Public Value of Social Policy Research

by David H. Guston, PI, and Jocelyn E. Crowley (Rutgers University), co-PI
 

This project investigates the public value of research funded by social policy agencies of the US federal government. By “social policy agencies,” we mean the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Labor, and some human services agencies within Health and Human Services. By “public value” we mean not the outputs of research (in terms of papers, reports, patents, etc.), but the societal outcomes such research influences, according to the agencies’ missions and as measured by the broadest available social indicators.

The research sponsored by social policy agencies constitutes a significant sum – more than $500 million annually among the agencies to be studied. Although this sum is just 1% of the civilian R&D budget, it includes a wide array of disciplines and a great share of the social science research the federal government funds. Studying this research will broaden the scholarship of public R&D management beyond such traditional agencies as NIH and NSF, facilitating the comparative study of research management techniques including merit review and technology transfer. Moreover, the study may illuminate mechanisms for producing public value from research and thus contribute to understanding the relationship between sponsored research and societal outcomes more broadly.

Examining the “public value” of social policy research means, crudely, studying the societal outcomes of the research and the hypothesized causal links between mission-related research programs and these outcomes. The study begins by scrutinizing public articulations of the goals and objectives for the research and continues by analyzing the procedural and logical connections between them and identifiable societal outcomes. Sources for the articulation of goals and objectives include authorizing legislation, mission statements, and strategic plans. Societal outcomes include available, systematic social indicators, as well as ad hoc indicators that policy makers and stakeholders have used in articulating the societal problem triggering the need for the research program. Although the agencies’ responses to the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) will be an important resource, we will not focus on evaluating GPRA’s impact, per se, on the agencies or their research. Rather, we will concentrate on asking how social policy agencies set priorities between current programs and investing in research, how they manage research for societal outcomes, how they transfer new knowledge and/or technologies from their sponsored research into the pursuit of their missions, how they anticipate the linkages between their research and societal outcomes, and what those outcomes may be.

The project has completed a set of interviews, mostly with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), as well as with down-stream users of research. The first preliminary product is a draft manuscript on knowledge utilization within this research ecology. Interviews with the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), within the Department of Justice (DOJ), are nearly complete; down-stream users of this research still need to be interviewed. Additional funding will be sought for research on the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitative Research (NIDRR), within the Department of Education.