Pascal – research, practice and policy

I think it’s really critical that when it comes to policy making whether its education, social policy, social services, health, that we be far more evidence based from a policy point of view  

When it comes to what kind of evidence, I think it’s really critical to be clear about what kind of questions you’re asking. So for example, if we’re looking at early education and social services, I think we need to ask questions like how’s my child doing because that comes closest to what parents and guardians across all jurisdictions are interested in, so how’s my child doing? How’s the family doing? Because children reside in all sorts of interesting arrangements called different kinds of families and I think we need to gather evidence that’s distinct from just the individual child that focuses on the family. Next question I might want to ask is how’s the program doing? So the program that’s serving and supporting children and families I think needs to have focus. How’s the community doing? Because I a lot of what we’re doing is community development as we develop villages more able to raise children and families capable of raising children, and the interaction with the community and those that are elected officials to support community, so how’s the community doing? And then I think the larger question is how’s society doing? I think we need to have information gathered on an ongoing organic basis regarding the economy, and what’s the economic return on these investments  

So it’s absolutely critical to have this wonderful dynamic between those who do research and those who do policy. For me it’s, I call it the three legged stool. When you have a reciprocity between practitioners, who are consulted by researchers and practitioners who become more sensitive and excited about the latest evidence, and there’s people who can guide them about how to use the latest evidence, and if we can get the relationship between researchers in the academy more in synch with policy makers in government, and vice a versa, that three legged stool will change the world.  

Researchers and practitioners need to have a real active respect for each other and reciprocity. Researchers talk to practitioners about the kind of questions practitioners like, and even when academics really have good relationships with the practitioners, and not enough of us do, it’s important that academics and practitioners also have a relationship with policy makers, who live in a very different culture, and connecting that three legged stool that I talk about, researchers, practitioners, and policy makers is the important word communications. Because if we don’t have communications, that people can understand and talk about, we lose the value of gathering the evidence. There’s no sense in gathering a lot of evidence that’s nice for journals and books but that doesn’t have a communicative value to the public at large that encourages governments to make certain kinds of decisions and avoid other kinds of decisions. I call this evidence-based story telling, and it’s also important to make sure we attract new story tellers. We need people from the banking industry.