full free access: How Research Influences Policy Makers: Still Hazy After All These Years — J. Natl. Cancer Inst. Steven Lewis (author)

"Libraries have been written about the theory and practice of public policy making. Yet, this enormous scholarship has proved insufficient to lift the veil of mystery and idiosyncrasy that shrouds the art of decision making. The heady ambition to turn both clinical practice and health policy into evidence-based bastions of rationalist decision making has been downgraded; the vocabulary is now “evidence-informed,” and the realm of admissible evidence has been greatly expanded to include preferences, political contingencies, and psychology (1). This newfound conceptual modesty and nuance does not suggest that we should abandon efforts to understand decision-making processes and to enhance the role of research-based evidence in policy. It merely confirms the complexity, contingency, and messiness of the terrain............This leads to a second issue: the definition of “use.” The questionnaires simply asked whether the respondents intended to use the brief. We do not know what “use” means.." cont'd