Grey Lines in Grey Literature: Incorporating Grey Literature Value into the Research and Evaluation of Public Policy and the Social Sciences

Grey literature has significant value when assessing, contextualising and critiquing nonprofit and charity policy and program efficacy, as well as furthering academic examinations of policy interventions. However, rigorous inclusion and utilisation of grey literature is hampered by an absence of an effective approach to mitigating risks related to its quality and manageability. This paper presents an evaluation of grey literature as a research material, as well as introduces the novel concept of comfort to foster greater confidence and consistency in the assessment, appraisal and synthesis of grey literature in supporting academic literature. The concept of comfort is introduced to reconceptualise grey literature through a sense of reliability and appropriateness garnered from observing a holistic set of characteristics. The article’s main contribution serves to provide a comprehensive grey literature methodology to facilitate its more rigorous utilisation as corroborative evidence, a contextualising resource and a source of hypothesis formulation in academic and policy analysis. In line with this aim, the article forwards the comfort criteria furthering the methodological understanding of grey literature in nonprofit research fields.