Research Register for Social Care - about

The Register records projects that are designed and presented as research. All of the research on the Register must have received some form of independent ethics approval and/or local councils' Research Governance approval.

The Research Governance Framework (RGF) applies to any research involving service users/carers (or their data) or staff, for whom Directors of Adult Social Services have a duty of care. This includes care provided directly by the local council or contracted to other agencies in the statutory or independent sectors.

For the purposes of Research Governance, ‘research' means the systematic application of established research methods and techniques to gather information about participants in an explicitly planned way. The social care community promotes a wide definition of what constitutes research and this is reflected in the content of the Register. For example, some service evaluations and consultation exercises may be included. However, the Register does not include student research undertaken purely for the purpose of obtaining an educational qualification .

Research recorded on the Register includes a range of topic areas, such as:

• Adult social care services
• Social care services for children and young people
• Social work
• inter-agency working

Research recorded on the Register includes projects commissioned by:

• Local councils, whether carried out by or on behalf of the council
• Department of Health (DH)
• Other government departments (eg. Department for Education DfE)
• Other research organisations (eg. Nuffield, Joseph Rowntree)

Research recorded on the Register may be carried out by:

• local councils
• user-led or other non-profit organisations
• higher education institutions
• commercial research companies

Research recorded on the Register will have been approved by at least one of the following:

• Local Council Research Governance system
• Social Care Research Ethics Committee (Social Care REC)
• Other National Research Ethics Service (NRES) Research Ethics Committees (REC)
• University Research Ethics Committee

Research recorded on the Register is quality assured in the following ways:

The Register team at SCIE checks each submitted record for completeness before adding it to the Register

• All the research added will have been through a process of ethical review and/or research governance approval

Information added to the register is freely accessible to all users. It will also appear on Social Care Online. You only need to register if you want to add content to the Research Register.

Please note that responsibility for the accuracy of information submitted to the Research Register lies entirely with the organisation that submitted it. Any questions about individual records should be directed to the organisation concerned.