Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: How Do Policymakers Find and Interpret Research to Inform Evidence-Based Decisions?

(Tools of Analysis: Methods, Data, Informatics and Research Design)

Policymakers place increasing emphasis on evidence-based decisions to inform new directions for policy, and researchers want to supply information to aid in those decisions. Yet, the volume and breadth of available research is too great for decision-makers to efficiently digest and accurately interpret without appropriate tools for distilling the findings. And, policymakers and practitioners can only learn from research that makes its way from researchers to end-users. This panel will discuss findings from four projects that explored different aspects of the path evidence takes from researcher to decision-maker. The first presentation will discuss the results of an empirical study of the effect of knowledge about a study’s origins and research team on how Canadian policymakers use and interpret policy research. The second presentation will share findings from a study of how university-based poverty research centers disseminate the results of their work in an effort to reach decision-makers. A third presentation will share the methods and products of a several federally-funded systematic evidence reviews, which aim to help policymakers easily identify and interpret the credibility of findings for effectiveness research on various topics. The fourth presentation will describe findings from a case study that applies scientific guidelines of transparency and reproducibility to a policy report on minimum wage, and performs sensitivity analysis of the policy estimates to all its inputs. The panel’s discussant will discuss how policymakers in the U.S. federal government find and use research on social policies to decide what works and inform directions for future research.