Social science and the challenges of the 21st century
A new concern with knowledge, a desire for evidence-based action, and a greater recognition of the relevance of social science are all part of the challenges facing social researchers in the 21st century, says Kay Saville-Smith.
A director of the Centre for Research, Evaluation and Social Assessment (CRESA), Kay Saville-Smith was a presenter at last month’s Royal Society of New Zealand’s workshop "Towards 2020: Challenges for the Social Sciences Community".
Speaking to the Bulletin after the workshop, Kay said social scientists were being asked to be involved in research and evaluation much more in the past five or six years. “Social scientists and social science as a series of pursuits are not very well placed, particularly in New Zealand, to face up to that challenge,” she said.
“The demand for social science work is outstripping supply. The demand from central government, local government, non-governmental organisations and the private sector is greater than the current set of social scientists can deliver on.”
Kay said agencies commissioning research talked of problems getting good-quality research and evaluation, but she warned it was important to be careful of such statements. “Sometimes good-quality products are not accepted by commissioning agencies as it gives them bad news. And sometimes commissioning agencies generate the problems they are complaining about – for example, sometimes the way they purchase and invest in research and evaluation has been poor.”
She said social science in universities had, for a long time, been dominated by teaching. “Theoretically a portion of university funding goes to research, but in most cases that was not happening in the social sciences. I suspect if you did an audit of social science research in the seventies, eighties and nineties, it wouldn’t come to anywhere near the amount of money that, theoretically, they were getting to do the research.
“Universities must start to value their researchers as more than simply revenue streams and must seriously invest in their research capacity. They must start facilitating cross-organisation research teams — especially with applied social research organisations.”
Kay said a lot of academics had become “research de-skilled”. “Research is a trade. It’s complex and often difficult, but it’s a trade – if you’re not doing it, it’s hard to get back into it. Teaching about social science is not the same as applying research skills in the real world and producing results that can stand up. The outcome is that we often have a split between academic and applied researchers, with academics seeing applied researchers as atheoretical. That can end up being true if the commissioning agencies can’t get researchers who are well-grounded in the theoretical paradigms of disciplines. You can end up with social research and evaluation done by people who reduce complex dynamics to simple ideas.”
Kay said the relationship between commissioning agencies and researchers could become one of capture or estrangement. “The result can be that we promise a lot more than we can deliver, or that agencies often demand more than they are prepared to pay for, or that anyone could deliver, regardless of money.”
For example, some agencies were preoccupied by randomised control studies, but the nature of the work meant that was impossible to deliver. It would be impossible to do a random controlled study on providing child support, for example, as it would be possible to withhold child support from some people for the study.
“There are ethical problems. And there is also the issue of the recruitment and maintenance of control groups. So there are raised expectations and beliefs about what is appropriate that are not sustainable.”
Kay said she was also concerned that universities needed more support and funding for their role as training grounds for social scientists in the future. “If you reduce all research to short hit pieces and projects, you don’t build up a set of research knowledge or skills to sustain social science in the future.”
It was important to have both short- and long-term research programmes. “Some long-term programmes that look at broad social dynamics get traction in the policy arena long after they were initiated – yet people didn’t want to know about them when they started. So we need a mix of opportunities to sustain short- and long-term work, and to sustain capacity and capability in New Zealand,” she said.
“If researchers develop the right sort of relationship with policy people and service deliverers, then researchers have something to offer. When service deliverers come up with a problem, they will go to the research. We’ve got to have a knowledge platform for responding to particular instances. If not, and we go just for the short term, then we are always rediscovering the world, and there is no build-up of knowledge.”
For more information, go to www.cresa.co.nz
