Knowledge problems

The first step when looking for evidence is deciding what you want to find evidence about. To do this it helps to identify your ‘knowledge problem’.

It may be that you want to find evidence of what is good or effective practice to ‘benchmark’ your practice against or it may be that you simply want to find new ways of approaching something, but you want to be sure that they will work.

One way of thinking about how the information you are looking for will help you solve your knowledge problem is the ‘Knowledge Equation’ put forward by Janet Lewis, in 2002, when she was Joseph Rowntree Foundation Research Director.