Historically, policy and practice in the Australian child welfare sector have largely been shaped by factors other than research. This is partly because there has been a shortage of high quality evidence regarding the effectiveness of child welfare interventions. To date there has been limited systematic research to identify and understand research use in this field. The aim of this project was to understand the barriers and facilitators to the use of research in a sample of Australian child and family welfare professionals, and to test the applicability of the Three Cultures perspective of research use.