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This article addresses three questions: What is the extent of instrumental, conceptual, and symbolic use of university research in government agencies? Are there differences between the policy domains in regard to the extent of each type of use? What are the determinants of instrumental, conceptual, and symbolic use of university research? Based on a survey of 833 government officials, the results suggest that (1) the three types of use of research simultaneously play a significant role in government agencies, (2) there are large differences between policy domains in regard to research utilization, and (3) a small number of determinants explain the increase of instrumental, conceptual, and symbolic utilization of research in a different way.

This article addresses three questions:To what extent is university research used in government agencies? Are there differences between the policy domains in regard to the extent of use? What determines the use of university research in government agencies? The data analysis is based on a survey of 833 government officials from Canadian government agencies. Comparisons of the magnitude of uptake of university research show large and significant differences across policy domains. The results of the multivariate regression analyses show that the characteristics of research and the focus on the advancement of scholarly knowledge or on users' needs do not explain the uptake of research. Users' adaptation of research, users' acquisition efforts, links between researchers and users, and users' organizational contexts are good predictors of the uptake of research by government officials. This article addresses three questions:To what extent is university research used in government agencies? Are there differences across policy domains in regard to the extent of use? What determines the use of university research in government agencies? The use of research evidence in government agencies is based on the idea that informing decisions with research findings is likely to help eliminate inefficient uses of resources or wrong decisions. Although there is an expanding body of conceptual and empirical studies on the use of research in government agencies, these studies tend to suffer from four methodological problems that Mandell and Sauter (1984) identified 19 years ago: composition of the study population; specification of the dependent variable "use"; problems associated with the independent variables considered; and problems resulting from the failure to appreciate respondents' inability to report and explain their behavior accurately. Some of these methodological problems exist because, despite several attempts to develop conceptual models for explaining the use of research (is not yet an integrated conceptual model used by the experts in the field of knowledge utilization.This article first reviews the major methodological problems of the field of knowledge utilization to indicate how the present study deals with them. Then it applies conceptual models and methodological solutions likely to alleviate those problems to data about how professionals and managers in Canadian and provincial government agencies use university research in their professional activities. The article concludes by stressing the major findings of the study and their policy implications, as well as by pointing to issues that should receive attention in future investigations.We know little about the factors that induce professionals and managers in government agencies to use university research in their professional activities. The purpose and contribution of this article is to identify the determi-Réjean Landry is a professor of management at Laval University in Quebec City. He holds a chair on the dissemination and uptake of research. Web site: http:...