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Creating our evidence summaries: How we decide what counts as good evidence

12 August 2025

In this blog, Dr Grace Krause reflects on the approach and working practices of our research team.

This year we gave a presentation at the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) School for Social Care Research (SSCR) annual conference. It gave us an opportunity to reflect on how we work, especially in relation to our evidence summaries.

How we approach our evidence summaries

For the last two years, we’ve been producing evidence summaries to help make research easier to understand and apply in social care settings. 

Choosing topics

We decide on what topics we’re going to write about based on priority-setting exercises. These exercises involve:

  • people accessing care and support
  • families and carers
  • people working in social care
  • other stakeholders. 

In these exercises, we ask people what challenges they face and also the areas where they’d like to see more research. 

Our method

In working out how to respond to these questions, we’ve found that more structured ways of gathering evidence, such as systematic reviews, are not the best approach for our goals. 

People working in social care need accessible and practical information that can help them deliver person centred care and support to the people of Wales. 

We don’t summarise and describe all the research that exists, instead we:

  • focus on the research that’s most relevant for each topic
  • highlight and draw out lessons for practice
  • avoid oversimplifying or minimising complex circumstances.
Two people having a conversation at a table

People working in social care need accessible and practical information that can help them deliver person centred care and support to the people of Wales

Selecting research

When we produce an evidence summary, we have to assess and sort the most relevant and high quality research. Some literature reviews define clear search terms and then include all relevant articles from a number of peer-reviewed journals. We decided early on that this approach was not right for us. The questions that people asked us to answer with research did not always match specific search terms.

Often, it takes some time for our research officers to identify how best to answer the questions. The priority areas are more likely to be questions about how to achieve certain outcomes, such as improving access to care for older people or making sure neurodivergent people can access support that works well for them. These questions can’t always be reduced to a simple search term, because they bring together a range of research on different topics in a new way.

So, instead of trying to capture a surface level overview of all available research, we’ve developed a different approach. It allows us to respond to the specific questions raised by the social care workforce as well as people accessing care and support. 

A person looking at a clipboard

We provide context for the research we include in three specific ways: 

  1. Political and theoretical context 

    We align our work with the values laid out in the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014. The Act specifies that individuals who access care and support and their needs should be at the centre of social care. This means they should have a say in the care they access and that this care should support their well-being. 

    Our team is made up of researchers with diverse professional backgrounds, both in social care and other areas of research. This means we can draw from a wide range of theories and approaches. Drawing on our different strengths helps us understand the complex nature of lived experience, for both the people accessing and delivering care and support. 

  2. Making the voices of people with lived experience a priority

    People who access care and support often experience different kinds of marginalisation. We recognise that people who have less access to money, politics or other forms of power also have less ability to influence research. The Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 puts a strong focus on voice, control and co-producing aspects of social care. Our work explores the voices and experiences of people who often aren’t listened to and may have fewer opportunities to become researchers themselves. 

    This sometimes means including research that would not meet traditional academic standards. For example, we sometimes use project reports from self-advocacy groups, blogs about people’s lived experiences, or material produced by third sector organisations. When we do this, we always make sure we provide clear context for the material we use to help people understand where the information comes from. 

  3. Navigating complexity 

    People delivering care and support face complex challenges in their work. There are many different circumstances that lead to people accessing care and support. Our goal is to make research as accessible as possible, making it easy to understand and apply in practice. Often, this means writing about research findings on certain topics but also about the theories commonly used to explore them.

An open door

Our work explores the voices and experiences of people who often aren’t listened to and may have fewer opportunities to become researchers themselves. This sometimes means including research that would not meet traditional academic standards

Responding to the needs of the social care workforce in Wales

There are many different approaches to delivering social care and many of these address different aspects of people’s lives. Asking ‘what works?’ in social care can be tricky because different things work in different contexts. 

One of the most important things for people working in social care is being able to build positive and mutually respectful relationships with people they support. And there’s not just one way to do that. So, rather than giving people direct, simple rules to follow, we aim to give them information and tools to reflect on their practice and see things in a new light. To do this, we’ve had to think of new ways to assess the quality of research, focusing on relevance and usefulness over rigid criteria. 

Find out more

Blog written by

Dr Grace Krause

Dr Grace Krause

Research coordinator

research@socialcare.wales

My role is about making research accessible to people working in social care. As a team, we take academic research, research done by other organisations or people with lived experience, and data collected by Social Care Wales, and make this information easy to understand. 

I'm a trained social worker and have experience of working with a range of people. This includes people with learning disabilities, substance misuse issues, and people engaged in survival sex work. I have a master's degree in criminology and a PhD in social sciences. My research includes a variety of topics from education, attitudes towards vaccination and the way people talk about moral beliefs, as well as inequality in the workplace.