To Manchester to give a talk at a conference for the organisation Making Research Count. This is one of the organisations around in social care that is supposed to be encouraging practitioners to be interested in researching their work, and using research evidence to guide their practice. In this case, it’s a consortium of a local university and local agencies, which is reconfiguring itself to take in voluntary organisations, so far excluded. It’s a bit more of a bottom-up body than some of the groups (I’m thinking of RIPA and RIPFA and indeed SCIE – see my glossary of abbreviations in case you don’t know). One of the people there says that these bodies spend a lot of government money on parcelling up in easy chunks research results that the government thinks practitioners ought to be interest them and ‘marketing it’ (he actually used that word) to encourage them to use it. I think the government marketing research results is not a good way of getting people to use them.

On the morrow, I talk about the research governance and development of research among staff at St Christopher’s, and try to emphasise how a regular commitment to a bit of audit and strong involvement in higher degrees so that people at least do a dissertation once in their career is important. I also argue that collecting and interpreting ‘life-historical knowledge’ that people have and turning it into professional knowledge is just as much research as doing experiments and surveys. Also interpreting research results into knowledge that practitioners can really understand and use (not ‘marketing it’) is.

Making Research Count: http://www.uea.ac.uk/swk/MRC_web/public_html

Research in Practice: http://www.rip.org.uk

Research in Practice for Adults: http://www.ripfa.org.uk
Social Care Institute for Excellence: http://www.scie.org.uk

Pics of the rebuilding at St Christopher’s, now under way, in solidarity with all colleagues working through a difficult time, to make things better in the future:
Cone park