Chair's comment
SPEaR’s Chair, Professor Richard Bedford, reflects on communicating and improving research and evaluation for continuing to advance a robust social policy decision-making culture.
At the core of an evidence-informed policy culture is a commitment to the value of knowledge gained both locally and from the international literature about past and current policy and practice. To engage in the procurement and production of research and evaluation (R&E) requires effective communication. The latter is also essential for ensuring relevant uptake of R&E into policy and decision making.
Social information and knowledge must flow as freely as possible for informed action. The challenge we face is to “liberate” and utilise our data for multiple uses. All information and knowledge has intended and unintended consequences.
We need to expand the scope for positive unintended consequences by advancing the datasaving and sharing agenda. Organising our knowledge in an online operating environment poses big challenges at a variety of levels. SPEaR is engaging with these issues directly with the evolution of the SPEaR website and the work of the datasaving and sharing working party.
These projects are both playing a role in providing pathways that will open up new opportunities for social policy R&E practice. To take advantage of this new data-rich environment, it is essential we have a generation of social policy researchers and evaluators who are skilled in a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data manipulation practices. We must also set high quality standards for R&E practice so we achieve excellent outcomes. The interconnected social policy and R&E communities must exemplify “good practice” to ensure high-quality knowledge creation and synthesis. SPEaR is leading a good practice process to set standards for the management and production of high-quality R&E.
If we do quality work that makes a difference, the social policy R&E sector will be an attractive career proposition for intelligent and caring people. With accessible information and creative potential for application, new and emerging researchers will have interesting and profitable spaces to explore.
In summary, successful R&E uptake requires the conditions of integrated organisation practice, excellent knowledge access, quality data, the communication of clear learnings and the opportunity for investment to extend into new areas.
The potential of an engaged, robust and dynamic policy, R&E and practice nexus is exciting. I believe we are starting to track well towards achieving this, and must continue to support and build on the initiatives underway. This requires an ongoing commitment to capability and capacity building plus new investments in the social sciences to expand “value-add” opportunities.
