by Like most kids in the 1990s, I attended a school that used the original DARE program as a cornerstone initiative in the war on drugs. Congressional funding for this Drug Abuse Resistance Education program increased to over US$10 million per year by 2002, despite studies published a decade earlier that showed the original program was ineffective in preventing substance use. After increasing political pressure and dwindling government investments, the DARE program was reinstated.
This case illustrates how a disconnect between research-based information and decision-making can lead to ineffective policies. It also shows why scientists often lament that it could take more than a decade before their work achieves its intended public benefit.
Researchers want the results of their studies to have an impact on the real world. Policy makers are trying to make effective policies that serve the people. The public wants to benefit from tax-funded research.
But there is a disconnect between the world of science and the world of policy making that keeps information from flowing easily between them. There are hundreds of evidence-based programs that receive minimal public investment despite their promise to end social ills and save taxpayer dollars.
At the Penn State Research Translation Platform, I work with a team that studies the use of research evidence by policy makers. Legislators and other decision makers tend to prioritize certain solutions over others, based primarily on the types of advice and input they receive from trusted sources. My team is developing ways to connect policy makers with university researchers – and studying what happens when these academics are trusted sources, rather than those with vested interests who will benefit financially from various initiatives .
Creating relationships between researchers and policy makers
Our Research Translation Platform team has found that policy makers assess a person’s credibility in different ways. They generally consider university researchers to be more reliable and impartial than interest groups, lobbyists and think tanks. Academic researchers can be reliable key messengers, and their information is credible when they are not advocating particular political agendas.
But scientists and lawmakers are usually not on speed dial. Building these connections is a promising way to improve policymakers’ access to credible, high-quality information.
Drawing on these principles, I co-developed a service that matches state and federal legislators with researchers who share their interests. Called the Research-to-Policy Collaborative, it involves a series of steps that begin with identifying policymakers’ current priorities – for example, addressing the opioid crisis. We then identify and match them with researchers working on substance use studies. The ultimate goal is to facilitate the meetings and follow-ups that are critical to developing mutually beneficial partnerships between politicians and scientists.
Working closely with prevention scientist Max Crowley, we designed the first experiment of its kind to measure whether our model was useful to the Congressional staff. We found that legislators we randomly assigned to receive the support of researchers introduced 23% more bills that refer to research evidence. Their teams reported that they valued using research to understand problems more than team members who were not matched with a researcher.
This experiment showed that partnerships between researchers and policy makers can be effective, not only in connecting research and policy, but that legislators and their staff may find value in the service of defending empirical evidence related to their bills.
Putting research in the hands of policy makers
Although research policy partnerships can be effective, they also take time.
When the world was turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic, a normal handshake fell by the wayside in social distancing. As a flurry of congressional activity attempted to try to triage the disaster, pandemic conditions offered an opportunity to experiment with a way for researchers to communicate directly with policymakers online.
Our team created what we call the SciComm Optimizer for Policy Engagement, or SCOPE for short. It is a service that connects legislators directly with researchers who study current policy issues. Researchers author a fact sheet in their field of study by summarizing a body of research related to a national policy issue.
SCOPE staff then email on their behalf to legislators and staff assigned to relevant committees. The email invites you to make further connections. This effort is more interpersonal than a newsletter, providing a direct link to a reliable source of science-based information.
As part of this effort, students produced over 65 fact sheets as well as several virtual panels and briefings related to various policy areas during the pandemic, such as substance use, violence and child maltreatment. These were spread over the course of a year and typically prompted about two meetings between researchers and policy makers.
To investigate the value of this service, we looked at the language used by statesmen in social media posts related to COVID-19. We found that those we randomly assigned to receive our SCOPE emails produced 24% more social media posts referencing research than those we didn’t contact. In particular, we noticed an increased use of technical language related to data and analytics, as well as more language related to research concepts, such as risk factors and variables.
Legislators who received SCOPE material used less language related to more information or generating new information, suggesting that they were less likely to request further study to provide new evidence. Their access to evidence may have reduced their need for more.
Benefiting from timely and relevant research
These studies show some promising ways to connect legislators with timely and relevant research, and how doing so could improve the impact of research translation.
Further work is needed to study other types of science policy efforts. Most research translation initiatives have very little data to assess their impact.
It is also worth considering the possibility that some efforts may unintentionally damage these political relationships and the credibility of scientific institutions. For example, partisan efforts to promote particular political agendas tend to reduce the credibility of academic scientists.
And if educational outreach is just science in the absence of interpersonal connections, students not only run the risk of meeting the stereotype of the out-of-touch academy, but also run the risk of wasting resources on ineffective programs, like the the original DARE program.
The bridge between science and policy is a two-way street. Not only must the parties meet in the middle, but science policy and communication practice should be held to the same rigorous standards we expect in evidence-based policy making. The world needs solutions to countless real-time crises. How to create these connections is a critical area of study in itself.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a non-profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.
Written by: Taylor Scott, Penn State.
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Taylor Scott has received funding from the William T. Grant Foundation, the National Science Foundation’s National Science Foundation Program, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Penn State Social Science Research Institute and Univ. of Ireland, Galway. Huck Institutes at Penn State. She directs the Translational Research Platform at Penn State’s Evidence-to-Impact Collaborative and serves on the boards of TrestleLink and the National Prevention Science Coalition.
