economic engine (vocational training as sovereignty), and ideological resistance (schools as fortresses against liberal 'contamination'). Together they achieve hegemonic closure, rendering pluralism unthinkable; textbook content materializes this rhetoric as pedagogical fact. Conclusion/Implications:Educational disinformation operates through meaning reconstruction, 'epistemic engineering', not only factual falsehood, making fact-checking insufficient in itself. Monitoring democratic backsliding should track discursive shifts in institutions' self-described purposes, since classroom meanings shape future citizens' political imaginations.
Background Canada’s homelessness crisis has deepened due to policy failures, structural inequities and systemic neglect. In Ontario, mid-sized cities face growing pressures with housing and homelessness responsibilities downloaded to municipalities and under-resourced community organizations. These intersecting challenges underscore the need for coordinated, community-driven and evidence-informed responses that transcend traditional policy and research silos. Aims and objectives This article examines collaborative efforts to address homelessness within Peterborough, Ontario, and distils a local research-to-action process to inform evidence-led problem-solving in other contexts. It explores how researchers can balance academic and activist frameworks with community values to foster meaningful social change. Methods Aligned with institutional ethnography, the process integrated community-based participatory research, knowledge mobilization and community organizing. Two coordinated research projects culminated in a half-day community forum and a two-day community symposium, co-designed with local people with lived experience, Indigenous organizations, service providers and municipal staff. Structured facilitation supported collective problem identification, priority setting and coordinated planning. Findings The forum mobilized local evidence, allowing participants to identify key policy and practice priorities. The symposium generated community actions and future directions, including a living resource hub, a coordinated advocacy committee and enhanced access to justice supports. Participants reported strengthened collaboration, mutual accountability and solidarity across sectors. Discussion and conclusion Although the process did not directly reduce homelessness, it built local agency and collective capacity for policy advocacy and resource coordination. Grounded in local evidence and shared values, it offers an adaptable model for communities addressing complex social challenges.
Anglicare Southern Queensland (Anglicare) is a not-for-profit organisation that has been providing human services and social care in Queensland, Australia, since the 1870s. Since 2023, Anglicare has administered a Seed Grants Program that connects Anglicare staff with university-based academics to bring original research ideas to life through partnership and collaboration. Anglicare's Seed Grants Program aims to nurture applied research that can be piloted or implemented to benefit clients and/or staff. The objective is to feed research-based evidence back into organisational practice and decision-making to influence future service delivery, alongside the possibility of building towards larger research projects with organisational or sector-wide significance and implications. This practice paper explores the key opportunities and challenges that shape Anglicare's Seed Grants Program, with a focus on embedding organisational governance and knowledge co-production through the Seed Grant Model. Opportunities derive from the contribution that research makes to innovation and researcher development within the organisation. Challenges relate to securing academic partners and accessing human research ethics committees, while ensuring staff buy-in and accounting for staff mobility. Building on literature relating to research-practice partnerships (RPPs) in social care, the research-practice gap, and researcher development in the university sector, these insights offer transferable lessons for establishing and sustaining collaborative RPPs.
Background:Despite extensive research on workplace aggression, far less attention has been paid to how regulatory frameworks structure its prevention and management. Although national policies establish legal duties and guidance, it remains unclear how prevention is conceptualised, how responsibilities and interventions are articulated for different actors (perpetrators, targets and bystanders), and the extent to which policy aligns with contemporary evidence. Aims and objectives:This study conducts a systematic policy mapping review of UK statutory and non-statutory documents addressing workplace aggression. Using a multi-actor, multi-level prevention framework, we examine how policies define workplace aggression, structure monitoring, and distribute primary, secondary and tertiary prevention across perpetrators, targets, and bystanders. Findings:We screened 8,413 documents and analysed 57 eligible policies. The mapping reveals a fragmented policy landscape characterised by definitional inconsistencies, uneven monitoring guidance, limited attention to digital forms of aggression and an imbalanced prevention portfolio. Prevention efforts are comparatively concentrated on targets and post-incident responses, with limited articulation of bystander-focused and tertiary strategies, and relatively little structured primary prevention targeting perpetrators beyond normative statements such as zero-tolerance. These patterns suggest a predominantly reactive orientation within current policy approaches. Discussion and conclusion:By systematically applying a multi-actor framework across the full policy corpus, this study moves beyond descriptive review to provide a diagnostic account of prevention coverage within a mature regulatory system. The framework offers a practical tool for policy makers and organisations to audit gaps, strengthen prevention portfolios and stage implementation.
In the UK, increasing attention is being given to strengthening the use of academically produced evidence within local government. Recent investment from the National Institute for Health and Care Research has supported various initiatives designed to foster closer collaboration between universities and local authorities. This includes the Health Determinants Research Collaborations (HDRCs) and a separate researcher-in-residence programme focused on social care. While existing literatures explore research-practice partnerships, embedded research, knowledge mobilisation and evidence use, there remains considerable value in sharing reflections emerging from these recently funded forms of collaboration. Drawing on experiences within one HDRC and from a researcher-in-residence, this reflective article examines efforts to strengthen engagement with academically produced evidence within the public health and social care functions of local government. In reflecting on these experiences, we draw on a conceptual framework which emphasises the importance of capacity, motivation and opportunity in shaping engagement with research evidence. We organise our reflections around three themes: (1) developing engagement with academically produced evidence; (2) negotiating time, pace and policy pressures; and (3) communication, language and professional cultures. Across these areas, we identify recurring tensions and challenges that emerge when academia and local government work together, while also highlighting practical strategies that may strengthen engagement with research evidence. Our experiences suggest that effective collaboration depends not only on producing robust research findings, but also on sustained engagement with research processes, shared expectations around time and policy relevance, and accessible forms of communication.
Background:What counts as evidence remains contested at the research-policy interface, with consequences for qualitative researchers seeking to demonstrate impact. Despite increasing recognition of lived experience and participatory inquiry, entrenched evidence hierarchies continue to privilege quantification, scale and standardisation as markers of methodological rigour and policy relevance. These dynamics pose particular challenges for research with marginalised groups whose lives remain under-specified within administrative data systems. Position:Drawing on insights from a qualitative longitudinal and participatory research programme with young fathers, this article argues that evidential credibility tied to prevalence and sample size systematically constrains the visibility, uptake and impact of qualitative research. Contesting these hierarchies requires both critical attention to how they operate and a broader understanding of what constitutes legitimate impact. Arguments:Two encounters demonstrate how evidence hierarchies are reproduced through everyday institutional practices that privilege quantification as a proxy for credibility and policy relevance. The recurring demand to establish how many young fathers there are nationally exposes how populations under-specified within administrative and frontline data systems struggle to achieve evidential visibility. Meanwhile, a government quality assurance process privileging sample sizes exceeding 1,000 participants illustrates how scale operates as a marker of legitimacy despite the distinctive depth, relationality and temporal insight generated through qualitative longitudinal research. Together, these dynamics create a self-reinforcing cycle in which already under-researched populations remain empirically and institutionally marginalised. Implications:Funders, policy makers, practitioners and academic institutions must support processual, relational and longitudinal models of impact that recognise qualitative inquiry as central to credible evidence.
Background:Intermediaries such as think tanks, commissions, and non-profits produce large volumes of grey literature to inform public policy. Yet, the rhetorical practices that make their grey literature reports credible and persuasive remain poorly understood. Because intermediaries operate between multiple communities, they must build credibility without necessarily possessing expertise in each domain - a distinctive challenge with practical implications for their evidence-to-policy communication. Aims and objectives:To (1) investigate rhetorical strategies intermediaries use to establish credibility as grey literature authors; and (2) explore how rhetorical ethos adds explanatory power to help understand intermediaries' communication with policy audiences. Methods:Using a qualitative multiple case study design, I analyzed three influential reports on antimicrobial resistance written by non-governmental intermediaries. Each case combined close reading of report texts with analysis of production and reception materials and 23 semi-structured interviews with authors, contributors, and policy audience members. Findings:Intermediaries cultivated a distinctive ethos of interactional expertise through two key rhetorical strategies. First, they performed an extended invention process, publicly showcasing how they learned over time and engaged diverse stakeholders. Second, they emphasized inclusivity, transparency, and independence as signature virtues. Discussion and conclusion:Foregrounding ethos clarifies how intermediaries can navigate their rhetorical situation and write more persuasively to inform policy. The study contributes both theoretical insight and practical guidance: intermediaries can enhance credibility by publicly showing their process of engagement and by enacting virtues that leverage their unique position between communities.
Background:Large-scale emergencies push street-level organisations (SLOs) towards improvisation, yet we know less about how crisis experience is stabilised into preparedness. Bringing crisis-preparedness and knowledge mobilisation (KM) into dialogue, this article conceptualises preparedness as a negotiated configuration of knowledge types, KM mechanisms and sustaining infrastructures. Aims and objectives:The article connects KM and crisis preparedness literatures, asking: (1) which knowledge types are invoked in practitioner-designed measures; (2) how co-design outputs articulate pathways from improvisation to future routines and structures; and (3) how these differ across sectoral configurations. Methods:The analysis focuses on three sector-specific, aspirational 'good practice' documents produced in May 2023 in northern Italy through co-design workshops. Thematic analysis was conducted with a deductive codebook and inductive theme coding, with the interpretative aid of further workshop material. Transparency was enhanced through independent AI double-coding followed by human adjudication. Findings:Across sectoral workshops, phronesis is most salient, followed by techne and episteme. Participants propose preparedness architectures centred on local crisis units and micro-territorial coordination, routinised training and exercises, and coherent synthesis and dissemination of changing rules through official channels. Between-workshop differences appear mainly in the proposed sustaining axes, KM mechanisms and robustness features. Discussion and conclusion:Co-design outputs foreground practical judgement as the means through which empirical and technical inputs become actionable and ethically legitimate under ambiguity. Boundary objects tend to be relevant to practitioners insofar as co-design is explicitly structured and formalised. Frontline preparedness is narrated as value-laden and relies on KM infrastructures close to institutional and sectoral contexts.
Background: The Use of Research Evidence (URE) and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) fields have developed in parallel. YPAR grapples with challenges of timeliness, 'traction', and sustained impact: Where does YPAR evidence go, who hears it, and what happens afteryouth present their findings? URE frameworks developed primarily with professional research in mind, leaving unexamined the use of evidence generated by students within the systems youth seek to change. Position: Cross-pollination of YPAR and URE strengthens both fields and requires intentionality. URE concepts such as absorptive capacity and brokering illuminate pathways and barriers to YPAR impact, yet must center internal knowledge generated by youth, address power dynamics, and resist reducing YPAR to a transmission model of evidence delivery. Arguments: Drawing on our UC-Berkeley-SFUSD Research-Practice Partnership focused on promoting student engagement and reducing chronic absenteeism, we examine how URE concepts sharpened our questions about organizational learning and decision-making. Districts must expand absorptive capacity to include YPAR as legitimate internal knowledge. Brokering must account for power differentials when youth critique the institutions that serve them. Political and symbolic uses of YPAR risk tokenizing youth input when decision-makers fail to act-or act in ways that contradict youth goals. Implications: Advancing authentic YPAR integration into system routines requires strategic advance planning, structures connecting evidence to decision-makers, and intentional space for multiple interest holders to shape questions and actions. We call for large-scale empirical investigation of YPAR URE, comparative designs to assess the value-add of YPAR, and systems mapping to clarify pathways to impact.
Central question: This special issue examines how youth participatory action research (YPAR) can strengthen the use of youth-generated research evidence (URE) in policy making across schools, districts, municipalities and national systems. The issue emerges at a moment of heightened political polarization, declining public trust in expertise, and increasing scrutiny of universities and scientific institutions globally. In parallel, young people are disproportionately affected by policy decisions yet are often excluded from formal decision-making processes. These contexts raise urgent questions about how research can remain relevant, trusted and responsive while also expanding democratic participation. Approach: YPAR offers one promising response to these challenges. As a collaborative research approach in which youth work alongside adult allies as co-researchers, YPAR positions young people to identify pressing issues, design and conduct research, and mobilize findings toward social and policy change. In doing so, it shifts youth from the role of research participants to knowledge producers and advocates. Prior research demonstrates that YPAR can generate benefits for youth, adult partners, schools, communities and the research enterprise by increasing the relevance, legitimacy and actionability of evidence. Findings and implications: Bringing together diverse empirical and conceptual contributions, this special issue explores the conditions under which youth-generated research informs policy and practice, whose knowledge is recognized as credible, and how evidence systems can become more inclusive of marginalized perspectives and lived experiences. Collectively, the articles argue that engaging youth as researchers is not only developmentally meaningful, but also essential for building more democratic, equitable and publicly responsive research-to-policy systems.
Introduction:Effective pandemic response requires large-scale behavioural change. Despite efforts to integrate behavioural science advice in public health policy making, there is a shortage of empirical evidence on the challenges faced by countries that want to professionalise their behavioural science advisory capacity. As senior behavioural science advisers during the COVID-19 pandemic, we explored and compared how behavioural science organised itself across Northwestern Europe in order to draw lessons for integrating behavioural insights into policy during future crises. Methods/data:Using the evidence-based public health framework, we conducted interviews with 21 senior stakeholders from the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK and Finland, followed by a facilitated look-back meeting with a subset of participants. All participants were actively involved in their countries' pandemic responses. Analytical plan:Data were analysed using qualitative analysis software (NVivo 15) and validated during the facilitated look-back meeting. Results:Producing actionable and relevant behavioural science advice during crises benefits from: (1) drawing on a wide mix of research methodologies; (2) sustaining continuous dialogue with, and access to, policy and decision-makers; (3) ensuring clear packaging and delivery of advice, including additional efforts to support comprehension; (4) creating functional structures for interdisciplinarity; and (5) maintaining institutional memory of the competencies and relationships developed during crisis response. Conclusion/implications:An improved science for policy practice in the health field involves the difficult tasks of motivating direct dialogue, interdisciplinarity and co-creation, and a functioning governance of behavioural science advice systems. The findings further illustrate the conceptual utility of the evidence-based public health framework.
Emphasis on 'evidence-based' practice in education has intensified in Australia over the past three decades. This article charts this rise by presenting a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of a purpose-built corpus of over 1,600 articles published in Australian national and capital city daily newspapers between 1988 and 2024. Using the conceptual lens of 'media logic' (Altheide, 2013), we explore four phases of 'evidence-based' practice linked to the 'what works' agenda. Our analysis finds an increasing focus over time on specific aspects of pedagogical instruction, particularly in the areas of phonics and reading, with emphasis placed on the superiority of explicit and direct instruction. Within the corpus, evidence-based approaches are often equated with value-neutral, rigorous and effective methods, and the idea of 'evidence' as universally uncontested, proven and removed from teacher professional judgement. The final years of the corpus demonstrate a marked increase in attention to 'evidence-based' and 'what works' approaches, in parallel with reference to knowledge brokers and other private interests. Within this push for 'what works', we identified a growing emphasis on outsourcing traditional teacher-led activities, such as lesson planning and curriculum work, as frequently advocated by private interests, intermediary organisations and knowledge brokers, positioning the notion of 'evidence-based' as a silver bullet for a number of problems, including teacher shortages.
Background: Young people are directly affected by built environment decisions but are rarely included in formal planning or policy making. Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) offers a mechanism for youth to generate localized evidence intended to inform policy and practice. However, little is known about how youth-generated research evidence (URE) is taken up in built environment decision-making contexts. Methods: This comparative case study examines two YPAR initiatives: the Nashville Youth Design Team (NYDT), a high school research and design internship in Nashville, Tennessee, and Photovoice at the Creek (PAC), an afterschool photovoice program with 4th-6th graders in Northern California. Data sources included semi-structured interviews, ethnographic fieldnotes, and head-notes from extended engagement. Analysis involved within-case thematic analysis, cross-case synthesis, and team-based consensus building. Findings: Across both cases, URE was used conceptually, processually, tactically/symbolically, and occasionally instrumentally. Conceptual use was most common, as youth reframed issues and challenged deficit narratives. Process use emerged as youth developed civic agency and adults adapted practices. Tactical/symbolic use increased visibility and legitimacy of youth priorities. Instrumental use appeared primarily in the Nashville case, where sustained partnerships enabled direct application. Differences highlight the role of age, institutional positioning, policy proximity, and relational infrastructure. Conclusions: Findings extend URE frameworks by showing how relational and structural dynamics shape whether youth-generated evidence is recognized and acted upon. Designing YPAR with attention to these dynamics can strengthen near-term impacts and support more inclusive built environment policy over time.
Background: Over the past decade, unconditional cash transfer pilots have proliferated across the United States. Many are designed as top-down policy 'experiments' that rely on narrow definitions of validity, privileging randomized controlled trials and decontextualized outcome measures. In youth policy and child welfare contexts, such approaches risk epistemological violence by devaluing lived experience, denying resources to communities, relying on reductive variables and reproducing dominant narratives of deservingness. Aims and methods: This article examines YouthNPower: Transforming Care, a pilot designed by and for young people with experience in the child welfare system that provided US$1,000 per month for one year to 100 youth who aged out of foster care and was accompanied by research, organizing and policy engagement. Rooted in a critical participatory action research (CPAR) framework and using a mixed-methods design, the study drew on surveys, interviews and focus groups to document impact while resisting extractive research logics and exclusionary hierarchies of evidence. Findings: Findings indicate that unconditional cash stabilized housing, supported education, employment and wellbeing, and increased participants' sense of agency. At the same time, the research documented the limits of cash alone within conditions of structural precarity. Participatory methods also surfaced how dominant policy myths about irresponsibility and dependency are contradicted by youth's financial decision-making under constraint. Discussion and conclusion: YouthNPower demonstrates how CPAR can intervene in evidencebased policy making by strengthening epistemological accountability, redistributing epistemic authority, widening what counts as evidence, and positioning policy research as a site of collective struggle rather than post hoc evaluation.
This article examines how Youth-led Participatory Action Research (YPAR) can amplify youth voices in public discourse and policy making, drawing on a case study of young Australians collaborating with academic researchers to analyse survey and interview data for the Australian Youth Barometer. At its core was a Youth Reference Group (YRG), which moved beyond tokenistic consultation by engaging directly in data analysis and knowledge production. In 2022, the YRG co-analysed survey data (n=505) and interviews (n=30), interrogating the finding that nearly half of young people felt they were 'missing out on being young'. The process produced a co-authored report combining statistical evidence, lived experience and critical reflection, which attracted significant national and international media coverage. The article applies the Quality Use of Research Evidence (QURE) Framework to assess enablers and constraints of youth engagement as evidence users. Youth researchers brought valuable lived experience, curiosity and commitment, but needed support in data and media literacy, access to academic literature and sustained time investment. Power-sharing between academic and youth researchers was facilitated but limited by institutional timelines, funding and differing skillsets. Organisational supports, collaborative infrastructures and media strategies enhanced dissemination, yet inequitable remuneration and limited diversity risked reproducing exclusions. Using the QURE Framework as a lens, the article argues that quality evidence use in YPAR can promote young people as active interpreters and users of evidence, supported by enabling ecosystems of resources, skills and collaboration. It provides an approach to improved authentic youth partnership in knowledge production and more inclusive policy making.
Background:Knowledge mobilisation concerns translating knowledge into action and bridging the gap between knowledge production and its apt utilisation in practice. Scholars have called for more interactive models that integrate different forms of knowledge through iterative collaboration among diverse actors. However, insights on how such interactive models function in practice are scarce. This article addresses this gap by examining how knowledge is mobilised during implementation of the positive deviance (PD) approach, a problem-solving approach involving diverse actors. Methods:The article draws on an in-depth qualitative case study of a cross-sectoral project in six Norwegian municipalities, where PD was applied to address youth marginalisation. Data were generated through iterative PD processes involving practitioners, managers and stakeholders across sectors. Insights were gleaned on PD as an interactive strategy for knowledge mobilisation. Findings:The findings show that PD enabled the identification and amplification of locally embedded practices, facilitated cross-sector collaboration, and contributed to shifts in participants' understandings of problems and solutions. Rather than relying on external expert knowledge, PD supported practice-driven learning and adaptive responses, resulting in interventions being perceived as more context-sensitive and sustainable. Discussion and conclusions:The article argues that PD represents a promising strategy for interactive knowledge mobilisation by reconfiguring the relationship between evidence, policy and practice. It contributes to debates on co-creation and knowledge use by demonstrating how practice-based knowledge can act as a driver of change. Certain limitations related to institutional scalability are discussed. The findings have implications for research, policy and practice addressing complex social challenges.
Background: To address research-practice gaps, scholars are investigating the conditions that strengthen and constrain the use of research evidence. Yet these studies primarily focus on evidence that adult researchers have generated. In Youth-Led Participatory Action Research (YPAR), youth learn to conduct systematic research to improve their schools and communities. However, youth researchers face challenges similar to those experienced by adult researchers around how their findings are disseminated and used. Methods: This article illustrates active efforts of a research-practice partnership between San Francisco Unified School District and UC Berkeley to scale the impact and use of YPAR evidence. We detail the development and testing of a districtwide dashboard as a method for disseminating YPAR evidence to K-12 students and district leaders. We describe the origins and motivation for the dashboard concept, the development process, early impact and benefits, implementation challenges, and future directions. Findings: Through the development and testing of the dashboard, ethical and political implications emerged. We describe tensions related to dashboard content, privacy and confidentiality, use, and impact. Conclusion: The dashboard is one method designed to strengthen the use and impact of youthgenerated evidence from YPAR. Implementation challenges that arose during the development phase required us to strategise about responsibly and effectively disseminating YPAR evidence. As of December 2025, we have moved into a beta testing phase for the dashboard. A forthcoming public launch will bring new insights to district leaders in San Francisco, with potential replication across the state and beyond.
Background: Despite the development of numerous approaches to organise youth participation in public policy, actual opportunities remain limited. This study explores which factors help explain public officials' attitudes towards youth participation. Methods: Nineteen in-depth interviews were conducted with public officials at the City of Rotterdam who are involved in policy domains related to youth and/or participation. Results: Most respondents agree on the importance of youth participation in policy. However, the extent to which they consider this an essential part of the policy cycle varies. At an individual level, public officials' attitudes can be explained by (1) their beliefs regarding the value of youth participation, (2) their perceptions about children and adolescents, (3) their confidence in their own skills to get started with youth participation, and (4) their ability to let go of control. At a contextual level, public officials' attitudes can be explained by (5) the municipal vision regardingyouth participation, (6) the organisational structure and the availability of time and resources, (7) culture, and (8) political changes and pressure. These factors are interrelated and may reinforce each other. Conclusions: Public officials' attitudes towards youth participation in public policy can be explained by interrelated individual and contextual factors. To foster meaningful youth participation, clusters of barriers that currently prevent public officials from including the perspectives of youth need to be addressed. By actively dismantling these barriers, municipalities can move towards truly inclusive policy frameworks.
