Like most kids of the 1990s, I went to a school that used the original DARE program as a cornerstone initiative in the war on drugs. Congressional funding for this drug abuse education program increased to more than $10 million annually in 2002, despite studies published in the previous decade showing that the original program was ineffective at preventing substance use. After increasing political pressure and decreasing government investment, the DARE program was redesigned.
This scenario illustrates how a disconnect between research-based information and decision-making can lead to ineffective policies. It also illustrates why scientists often complain that it can take more than a decade for their work to deliver the intended public benefit.
Researchers want the results of their research to have an impact in the real world. Policymakers want to make effective policies that serve the people. The public wants to benefit from tax-funded research.
But there is a gap between the world of science and the world of policy decisions, which prevents information from flowing freely between them. There are hundreds of evidence-based programs that receive minimal public investment despite their promise to curb social problems and save taxpayer dollars.
At the Penn State Research Translation Platform, I work with a team that conducts research on the use of scientific evidence by policymakers. Lawmakers and other decision makers tend to prioritize certain solutions over others, based largely on the type of advice and input they receive from trusted sources. My team is developing ways to connect policymakers with university researchers – and exploring what happens when these academics become the trusted sources, rather than those with special interests who can benefit financially from various initiatives.
Forging relationships between researcher and policymaker
Our Research Translation Platform team has found that policymakers assess someone’s credibility in different ways. They generally view university researchers as more reliable and impartial than interest groups, lobbyists and think tanks. Academic researchers can be important, trusted messengers, and their information is most credible when it does not advocate particular political agendas.
But scientists and lawmakers don’t usually have each other on speed dial. Building these connections is a promising way to improve policymakers’ access to credible, high-quality information.
Based on these principles, I helped develop a service that matches state and federal legislators with researchers who share their interests. Called the Research-to-Policy Collaboration, it involves a series of steps that start with identifying policymakers’ existing priorities – for example, tackling the opioid crisis. We then identify and match them with researchers working on studies relevant to substance use. The ultimate goal is to facilitate the meetings and follow-up that are crucial for 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 congressional staff. We found that legislators we randomly assigned to receive support from researchers introduced 23% more bills that referenced research evidence. Their staff members indicated a greater value in using research to understand problems, compared to staff members who were not associated with a researcher.
This experiment demonstrated that partnerships between researchers and policymakers can not only be effective in bridging research and policy, but that legislators and their staff can find value in the agency for sharpening empirical evidence related to their bills.
Getting research into the hands of policymakers
While research and policy partnerships can be effective, they are also time-consuming.
When the world was turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic, routine handshakes disintegrated into social distancing. While a flurry of congressional activity sought to map the catastrophe, pandemic conditions provided an opportunity to experiment with a way for researchers to communicate directly with policymakers online.
Our team has developed what we call the sciComm Optimizer for Policy Engagement, or SCOPE for short. It is a service that connects lawmakers directly with researchers studying current policy issues. The researchers write a fact sheet in their field by summarizing a collection of research related to a national policy issue.
The SCOPE team then sends an email on their behalf to lawmakers and staff members assigned to relevant committees. The email invites an opportunity to connect further. This effort is more interpersonal than a newsletter and provides a direct connection to a trusted source of science-based information.
As part of this effort, scholars have produced more than 65 fact sheets, as well as several virtual panels and briefings relevant to various policy areas during the pandemic, such as substance use, violence, and child abuse. These were distributed over the course of a year and usually resulted in two meetings between researchers and policy makers.
To explore the value of this service, we looked at the language state lawmakers used in social media posts about 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 did not contact. In particular, we noticed an increased use of technical language related to data and analyses, as well as more language related to research concepts, such as risk factors and disparities.
Lawmakers who received SCOPE materials also used less language related to generating more or new knowledge, indicating that they were less likely to push for more studies to produce new evidence. Perhaps their access to evidence has reduced their need for more.
Capitalizing on current and relevant research
These studies show some promising ways to connect lawmakers with current and relevant research, and how this could improve the impact of research translations.
More work is needed to study other types of science policy efforts. Most research translation initiatives have very little data to evaluate their impact.
It is also worth considering the possibility that some efforts may inadvertently damage these political relationships and the credibility of scientific institutions. For example, partisan efforts to advance specific political agendas tend to reduce the perceived credibility of academic scientists.
And if education merely preaches science in the absence of interpersonal connections, scientists not only risk perpetuating the distant, idiosyncratic stereotype of academia, but also risk wasting resources on ineffective programs, similar to 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 communications practice must be held to the same rigorous standards we expect in evidence-based policymaking. The world needs solutions to countless real-time crises. How these connections can be established is itself a crucial area of study.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit organization providing facts and analysis to help you understand our complex world.
It was written by: Taylor Scott, Penn State.
Read more:
Taylor Scott has received funding from the William T. Grant Foundation, the National Science Foundation’s Science of Science Program, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Social Science Research Institute at Penn State and the Huck Institutes in Penn State. She directs the Research Translation Platform in Penn State’s Evidence-to-Impact Collaborative and serves on the boards of TrestleLink and the National Prevention Science Coalition.