The Demand Side: Uses of Research in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services

This special issue on child and adolescent mental health contains a thoughtful set of papers that address many of the challenges in bridging research and practice. These articles, however, focus predominantly on the supply side of producing research for use by a range of audiences, including practitioners, administrators and policy makers. This commentary emphasizes the importance of attending to, and better understanding, the demand side with regard to how research evidence is evaluated, understood, and utilized. Drawing from work underway at the William T. Grant Foundation, the authors argue for the need to understand three broad topics: user settings and perspectives, political, economic and social contexts, and the various uses of research. Furthermore, understanding the use of research evidence, or the demand side, is itself a topic for empirical investigation. The authors conclude that, when it comes to supplying evidence, don’t forget the demand side.