Integration and Implementation Insights
A global, comprehensive, living toolkit improving research, education and impact on complex real-world problems
By William L. Allen
When researchers want to engage or work with groups outside universities—especially civil society organisations—what should they consider as part of this process?
Civil society comprises organisations—large and small—that are outside of the public and private sectors. These include non-governmental organisations, charities, or voluntary groups.
Three lessons emerged from asking civil society organisations what they would tell academics who want to work with them:
By Sven Ove Hansson and Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn
Scientific uncertainty creates problems in many fields of public policy. Often, it is not possible to satisfy the high demands on the information input for standard methods of policy analysis such as risk analysis or cost-benefit analysis. For instance, this seems to be the case for long-term projections of regional trends in extreme weather and their impacts.
However, we cannot wait until science knows the probabilities and expected values for each of the policy options. Decision-makers often have good reason to act although such information is missing. Uncertainty does not diminish the need for policy advice to help them determine which option it would be best to go for.
By Diana Rose
Outcome measures in research about treatment and service provision may not seem a particularly controversial or even exciting domain for citizen involvement. Although the research landscape is changing – partly as a result of engaging stakeholders in knowledge production and its effects – the design of outcome measures has been largely immune to these developments.
The standard way of constructing such measures – for evaluating treatment outcomes and services – has serious flaws and requires an alternative that grounds them firmly in the experiences and situations of the people whose views are being solicited.
By Cynthia Mitchell, Dena Fam and Dana Cordell
Starting with richly articulated pictures of where we would like to be at some defined point in the future has powerful consequences for any human endeavour. How can we use such “Outcome Spaces” to guide the conception, design, implementation, and evaluation of transdisciplinary research?
Our Outcome Spaces Framework (Mitchell et al., 2017) considers three essential impacts:
(1) improving the situation,
(2) generating relevant stocks and flows of knowledge, and
(3) mutual and transformational learning by the researcher/s and involved participants.
By Jon Warren and Kayleigh Garthwaite
In 1967 Howard Becker posed the question – to academics – “Whose side are we on?”.
Becker was discussing the question during the time of civil rights, the Vietnam war and widespread social change in the US. He sparked a debate about objectivity and value neutrality which had long featured as part of the social sciences’ methodological foundations and which has implications beyond the social sciences for all academics.
What relevance do these ideas have now, in an era when academics and their research are becoming increasingly commodified? Academics are increasingly pressured by their own institutions and fellow professionals to gain more funding, publish more papers and make more impact. Questions of social justice and professional integrity are at risk of being swamped by these forces allied to unscrupulous careerism.
We argue that the question now is not only who academics serve but also who we write for.
By Gerald Midgley
How can we design new services or strategies when the participation of marginalized stakeholders is vital to ethicality? How can we liberate people’s creativity so we can move from incremental improvements to more fundamental change?
To answer these questions, I have brought together insights from Russ Ackoff and Werner Ulrich to develop a new method that I call Critical Back-Casting.
Russ Ackoff, writing in the 1980s, is critical of organizations that focus on incremental improvements without ever asking whether they are doing the right thing in the first place. Thus, they are at risk of continually ‘improving’ the wrong thing, when they would be better off going for a more radical redesign. Ackoff makes two far-reaching prescriptions to tackle this problem.
By Jessica Shaw
What, and who, are research mediators? And are they the key to linking research with policy and practice?
There has long existed a gap, perhaps a chasm, between the worlds of research and of policy and practice. All too often, policymakers and practitioners do not use research evidence when making key decisions, while researchers design entire programs of research without a complete understanding of the needs of those on the ground doing the work. Because of this divide, we’re left wondering—how do we get individuals to use the most relevant research findings when making personal healthcare decisions? how do we get school officials to choose evidence-based curriculum? how do we get legislators to develop scientifically-sound policies?
By Rebecca Jordan and Steven Gray
As investigators who engage the public in both modeling and research endeavors we address two major questions: Does citizen science have a place within the participatory modeling research community? And does participatory modeling have a place in the citizen science research community?
Let us start with definitions. Citizen science has been defined in many ways, but we will keep the definition simple. Citizen science refers to endeavors where persons who do not consider themselves scientific experts work with those who do consider themselves experts (around a specific issue) to address an authentic research question.