Ruth Puttick
Evidence-based decision making and rigorous evaluation of social policy is vital to developing radical, innovative solutions to the problems facing society today. The benefits of grounding decision making in rigorous evidence are clear. It is stating the obvious to say investing in programmes, services and policies that are shown to work increases the chance of achieving positive outcomes. Yet despite decades of producing excellent research it is often not acted upon.
Evidence informed programmes and policies have been defined as the "the basis for decision making and action; a process for ensuring that an individual or group of individuals gets the best possible intervention, service, or support based on an assessment of needs, preferences, and available options". This is a statement most would struggle to find fault with. Yet the evidence agenda is rife with controversy. Despite decades of debate, we are still far from ensuring that all services provided are the most effective that they could be.
Attempting to remedy this is not new, yet we still haven't managed to institutionalise rigorous evidence in the decision making process across all areas of social policy and practice. We also recognise that we are not at ground zero. Evidence of effective policies, programmes and practice does exist and some decision makers do use research and evidence. But as we've noted before, this isn't consistent. In a time of intense pressure on resources, public service reform, development of outcomes-based procurement and more decentralised decision making, the need for timely, accessible and reliable evidence is becoming ever more important.
The UK Alliance for Useful Evidence is being created to fill this gap.
Over the next ten days we will outline a number of the challenges and barriers that are frequently encountered when trying to improve the use of evidence in decision making. As you'll see they a raise a number of questions for how they can be overcome. We want to work with a wide range of organisations to create an Alliance for Useful Evidence that will develop the practical solutions to actively overcome these, helping to transform the use of evidence in decision making.
We are announcing the UK Alliance for Useful Evidence at an event at NESTA on 24 October 2011. To attend this event please register here.
As always we welcome your thoughts.
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Download the complete Alliance for Useful Evidence blog seriesWe are delighted to announce that we are working with the ESRC - and others - to create an Alliance for Useful Evidence.
21.10.2011"You say "evidence". Well, there may be evidence. But evidence, you know, can generally be taken two ways" - Dostoevsky, Crime & Punishment, 1866
The blogs over the past two weeks have demonstrated that embedding rigorous evidence in decision making is not always a straightforward task. As the above quote shows, this is further complicated by data not always showing a single course of action for decision makers to take.
20.10.2011We have talked about the need for more and better use of evidence, but this does not always mean commissioning costly academic research. Instead we can find new ways of utilising the information already available and empowering wider society to make use of it. This means that as well as innovating with new programmes and policies, we also need to innovate with the tools we use to evaluate them.
19.10.2011Not everybody thinks that evidence is the most important thing in the world. But most would recognise that knowing whether a programme of intervention is going to be harmful to them, their family or friends, is a big deal.
18.10.2011Research, evidence and data do not exist in a vacuum. To influence decision making, sources of information have to compete with a myriad of other factors, ranging from political pressure, lobbyists, public opinion, ideology and personal values. If the research findings clash with the dominant view, how can these factors be managed to embed evidence into decision making?
17.10.2011Click here to subscribe to the Ten Steps to Transform the Use of Evidence
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