As will be evident from much of the discussion to this point, we believe that research can play a positive role in informing the development of public services. Thus, encouraging and enabling research use in practice settings seems to us to be a laudable aim, especially if use is defined broadly to encompass the conceptual as well as the instrumental uses of research, and other forms of knowledge are respected and drawn upon in the process of encouraging that use. But how should we seek to encourage research use? In Chapter Five we discussed what we know about the effectiveness of the main mechanisms and interventions that have been employed to improve the use of research. We noted that many initiatives to increase research use draw on several mechanisms in combination. Chapter Six in turn explored what might be learned from a reconnection with the wider social science literature on learning, knowledge management and the diffusion of innovations. But the question remains of how best to develop a composite and coherent approach to improving research use that draws on this wide range of insights.

In this chapter we outline three broad ways of thinking about and developing research-informed practice (the following chapter, Chapter Eight, addresses how policy processes may be helped to be more evidence informed). These three ways of thinking – drawn inductively – reflect what seem to us to be the main differences in approach to improving research use in practice contexts, drawing especially on work carried out in the UK. These differences are often implicit rather than explicit and our aim is to surface and highlight their characteristics and implications by encapsulating them in three composite models of research-informed practice. We use the insights from previous chapters to tease out the key characteristics of each of these models, focusing in particular on their assumptions about what research use means and how it is best achieved. We also explore what each model implies for the design of coherent approaches to improving research use. After discussing the models we reflect on possible roles for government in encouraging research use in practice settings and how these roles link to our models.