What happens when policymakers need theory-informed evidence not next year, but next month?
Alejandro is joined by Sarah-Jane Fenton, Associate Professor of Mental Health Policy at the University of Birmingham, and Justin Aunger, a Research Fellow in Applied Health Sciences, to explore APRIL: the Accelerated, Parallelised, Realist, Informed Literature Review.
Developed through commissioned work in adult community mental health, APRIL responds to a challenge familiar to researchers working close to policy and practice: decision makers may need robust, useful evidence on complex questions within timescales that conventional review processes cannot easily meet. Sarah-Jane and Justin explain how the approach works backwards from policymakerpriorities, brings extraction and analysis decisions forward and uses parallel workstreams to move from evidence to theory at speed.
The conversation explores the practical ingredients that make this possible. But speed brings trade-offs. Sarah-Jane and Justin reflect on the limits of searching and interpretation under intense time pressure, the need to be selective about relevance and richness, the resources required to parallelisework and why APRIL should not be seen as a replacement for deeper, well-funded research. They also explain that its value is not limited to very short reviews: the approach can support broader policy questions that cut across several areas.
Whether you are a realist evaluator, realist reviewer, policy researcher, health-services researcher, regulator, practitioner, student, supervisor or PhD researcher, this episode offers a practical discussion of how realist thinking can remain rigorous, transparent and useful when evidence is needed quickly.
