SPEaR Good Practice Guidelines 2008: Principles
Some Guidelines arrange elements of good practice principles in various ways and some have utility as a principle.
Utility
Some Guidelines arrange elements of good practice principles in various ways and some have ‘utility’ as a principle. As the primary users of these SPEaR Guidelines are officials commissioning or undertaking research or evaluation, ‘utility’ is very much embedded into all areas of the Guidelines which are a resource to aid officials improve research and evaluation utility’. Utility can therefore be seen as:
The achievement of utility is both an overarching objective and the desired outcome of research and evaluation undertaken by officials on behalf of their agencies or contracted by agencies.
Data sharing
The SPEaR Uptake project 2005 identified four key requirements policy people have of research, for it to have utility – it must be accessible, relevant, timely and credible.
An underpinning aspect for all areas of social research is ‘data sharing’, whereby:
All research and evaluation officials should recognise research as an investment in the generation of social knowledge whose benefit can be compounded by the saving and sharing of this initial data for future unspecified research.
Information about ‘data saving and sharing’ development can be found on in our datasharing section.
It is important to check existing information, including existing data before embarking on new data collection. Statisphere holds a growing collection of survey data, inter- Library linkups are extensive and deposit nodes of information via the web are growing.
