Reefer madness: seeking the links between evidence, policy and practice

A new edition of the Journal of Children’s Services, guest-edited by Nick Gould and Ian Butler from the University of Bath, UK, examines the nature, quality and use of evidence in the development of children’s services.

Its starting point is that children’s services brings together people from a wide range of professional and disciplinary traditions, occupational cultures and political orientations. These reflect contrasting experiences of using evidence and different views of what constitutes evidence, how its quality is judged and how it should be used.
 
Contributions to the edition include a philosophical analysis of the meaning of evidence by Nancy Cartwright from the London School of Economics and a discussion of options for closing the ‘implementation gap’ between research and practice, by Nick Midgley from the Anna Freud Centre, London. Ray Jones from the Universities of Kingston and London reviews the contribution of research evidence to 60 years of childcare policy in the UK, while Del Elliott, from the University of Colorado, US, explores why proven violence prevention programmes are so rarely used.
 
To subscribe to the journal follow this link.