Certain hindrances to the incorporation of research into policy, like limited budgets, are systemic and not readily altered. However, some of the barriers and facilitators of evidence-informed health policymaking are amenable to change. Policymakers could benefit from evidence-based skills training to help them identify and evaluate high-quality information. Researchers and policymakers thus could collaborate to develop networks for generating and sharing relevant evidence for policy.

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The way frontline workers in human service organizations implement policy is greatly influenced by how their jobs are structured within particular organizational settings. Although scholars of street-level bureaucracy have provided important insights into this relationship in specific situations, they rarely move beyond case study findings toward a more general research approach. Through cross-case analysis of fieldwork from California welfare and welfare-to-work programs, the authors inductively developed a framework for investigating how organizational setting mediates between policy goals and frontline behavior. The authors illustrate the use of this framework for welfare programs and street-level studies more generally using illustrations from their prewelfare reform study as well as from more recent postreform/Temporary Aid to Needy Families studies.

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