Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy (2012) / Chapter Skim
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2 Why This Report Now
2 Why This Report Now
Pages 21-34
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From page 21... ...
A growing number of policy schools and programs are preparing students for careers in these many nongovernmental organizations, as well as government agencies and corporations, whose strategies depend on reliable knowledge of the society, economy, and polity. We summarize all of this as a policy enterprise, which is defined in more detail 1 A memo from the U.S.
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From page 22... ...
, undertaken in response to a 1964 congressional instruction that the commissioner of education investigate "the lack of availability of equal education opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin." By the standards of social science at the time, this study was big: 600,000 students and 60,000 teachers in 4,000 public schools. Its size was only one of its distinctive characteristics.
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From page 23... ...
Hundreds of dissertations used federal statistics, and the writers of these dissertations became professors and researchers in university social science departments and interdisciplinary centers, where they produced the next generation of researchers trained to ask "big" questions about social welfare and economic trends, public health, and school reform. An early preoccupation in this research was whether the policies were having the expected outcomes.
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From page 24... ...
Newly formed university centers and programs are actively exploring data visualization, data mining, and internet data in the new field of computational social science. With huge amounts of accessible data, the technical knowledge to analyze the data, and hundreds of organizations seeking to link research to policy making, it is not surprising to find strong political interest in financial and performance audits, process monitoring, and impact evaluations, all of which are part of the broad interest in ways to hold officials and institutions accountable.
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From page 25... ...
There are, then, many interlinked developments that establish the era 3 The Supreme Court ruled that an adjusted count could not be used for apportionment, but it left open the question of whether an adjusted count could be used for other purposes, including redistricting and allocation of federal funds. Given the steadily increasing costs of the census and the persistence of errors -- missed households and erroneous enumeration -- it is likely that modifications or technical improvements on the basic design based on mailout/ mailback and nonresponse household follow-up will continue to be a policy issue.
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From page 26... ...
The monumental Recent Social Trends, commissioned by President Herbert Hoover in 1929 and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, can be viewed as a precursor to big social science, though it did not have the impact on policy debate that later attended the explosion of large-scale research in the 1960s. The national call on social science expertise was reinvigorated by the challenges of the depression economy in the 1930s, leading to major advances in micro- and macroeconomic analysis and in welfare policy initiatives, such as the Social Security system.
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From page 27... ...
In this way, the first half of the 20th century established the principle that universities, specialized research organizations, and think tanks were a source of independent and nonpartisan social science knowledge on social conditions and policy options. In these early decades, there was little attention to "use" as it is discussed today.
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From page 28... ...
mechanism, initially designed to purchase military hardware, was re-engineered to purchase scientific expertise.4 Forprofit and nonprofit research contract houses were formed, and consulting firms got into the business of using social science to advise government and private clients. A recent survey estimates more than 1,800 think-tank-like 4 For example, NORC, a midsize social science organization with an annual budget of approximately $160 million, annually screens about 10,000 government-issued RFPs, closely examines 10 to 15 percent of them, and prepares formal bids for several hundred.
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From page 29... ...
. In this literature -- spanning the fields of sociology, organizational behavior, political science, psychology, education, and, more recently, science and technology studies -- understanding the use of social 5 This number includes accredited graduate degree programs and graduate schools in the field of public administration and policy at the master's levels in the United States from all types of institutions except online degrees: see http://www.gradschools.com/programs/publicaffairs-policy [July 2012]
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From page 30... ...
Who is making effective use of what we learn? The report traced the questioning to two sources: "legislators distrustful of `social engineers' who promote radical ideas or pursue irrelevant academic interests, and social scientists worried that dependence on government might compromise their objectivity" (p.
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From page 31... ...
, a part of HHS, reports for fiscal 2013 that about 10 percent of its $30 billion budget is to fund behavioral and social science research, including projects that involve social scientists working with biological and medical scientists (Silver et al., 2012)
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From page 32... ...
One standard justification for government-subsidized social science is that it produces a public good in the form of reliable and credible knowledge for policy making that would not otherwise be produced. But of course 8 The 13 principal statistical agencies are the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of the Census in the Department of Commerce; the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the Department of Justice; the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Department of Labor; the Bureau of Transportation Statistics in the Research and Innovative Technology Administration of the Department of Transportation; the Economic Research Service and the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the Department of Agriculture; the Energy Information Administration of the Department of Energy; the National Center for Education Statistics in the Institute of Education Sciences of the Department of Education; the National Center for Health Statistics in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the Department of Health and Human Services; the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate of the National Science Foundation; the Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics of the Social Security Administration; and the Statistics of Income Division in the Internal Revenue Service Office of Research, Analysis, and Statistics of the Department of the Treasury.
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From page 33... ...
WHY THIS REPORT NOW 33 the value of this effort depends on the science being used. A starting point, then, is asking what is known about use.
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