Throughout this book we have been concerned to document the complexities of research use, and the diversity of ways in which such use has been conceptualised. Building on these understandings we have then sought to explain how research use might be improved or enhanced in a wide variety of public service settings. This chapter takes these debates further by asking – given all the complexity, diversity and messiness of research use – how can both research use processes and the resultant impacts be assessed? As we shall see, work fully assessing research impacts, in particular work that takes account of the kinds of complexity and unexpectedness of research use highlighted in earlier chapters, has, to date, been somewhat underdeveloped. Thus, the material presented in this chapter is necessarily a little tentative. Rather than being able to explore and summarise a mature field of evaluative studies, we instead draw attention to the concerns and difficulties inherent in this kind of work, and provide a series of reflective questions to aid the design of future work. In doing so we draw heavily on the complex and nuanced understandings of research use laid out in previous chapters.

This chapter, then, addresses a central question first raised (and then swiftly put to one side!) in Chapter One: does research use make a difference? As anyone working in the field of research use knows, a central irony is the only limited extent to which evidence advocates can themselves draw on a robust evidence base to support their convictions that greater evidence use will ultimately be beneficial to public services. Our conclusions in this chapter are that we are unlikely any time soon to see such comprehensive evidence neatly linking research, research use, and research impacts, and that we should instead be more modest in our expectations about what we can attain through studies that look for these. A key theme of this chapter, then, is how we might integrate more sophisticated understandings of research use into better studies of research impact.

We begin by exploring in a little more detail the drivers from various quarters for the production of evidence on research impacts or, as it is sometimes called, research payback.