Advancing an evidence-informed culture
Professor Richard Bedford, chair of SPEaR, reflects on key challenges for improving the knowledge base.
Monitoring the impact of research and evaluation on social policy will be an “interesting challenge” for SPEaR, says the committee’s new chairman, Professor Richard Bedford.
The government has asked SPEaR to report annually on how improving the knowledge base has had an impact on social policy. “The government wants evidence that research and evaluation flows on to better policy and therefore to better outcomes in the long term.
“It’s an interesting challenge, given the time it takes for the effects of new knowledge to work through into policy. We need to be careful not to set in train unreasonable expectations that new knowledge can impact quickly on policy,” Richard said.
One way to assist would be for departments to consciously note the connections between research and evaluation studies and their formulation of policy. This had been encouraged in recent years as a result of ongoing interaction between external researchers and people within government agencies.
An example was the shift in thinking about the support systems families would need, given an ageing population and sustained low fertility. “There’s a similar shift in terms of immigration policy, where intensive contact between government, policy makers and researchers at annual workshops has encouraged a stronger focus on settlement outcomes,” he said.
“There is a very open discussion in New Zealand between policy analysts, researchers in government departments and universities and Ministers of the Crown, and that’s a healthy situation. The open system of communication may disguise the impact of a particular research finding. We share a lot of information and building knowledge is iterative and ongoing.”
An example was a new population website (www.population.govt.nz) The result, after much inter-departmental discussion and collaboration, was a checklist of demographic concepts and factors for policy makers to take into account. It would be difficult to show in a straightforward way how such improvements in knowledge would impact on policy. “But SPEaR has to engage with that. It will be a good challenge. If we don’t demonstrate research has an impact, it will be hard to argue for sustained funding. SPEaR is about making sure new information and knowledge is impacting on policy in a coherent way.”
SPEaR was also making progress in improving best practice in research and evaluation. “It’s critically important to ensure consistency in practice in government and private research. Research in the social arena is complex and there are ethical considerations. We have to have well thought out procedures. There are also multi-cultural dimensions. We must be sensitive to how other cultures view certain types of questions or ways of seeking information from them. The protocols for seeking information from Maori or Pasifika people are different from those used in Pakeha research – there is a different sense of ownership of knowledge. So we need to adopt good practice in approaching people for information.”
Richard said the work of the recently established Building Research Capability in the Social Sciences (BRCSS) Net would provide a ‘front door’ for academic social research, in the same way as SPEaR provided the first coordinated approach to social research in the government sector. Another challenge was data saving and sharing, and ensuring better use of data, particularly when it was funded by government. “It’s a key concern – how to make more of the information that’s gathered available for wider use.”
