Periodic Reporting for period 3 - K4U (Knowledge For Use [K4U]: Making the Most of Social Science to Build Better Policies)
Reporting period: 2018-11-01 to 2020-04-30
RESEARCH QUESTION
The project K4U aims to construct a radically new picture of how to use social science to build better social policies and to make better policy decisions.
The project focuses on knowledge production: encouraging high quality studies and vetting them.
Little attention goes to knowledge use: how is social science knowledge to be used in policy design and deliberation.
IMPORTANT FOR SOCIETY
The project will show how to use research for better social policies with better outcomes, as committed by UE with Horizon 2020 societal challenges policy.
K4U will provide not just a theoretical but a practical understanding for policy makers in having respect of the social science research results during their activity.
The project aims also to create a new kind of knowledge, in order to be better understood by policy makers and to be combined with other competencies or elements considered for policy making.
The research team in the academic network involved is interdisciplinary for guarantee a good approach to a practice-oriented philosophy, which needs to be done in cooperation with other disciplines, especially where abstract philosophical positions are to be judged by what they amount to in the concrete.
OVERALL OBJECTIVES
K4U’s overall objectives are to develop in tandem methods:
• for using social science to build better social policies
• and for making better decisions about what to do,
and with this exemplary study,
• to provide a model for the philosophy of science in practice,
• to initiate the philosophy of social technology,
• and to provide breakthroughs in philosophy of science on questions involving causality, evidence, objectivity and values in science, where ‘better social policy decisions’ means decisions in which policy outcomes are more effective and more reliably predictable and competing values and points of view are respected in policy choice and implementation.
The project K4U aims to construct a radically new picture of how to use social science to build better social policies and to make better policy decisions.
The project focuses on knowledge production: encouraging high quality studies and vetting them.
Little attention goes to knowledge use: how is social science knowledge to be used in policy design and deliberation.
IMPORTANT FOR SOCIETY
The project will show how to use research for better social policies with better outcomes, as committed by UE with Horizon 2020 societal challenges policy.
K4U will provide not just a theoretical but a practical understanding for policy makers in having respect of the social science research results during their activity.
The project aims also to create a new kind of knowledge, in order to be better understood by policy makers and to be combined with other competencies or elements considered for policy making.
The research team in the academic network involved is interdisciplinary for guarantee a good approach to a practice-oriented philosophy, which needs to be done in cooperation with other disciplines, especially where abstract philosophical positions are to be judged by what they amount to in the concrete.
OVERALL OBJECTIVES
K4U’s overall objectives are to develop in tandem methods:
• for using social science to build better social policies
• and for making better decisions about what to do,
and with this exemplary study,
• to provide a model for the philosophy of science in practice,
• to initiate the philosophy of social technology,
• and to provide breakthroughs in philosophy of science on questions involving causality, evidence, objectivity and values in science, where ‘better social policy decisions’ means decisions in which policy outcomes are more effective and more reliably predictable and competing values and points of view are respected in policy choice and implementation.
1.1.1 Overview
K4U is progressing well at mid-point, with a fully mobilised and engaged team working hard on the range of complex and intersecting themes outlined in the Description of the action. The project is generating outputs, some of which are high-profile, and making external impact. We have been driving forward and continue to push on a number of sub-projects which are taking K4U research outputs into the realms of practitioner communities in diverse areas such as: child protection, social work, international development, a UK “What Works” centre and the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). The majority of the six K4U case studies are well underway resulting in a considerable flow of philosophical ideas between each case study and the wider project.
In terms of the ‘Points of Attack’ outlined in the Description of the action, we have made good headway in work around ‘assembling policy proposals’ and ‘collecting the right evidence’; some progress around ‘putting together what we know’ and ‘deliberating what to do’; and less progress, and therefore still need to push on with: ‘knowing if you are successful’ and ‘ensuring sustainability’.
As planned, in Year 1, within the Building Social Policies Work Stream (WS1), we engaged with The Durham Institute of Advanced Studies’ theme on evidence, with K4U team members participating in particular in the sub-themes: ‘Evidence Synthesis by Building a Case’; ‘Talking Therapies: Evidence and Evaluation’; and ‘Cutting-edge Computation and Scientific Evidence’. We also made good progress on ‘warrant for singular causal claims’. Work on ‘frameworks for synthesis by building a case’ was more difficult than foreseen and is lagging behind as a result.
In Year 2 the Deliberating Policy Work Stream (WS2) was launched as planned and a very great deal work has been done on ‘understanding the underlying structure’ (about which we will say more later). Progress has also been made on the ‘role of theory’, especially in Cartwright’s work with Angus Deaton (see, for instance, Deaton and Cartwright, ‘Understanding and Misunderstanding Randomized Controlled Trials’ – CHESS Working Paper 2016-05 and 2017 article in Social Science& Medicine, listed in publications section of this report) and her work in the UK Department for International Development’s Centre of Excellence for Development Impact and Learning (CEDIL). ‘Narratives’, however, have not proved to be nearly as useful a tool as we had expected so they have played little role in helping us progress. (We note that Mary Morgan has a big project funded by you specifically devoted to narratives so we will watch for ideas from that project to see if they can help us with ours.) Work on ‘conceptions of objectivity’ was moved forward in the project and good progress is being made. The biannual Philosophy of Science Association Meeting (dissemination/outputs list 3 Nov 2016) was used to effect, again as planned.
As previously reported, commencement of work on Case Study 6 (Climate Services) was delayed due to maternity leave, and Case Study 1 (Mental Health) was slightly delayed due to difficulties in agreeing the scope of K4U engagement with the Greater Manchester project team but is now on track. The studentships and other case studies are going, or are about to go, ahead in accordance with the original schedule. The compilation of a ‘pamphlet-style’ advice guide, planned for Year 5, was brought forward, and completed, in part by the desire to publish Improving Child Safety (publications list, 2017) before the new What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care (SCIE) was launched in hopes of K4U ideas influencing it.
In the remainder of this section we provide details on the progress for each of the main anticipated outcomes, research themes and emerging concepts of the project as well as reporting on progress within the two work streams and each of the six case studies.
1.1.2 Progress against ‘projected research and its outcomes’
At the outset we outlined a specific outcome of providing a theoretical and practical understanding for users. We also originally set out some research objectives. A summary of our progress against each of these outcomes is described below and also in our response to question 1.4 in relation to knowledge transfer.
1.1.2.1 ‘Developing methods for building social policies’
Eileen Munro is doing this right now in her work with the Irish Government to introduce “Signs of Safety” as a national programme. The Signs of Safety programme has changed and expanded its Irish application due in part to Munro’s research on systems thinking for social planning that has been done with K4U support. In a separate sub-project, Julian Reiss and Nancy Cartwright have been engaging with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at the UK MoD through a series of meetings. K4U’s work on evidence is helping DSTL develop better policies. As part of this engagement, in March 2017 we hosted an inter-disciplinary workshop at Durham between DSTL representatives and academics.
1.1.2.2 ‘Developing methods for making better decisions about what we do’
We have made good headway with the research for, and publication of, Improving Child Safety, an attractive and (we believe) easily readable and intelligible book of 175 pages, intended for people who participate in decisions about child protection, from front-line social workers to those who organise local and national child protection services. This has also been an ongoing topic at regular meeting of the research group at the LSE.
1.1.2.3 ‘Providing a model for the Philosophy of Science in practice’
We have again made good headway with a number of initiatives. In the first year of the project we co-hosted a workshop series entitled ‘Talking Therapies’ at which academics and practitioners from the field of mental health together explored the use evidence-based pathways for improving work and wellbeing. In the same year we co-hosted another workshop series on ‘Evidence Synthesis by Building a Case’ in which several secondary education professionals participated. Within a few months of project commencement we established a project website as a key dissemination tool for interested parties, both current and prospective.
In June 2017 we initiated an ‘Improving Child Safety Working Group’ with three subsequent meetings between members of K4U and middle and senior managers from several UK north-eastern authority Children’s Social Care departments. Discussions have been structured around topics raised by them as areas where research and knowledge are problematic and are helping the team to improve their understanding of how their work meets the needs of those providing child protection services. The meetings of this group are continuing. (see Testimonial Letter from Paul Pearce of DSTL at the end of this section – PDF available on request)
Julian Reiss’s work on evidence has shaped the so-called ‘Evidence Framework Approach’ (EFA), a decision tool used by the UK MoD. The EFA describes practical ways to use evidence and improve its analytical quality to support procurement and other decisions made by the MoD.
1.1.2.4 ‘Initiating the Philosophy of Social Technology’
This has been a special focus for Cartwright herself, who has been arguing the importance of a philosophy of social technology in conferences, lectures and papers. Building on her previous work in this area, including her 2015 Dewey Lecture (‘Philosophy of Social Technology: Get on Board’), now published and her lecture at the Society for Applied Philosophy Conference in July 2015 (‘The Philosophy of Social Technology: Making the Most of Social Science to Build Better Policies’), Cartwright advanced the argument via her subsequent Sir Malcolm Knox Memorial Lecture at the University of St Andrew’s (‘Scientific generalisations: What's so good about missing out all the differences?’). A call for the philosophy of social technology also figured prominently in: Cartwright’s December 2016 talk at the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds, ‘Nature the artful modeller: Truth, Know-how & the laws of Nature’; her April 2017 Carus lectures (CARUS 2017) at the American Philosophical Association; ‘Nature the artful modeller’ and in her September 2017 talk at the Inaugural Conference of the Centre for PPE in Groningen, Netherlands, ‘Towards a philosophy of social technology’. We are now seeing success in print from this work – see for instance: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368117303096
1.1.2.5 ‘Providing breakthroughs on questions involving causality, evidence, objectivity and values in science’
We have delivered and produced numerous talks and publications covering these four areas, not least, Improving Child Safety which covers all four, and also, Cartwright’s CARUS 2017 Lectures which also covers all four areas. K4U Working Papers, self-published through CHESS, also address key questions in each of the four categories.
1.1.3 ‘Building Social Policies’ Work Stream (WS1)
1.1.3.1 Systems Work
One central advance so far in terms of investigating what forms of knowledge need to be created to tackle societal challenges has been on ‘understanding the underlying system’. This has proved to be an extremely central and fruitful research topic that turns out to be important in almost all of our research areas and case studies.
Understanding the underlying system is at the core of Eileen Munro’s work (Case Study 1). In particular: Munro’s chapter (in press): ‘Re-designing organisations to facilitate rights-based practice in child protection’ (in Falch-Eriksen, A. & Backe-Hansen, E. (eds.), Child Protection and Human Rights: Implementing the CRC in policy and practice) since it digs into how the system helps or hinders the realisation of children’s rights. Her article (in press) ‘Decision making under uncertainty in child protection: creating a just and learning culture’ in Child & Family Social Work also address causal processes that influence the reasoning and actions of individuals.
In her Signs of Safety work with ten local authorities in England and in the Republic of Ireland, Munro has run staff surveys that measured organisational culture using the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire from aviation and gathered qualitative data from open-ended questions. These brought out some causal factors that are positive contributions and others that are obstacles to reform in moving from a predominantly compliance-with-procedures system to a respectful engagement with families, helping them find solutions. Much of the discussion is on ways to improve, or impediments to improving, local arrangements to help make social workers' work more effective.
Cartwright’s K4U research, in tandem with Hakan Seckinelgin (Case Study 2), has developed a distinction between the ‘intervention-centred’ and the ‘context-centred’ approaches to evidenced-based policy and a series of arguments stressing the need for more investment in the ‘context-centred’, where context-centring is a ‘systems’ approach. Seckinelgin’s work is looking at how international policy advice (on HIV and AIDS) that is based on generalizable decontextualized knowledge is recontextualized when the advice is given for specific policy concerns in different countries. The interest here is about the way in which recontextualization of general knowledge works through the norms and values within which the policy is supposed to function. One of the actors in this process is the researcher who produces the knowledge for policy use in the first place. Their role in participating in processes of creating generalizable knowledge for policy use was the subject of our workshop at the LSE in June 2017.
Reconfiguring Local Health Economies (Case Study 4) is a study of the systems changes involved in a health service reconfiguration. Here we have been taking a realist perspective, speculating on the shifting forms of knowledge that inform policy deliberation and so what forms of knowledge can hold sway in complex systems and contexts of austerity.
In relation to the Occupational Health Case Study (Case Study 5), we use a ‘carescapes/caringscapes’ framework to examine the issue of low-paid female workers evading care policy solutions and forming their own care economies. Here we are seeking to understand what is lacking in current care policy and its formation. In so doing, we will examine what types of evidence can be used to build policies that are actually helpful and used by both employers and employees. This knowledge must come from individuals, unions and employers, rather than from the ‘scrap heap’ of previous policies.
In the Mental Health Case Study (Case Study 3), we are looking at the effectiveness of a systems’ change in Greater Manchester’s social welfare policy, which unifies the concomitant treatment of problems of mental ill-health and unemployment.
Following Alison Wylie being unable to continue her involvement in the project, we were able to increase the involvement of Anna Marmodoro to help with our systems work. Marmodoro has contributed directly to one of the main objectives of the project, by working on the study of existing accounts of causality and developing a novel one that reduces causation to the exercise of causal powers in complex systems. Her work has been supported by two part-time research assistants.
In the 2017-8 academic year we co-sponsored workshops with Durham’s Institute of Advanced Studies on ‘Structure’ to explore better methods of understanding how the underlying system influences outcomes. First, the role of context and how distinctive environments shape and inform rational action calls into question the generalizability and scalability of Randomised Controlled Trials to other environments. Second, the role of context within care ecologies also suggests that structures are best interpreted as dynamic wholes. Individuals dynamically interact with the resources and services of a whole care ecology, which suggests that static or piecemeal analysis fails to fully capture the different formal and informal roles interactive parts potentially play. Third, the role of complex structures which build in institutions, cities and nation-states suggest that some structures may be usefully identified as ‘super organisms’ which constitute a form of structure. This approach emphasises that human social organisations are not just composed of people, but also include technological/environmental components.
1.1.3.2 What kinds of evidence are needed?
The paper ‘Understanding and Misunderstanding Randomized Controlled Trials’ was published by Nancy Cartwright with Nobel-prize-winning economist Angus Deaton in the journal Social Science & Medicine (SSM) [ DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.12.005]. This paper has had a great deal of discussion. There were 18 commentaries on it published together in SSM and 131 citations as of 21 June 2018, plus extensive informal comments and blogs on earlier versions published by the (US) National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. 22595, and as a K4U Discussion Paper, CHESS Working Paper No. 2016-05.
1.1.3.3 Synthesising
We are as envisaged working on developing proposals for synthesising evidence and we have made some headway both in our theoretical and in our practical work. On the theoretical side:
• Cartwright has developed the idea of a SCEM – a situation-specific causal equation model – as a way to represent the causal possibilities in a situation. Evidence for a cause-effect relation can then be related to warrant for different parts of the model. This makes visible
the role that each piece of evidence plays and where gaps are, thus allowing better judgements of how strongly the evidence, all-told, supports the causal claim. The basic SCEM idea is described in Cartwright, N. (2017). ‘How to Learn about Causes in the Single Case’. Durham University: CHESS Working Paper No. 2017-04.
• CHESS PHD student Donal Khosrowi has been closely involved with K4U and has published, ‘Tradeoffs between Epistemic and Moral Values in Evidence-Based Policy’ in the K4U working paper series. It points out that existing recommendations in evidence-based policy for how to amalgamate evidence from multiple settings establish a bias towards dismissing evidence suggesting that policy effects differ between settings and a bias in favour of averaging policy effects, disregarding important differences in such effects between settings. This paper was also presented at several conferences and workshops: PSA2016 in Atlanta; Science, Values, and Democracy Workshop at Tilburg University (2016); VMST6/SRPoiSE at UT Dallas (2016) and the YSI Young Scholars Initiative Workshop in San Sebastian (2017).
On the practical side
• In the Mental Health Case Study (Case Study 3) group interview data has been collated into a report for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA). This will be synthesised with ideas around causation and around deliberation to produce a paper on single case causation in the Working Well programme; K4U Student Richard Williams and Post-doctoral researcher (PRDA) Andrew Fletcher are using the Case Study to illustrate a talk on deliberation at a K4U workshop on June 27th 2018.
• In the Health Economies Case Study (Case Study 4) we combined: a desktop literature search; one-to-one interviews with stakeholders and interested parties; and video recorded GMCA committee meetings. This data was synthesised to examine trends in evidence use around health reconfiguration.
1.1.3.4 What role should values play?
• The thesis of K4U’s first PhD student, Tamlyn Munslow, addresses whether science should be value-free. It identifies several places where values enter into science, from the choice of research aims and how they are framed, through modelling choices and how to operationalise the measures that we are interested in. This matters for using scientific knowledge to inform policy formulation and deliberation. The PhD includes empirical studies related to concerns about people’s local experiences, interests and needs and contrasts these with concerns derived from policy makers’ interests and values, using examples in the field of international development evaluation, including evaluations of nutrition advocacy and women’s empowerment interventions. Policy evaluator. Advisor to K4U, Elliot Stern has offered useful guidance on these issues.
• Julian Reiss’s main work in this area has been an analysis and defence of the ‘entanglement thesis’ according to which factual claims and value judgements are inherently intertwined in science. His focus has been on the social and policy sciences, but many arguments carry over to the natural sciences to some extent. In the area of ‘judgement and expertise’, Reiss has worked on two relatively independent projects. The first is a development of his ‘pragmatist theory of evidence’, which is in fact a theory of inferential judgement and puts the (scientific) expert at the heart of scientific methodology. The other is an examination of the implications of the ‘entanglement thesis’ for the role of scientific expertise in broader society. The question of values also intersects with the work of the second student, Richard Williams, who is interested in the interaction between value judgements and individual interests.
1.1.4 ‘Deliberating Policy’ Workstream (WS2)
We promised to deliver ‘a radically new model of deliberation’. The need for such a new model originates from an argument formulated along the following lines:
Formal methods in decisions are suspect.
Rules of inference restrict what inputs are legitimate for making a decision.
But in the absence of rules there are no limits to the kinds of information and values which enter into good decisions.
So we need another method, which can still secure objective outputs leading to a new model of deliberation.
After launching the Work Stream in Year 1 (2016) we started thinking of how to build this new model. In particular we focused on three questions:
What building blocks do we need? (a mix of different ingredients well beyond formal rules, e.g. practical reasoning: emotions, cognition, judgement, expertise, group thinking)
How do we combine them? (the construction of credible narratives – in tandem with causal narratives of RS1)
How can we retain objectivity? – through reconceiving objectivity in such a way that it retains a role for practical purposes.
We held four progress meetings at the LSE to monitor thinking on practical reasoning and objectivity for policy and prepared the framework for a workshop on judgement. Some of the work done in the first year was discussed in a number of conferences and workshops, and then materialised in a number of papers:
J. Hardie, ‘Objectivity – What it is for, when we can have it and when we can’t’, CHESS Working Paper No. 2016-01, February 2016
E. Montuschi, ‘Using science, making policy: what should we worry about?’, to appear in European Journal in Philosophy of Science, 7 (1), 2017.
E.Montuschi ‘Scientific Evidence vs. Expert Opinion: A False Alternative?’, to appear in Politeia, special issue ‘Science and Democracy’, XXXIII (126) 2017.
Montuschi and Hardie also finalised the part on deliberation and judgement for the K4U book,Munro, E., Cartwright, N., Hardie, J. and Montuschi, E., Improving Child Safety: deliberation, judgement and empirical research.
As suggested in the project Timeline, Montuschi was among those team members who took part in the 2016 PSA Biennial Meeting in Atlanta USA partly in view of promoting the new project idea of a practical philosophy of science – an idea that, in particular, makes central use of a case study methodology. She talked at a special panel on ‘Expertise, Method and Value’, where she analysed the methodological advantages of including local knowledge in the formulation of expert opinion, finessing the point in the context of a real case of ‘expertise in action’. The topic was also chosen as it proves central to our goal of reconceptualizing the idea of objectivity in practice and in view of figuring out the different types of knowledge that can contribute to the formulation of good decision-making (which is a central pillar of the new model of deliberation that we envisage producing as an outcome of this Work Stream).
In year 2 (2017) we tried to capitalise on work done in year 1 to address issues raised by some of the case studies. Those working on the two K4U work streams joined monthly meetings with case study leaders at the LSE, discussing the implications of views of K4U work on objectivity, expertise, causality and evidence for Case Studies 1, 2 and 3. We read and discussed a number of papers to acquire a cross-cutting terminology for both theory and practice. We encountered difficulties with this. It often appeared unclear what the more practice-oriented work requires from theoretical and conceptual investigation and how theoretically-inclined reflection can profit from applied thinking. Nonetheless, joint brainstorming has been useful in highlighting concomitantly areas in which to concentrate future joint work and contested features which require further work in view of shared resolution.
Richard Williams is primarily researching the role objectivity can and should play within democratic deliberation. Through 2017, Williams focused on James Buchanan’s ‘public choice’ approach towards democratic politics which explicitly addresses the problem of strategic individuals abusing democratic procedures to pursue their own economic interests and how to protect against it. He presented a paper on this, arguing that it is unclear whether an objective common good is a coherent concept, and if it is, whether we should interpret individual voters as impartially pursuing it, at the ‘Information, Epistemic Norms, and Democratic Choice’ workshop in Munich, Germany.
Deliberating Policy (WS2) also intersects with the case studies. For example, around judgement and expertise: in the Mental Health Case Study (Case Study 3) we are exploring the power discrepancy between keyworkers and talking therapists. This was a matter of perceived expertise (keyworkers were highly experienced; talking therapists were highly qualified and also worked in the health sector). Consequently, this reduced the scope for keyworkers to negotiate with the talking therapists.
If the aim of year 5 is to ‘produce research articles exemplifying philosophy of social technology and on K4U’s philosophical lessons on objectivity, evidence and causality’, creating optimal conditions for a dialogue between conceptual inquiry and empirical investigation is mandatory.
1.1.5 Case Study 1: Child Welfare
This Case Study, which focuses on how we can learn the effects of using Signs of Safety as the practice framework in child protection service, is proceeding well. The Department for Education in the UK provided funding for further work with ten local authorities who are implementing the Signs of Safety organizational framework and aiming at creating the feedback loops and organizational culture that enables them to be learning organisations. The staff survey has been modified slightly to include the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire that was developed in aviation and widely used in the health sector. This measures organizational culture on a number of dimensions which are known from research to be associated with higher or lower levels of error and poor practice. This adds to our data about how the practice is being conducted and will be useful when seeking to find patterns in how cases progress.
There has been a lot of work done on quality assurance. The need is to replace a system that focused primarily on recorded data on task completion and timescales with a system that measures not just whether the work was done but also how well it was done. A substantial QA methodology has been created and is now being trialled. The work in Ireland is following a similar path but offers specific learning opportunities. A major challenge was responding to a newly legislated mandatory reporting of suspicions of maltreatment - it is known that in other countries when this legislative change was introduced it triggered a big increase in reports. A methodology for assessing initial reports has been developed and follow-up of the case data will provide some evidence on the accuracy of the criteria being used to judge the seriousness of a report.
1.1.6 Case Study 2: HIV/AIDS Policies
Hakan Seckinelgin has been developing and framing how this Case Study should be undertaken. This involves development of an appropriate conceptual lens by considering various theoretical debates and available conceptual frameworks. The approach requires a multidisciplinary focus. Therefore there has been focus on thinking about deliberation, knowledge and judgement (decision-making) from multiple perspectives. Work on this Case Study has been delayed slightly due to new university duties Seckinelgin has acquired since the original K4U planning, but it is not expected that this delay will impact significantly on the overall project.
1.1.7 Case Study 3: Mental Health
The project design and ethical approval were confirmed and, after some initial delays in agreeing meeting times with the GMCA, most of the data is now collected. 32 hours of audio has been recorded and transcribed, comprising interviews with keyworkers and talking therapists as well as managers and commissioners on the Working Well project. We were able to gain access to a protected group of participants (keyworkers and talking therapists) through negotiation with the GMCA, yielding some extremely useful insights into joint working between health and social care policy areas that would not have otherwise been available.
Data analysis and report writing are on-going. The report will be presented to the GMCA on July 27th 2018. This represents a significant engagement with policy makers and is expected to inform wider health policy, which is becoming increasingly integrated with social care. We also have a great deal of qualitative data in the form of vignettes about single cases on the programme. This will inform at least one paper on single case causation and another paper is planned around objectivity, both to be written between August and December 2018.
Andrew Fletcher and Richard Williams are working together to extract philosophical questions from this Case Study that can be replicated in the other studies.
1.1.8 Case Study 4: Reconfiguring Local Health Economies
Reading and research has been carried out using academic and policy material, as well as video recordings of council committee meetings. Seven individuals have been interviewed, including academics, Directors of Public Health, the head of a local Think Tank and the head of the Socialist Health Association – generating a range of perspectives. We produced a proposal for a Policy Press ‘shorts’ publication. Feedback indicated that this was too Manchester-centric, so the publishing plan has been reframed to make our research more transferrable and more relevant to a wider audience. We hope to advance a new argument about the use of evidence in health service reconfiguration. Two to three further papers are to be written over the next six months: ‘evidence types and policy, a case study of devolved health and public administration’ and a more theoretical paper around evidence as a process rather than an object.
1.1.9 Case Study 5: Occupational Health, Work and Wellbeing
Andrew Fletcher has contributed a section to a paper in progress by Linda McKie and Anni Raw for the journal Social Politics. This will be finished and submitted in July 2018. The paper examines how individuals find their own care solutions when employment policy is inadequate or irrelevant and indicates new approaches to policy design based on this evidence. Two further papers are planned over the next ten months. These will develop the ‘carescapes/caringscapes’ framework, indicating the need for further research with employers to examine and reshape their care policies to achieve better results for both employers and employees, especially women.
1.1.10 Case Study 6: Climate Services
Wendy Parker was on maternity leave from March 2015, returning to full-time employment only in Michaelmas 2016. This delayed work on this Case Study. Preliminary scoping for the study was carried out by Parker during the 2016-17 academic year. During Michaelmas 2017, collaborator Greg Lusk (University of Chicago) visited the K4U team in Durham and joined in research meetings throughout the term. During Lusk’s extended visit, he and Parker further investigated current practices in climate services, identified decision points at which greater attention to user values would be beneficial and began drafting a journal article outlining their findings and argument.
In late December 2017, a proposal for the article was accepted at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), a very prominent venue that reaches many climate services practitioners. Parker and Lusk are currently completing the preparation of the manuscript, This article, tentatively entitled ‘Managing Inductive Risk in Climate Services’, reflects the achievement of the main objective outlined for this Case Study in the Description of the action: “this study explores how the social, economic and ethical
values of users migh
K4U is progressing well at mid-point, with a fully mobilised and engaged team working hard on the range of complex and intersecting themes outlined in the Description of the action. The project is generating outputs, some of which are high-profile, and making external impact. We have been driving forward and continue to push on a number of sub-projects which are taking K4U research outputs into the realms of practitioner communities in diverse areas such as: child protection, social work, international development, a UK “What Works” centre and the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). The majority of the six K4U case studies are well underway resulting in a considerable flow of philosophical ideas between each case study and the wider project.
In terms of the ‘Points of Attack’ outlined in the Description of the action, we have made good headway in work around ‘assembling policy proposals’ and ‘collecting the right evidence’; some progress around ‘putting together what we know’ and ‘deliberating what to do’; and less progress, and therefore still need to push on with: ‘knowing if you are successful’ and ‘ensuring sustainability’.
As planned, in Year 1, within the Building Social Policies Work Stream (WS1), we engaged with The Durham Institute of Advanced Studies’ theme on evidence, with K4U team members participating in particular in the sub-themes: ‘Evidence Synthesis by Building a Case’; ‘Talking Therapies: Evidence and Evaluation’; and ‘Cutting-edge Computation and Scientific Evidence’. We also made good progress on ‘warrant for singular causal claims’. Work on ‘frameworks for synthesis by building a case’ was more difficult than foreseen and is lagging behind as a result.
In Year 2 the Deliberating Policy Work Stream (WS2) was launched as planned and a very great deal work has been done on ‘understanding the underlying structure’ (about which we will say more later). Progress has also been made on the ‘role of theory’, especially in Cartwright’s work with Angus Deaton (see, for instance, Deaton and Cartwright, ‘Understanding and Misunderstanding Randomized Controlled Trials’ – CHESS Working Paper 2016-05 and 2017 article in Social Science& Medicine, listed in publications section of this report) and her work in the UK Department for International Development’s Centre of Excellence for Development Impact and Learning (CEDIL). ‘Narratives’, however, have not proved to be nearly as useful a tool as we had expected so they have played little role in helping us progress. (We note that Mary Morgan has a big project funded by you specifically devoted to narratives so we will watch for ideas from that project to see if they can help us with ours.) Work on ‘conceptions of objectivity’ was moved forward in the project and good progress is being made. The biannual Philosophy of Science Association Meeting (dissemination/outputs list 3 Nov 2016) was used to effect, again as planned.
As previously reported, commencement of work on Case Study 6 (Climate Services) was delayed due to maternity leave, and Case Study 1 (Mental Health) was slightly delayed due to difficulties in agreeing the scope of K4U engagement with the Greater Manchester project team but is now on track. The studentships and other case studies are going, or are about to go, ahead in accordance with the original schedule. The compilation of a ‘pamphlet-style’ advice guide, planned for Year 5, was brought forward, and completed, in part by the desire to publish Improving Child Safety (publications list, 2017) before the new What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care (SCIE) was launched in hopes of K4U ideas influencing it.
In the remainder of this section we provide details on the progress for each of the main anticipated outcomes, research themes and emerging concepts of the project as well as reporting on progress within the two work streams and each of the six case studies.
1.1.2 Progress against ‘projected research and its outcomes’
At the outset we outlined a specific outcome of providing a theoretical and practical understanding for users. We also originally set out some research objectives. A summary of our progress against each of these outcomes is described below and also in our response to question 1.4 in relation to knowledge transfer.
1.1.2.1 ‘Developing methods for building social policies’
Eileen Munro is doing this right now in her work with the Irish Government to introduce “Signs of Safety” as a national programme. The Signs of Safety programme has changed and expanded its Irish application due in part to Munro’s research on systems thinking for social planning that has been done with K4U support. In a separate sub-project, Julian Reiss and Nancy Cartwright have been engaging with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at the UK MoD through a series of meetings. K4U’s work on evidence is helping DSTL develop better policies. As part of this engagement, in March 2017 we hosted an inter-disciplinary workshop at Durham between DSTL representatives and academics.
1.1.2.2 ‘Developing methods for making better decisions about what we do’
We have made good headway with the research for, and publication of, Improving Child Safety, an attractive and (we believe) easily readable and intelligible book of 175 pages, intended for people who participate in decisions about child protection, from front-line social workers to those who organise local and national child protection services. This has also been an ongoing topic at regular meeting of the research group at the LSE.
1.1.2.3 ‘Providing a model for the Philosophy of Science in practice’
We have again made good headway with a number of initiatives. In the first year of the project we co-hosted a workshop series entitled ‘Talking Therapies’ at which academics and practitioners from the field of mental health together explored the use evidence-based pathways for improving work and wellbeing. In the same year we co-hosted another workshop series on ‘Evidence Synthesis by Building a Case’ in which several secondary education professionals participated. Within a few months of project commencement we established a project website as a key dissemination tool for interested parties, both current and prospective.
In June 2017 we initiated an ‘Improving Child Safety Working Group’ with three subsequent meetings between members of K4U and middle and senior managers from several UK north-eastern authority Children’s Social Care departments. Discussions have been structured around topics raised by them as areas where research and knowledge are problematic and are helping the team to improve their understanding of how their work meets the needs of those providing child protection services. The meetings of this group are continuing. (see Testimonial Letter from Paul Pearce of DSTL at the end of this section – PDF available on request)
Julian Reiss’s work on evidence has shaped the so-called ‘Evidence Framework Approach’ (EFA), a decision tool used by the UK MoD. The EFA describes practical ways to use evidence and improve its analytical quality to support procurement and other decisions made by the MoD.
1.1.2.4 ‘Initiating the Philosophy of Social Technology’
This has been a special focus for Cartwright herself, who has been arguing the importance of a philosophy of social technology in conferences, lectures and papers. Building on her previous work in this area, including her 2015 Dewey Lecture (‘Philosophy of Social Technology: Get on Board’), now published and her lecture at the Society for Applied Philosophy Conference in July 2015 (‘The Philosophy of Social Technology: Making the Most of Social Science to Build Better Policies’), Cartwright advanced the argument via her subsequent Sir Malcolm Knox Memorial Lecture at the University of St Andrew’s (‘Scientific generalisations: What's so good about missing out all the differences?’). A call for the philosophy of social technology also figured prominently in: Cartwright’s December 2016 talk at the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds, ‘Nature the artful modeller: Truth, Know-how & the laws of Nature’; her April 2017 Carus lectures (CARUS 2017) at the American Philosophical Association; ‘Nature the artful modeller’ and in her September 2017 talk at the Inaugural Conference of the Centre for PPE in Groningen, Netherlands, ‘Towards a philosophy of social technology’. We are now seeing success in print from this work – see for instance: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368117303096
1.1.2.5 ‘Providing breakthroughs on questions involving causality, evidence, objectivity and values in science’
We have delivered and produced numerous talks and publications covering these four areas, not least, Improving Child Safety which covers all four, and also, Cartwright’s CARUS 2017 Lectures which also covers all four areas. K4U Working Papers, self-published through CHESS, also address key questions in each of the four categories.
1.1.3 ‘Building Social Policies’ Work Stream (WS1)
1.1.3.1 Systems Work
One central advance so far in terms of investigating what forms of knowledge need to be created to tackle societal challenges has been on ‘understanding the underlying system’. This has proved to be an extremely central and fruitful research topic that turns out to be important in almost all of our research areas and case studies.
Understanding the underlying system is at the core of Eileen Munro’s work (Case Study 1). In particular: Munro’s chapter (in press): ‘Re-designing organisations to facilitate rights-based practice in child protection’ (in Falch-Eriksen, A. & Backe-Hansen, E. (eds.), Child Protection and Human Rights: Implementing the CRC in policy and practice) since it digs into how the system helps or hinders the realisation of children’s rights. Her article (in press) ‘Decision making under uncertainty in child protection: creating a just and learning culture’ in Child & Family Social Work also address causal processes that influence the reasoning and actions of individuals.
In her Signs of Safety work with ten local authorities in England and in the Republic of Ireland, Munro has run staff surveys that measured organisational culture using the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire from aviation and gathered qualitative data from open-ended questions. These brought out some causal factors that are positive contributions and others that are obstacles to reform in moving from a predominantly compliance-with-procedures system to a respectful engagement with families, helping them find solutions. Much of the discussion is on ways to improve, or impediments to improving, local arrangements to help make social workers' work more effective.
Cartwright’s K4U research, in tandem with Hakan Seckinelgin (Case Study 2), has developed a distinction between the ‘intervention-centred’ and the ‘context-centred’ approaches to evidenced-based policy and a series of arguments stressing the need for more investment in the ‘context-centred’, where context-centring is a ‘systems’ approach. Seckinelgin’s work is looking at how international policy advice (on HIV and AIDS) that is based on generalizable decontextualized knowledge is recontextualized when the advice is given for specific policy concerns in different countries. The interest here is about the way in which recontextualization of general knowledge works through the norms and values within which the policy is supposed to function. One of the actors in this process is the researcher who produces the knowledge for policy use in the first place. Their role in participating in processes of creating generalizable knowledge for policy use was the subject of our workshop at the LSE in June 2017.
Reconfiguring Local Health Economies (Case Study 4) is a study of the systems changes involved in a health service reconfiguration. Here we have been taking a realist perspective, speculating on the shifting forms of knowledge that inform policy deliberation and so what forms of knowledge can hold sway in complex systems and contexts of austerity.
In relation to the Occupational Health Case Study (Case Study 5), we use a ‘carescapes/caringscapes’ framework to examine the issue of low-paid female workers evading care policy solutions and forming their own care economies. Here we are seeking to understand what is lacking in current care policy and its formation. In so doing, we will examine what types of evidence can be used to build policies that are actually helpful and used by both employers and employees. This knowledge must come from individuals, unions and employers, rather than from the ‘scrap heap’ of previous policies.
In the Mental Health Case Study (Case Study 3), we are looking at the effectiveness of a systems’ change in Greater Manchester’s social welfare policy, which unifies the concomitant treatment of problems of mental ill-health and unemployment.
Following Alison Wylie being unable to continue her involvement in the project, we were able to increase the involvement of Anna Marmodoro to help with our systems work. Marmodoro has contributed directly to one of the main objectives of the project, by working on the study of existing accounts of causality and developing a novel one that reduces causation to the exercise of causal powers in complex systems. Her work has been supported by two part-time research assistants.
In the 2017-8 academic year we co-sponsored workshops with Durham’s Institute of Advanced Studies on ‘Structure’ to explore better methods of understanding how the underlying system influences outcomes. First, the role of context and how distinctive environments shape and inform rational action calls into question the generalizability and scalability of Randomised Controlled Trials to other environments. Second, the role of context within care ecologies also suggests that structures are best interpreted as dynamic wholes. Individuals dynamically interact with the resources and services of a whole care ecology, which suggests that static or piecemeal analysis fails to fully capture the different formal and informal roles interactive parts potentially play. Third, the role of complex structures which build in institutions, cities and nation-states suggest that some structures may be usefully identified as ‘super organisms’ which constitute a form of structure. This approach emphasises that human social organisations are not just composed of people, but also include technological/environmental components.
1.1.3.2 What kinds of evidence are needed?
The paper ‘Understanding and Misunderstanding Randomized Controlled Trials’ was published by Nancy Cartwright with Nobel-prize-winning economist Angus Deaton in the journal Social Science & Medicine (SSM) [ DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.12.005]. This paper has had a great deal of discussion. There were 18 commentaries on it published together in SSM and 131 citations as of 21 June 2018, plus extensive informal comments and blogs on earlier versions published by the (US) National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. 22595, and as a K4U Discussion Paper, CHESS Working Paper No. 2016-05.
1.1.3.3 Synthesising
We are as envisaged working on developing proposals for synthesising evidence and we have made some headway both in our theoretical and in our practical work. On the theoretical side:
• Cartwright has developed the idea of a SCEM – a situation-specific causal equation model – as a way to represent the causal possibilities in a situation. Evidence for a cause-effect relation can then be related to warrant for different parts of the model. This makes visible
the role that each piece of evidence plays and where gaps are, thus allowing better judgements of how strongly the evidence, all-told, supports the causal claim. The basic SCEM idea is described in Cartwright, N. (2017). ‘How to Learn about Causes in the Single Case’. Durham University: CHESS Working Paper No. 2017-04.
• CHESS PHD student Donal Khosrowi has been closely involved with K4U and has published, ‘Tradeoffs between Epistemic and Moral Values in Evidence-Based Policy’ in the K4U working paper series. It points out that existing recommendations in evidence-based policy for how to amalgamate evidence from multiple settings establish a bias towards dismissing evidence suggesting that policy effects differ between settings and a bias in favour of averaging policy effects, disregarding important differences in such effects between settings. This paper was also presented at several conferences and workshops: PSA2016 in Atlanta; Science, Values, and Democracy Workshop at Tilburg University (2016); VMST6/SRPoiSE at UT Dallas (2016) and the YSI Young Scholars Initiative Workshop in San Sebastian (2017).
On the practical side
• In the Mental Health Case Study (Case Study 3) group interview data has been collated into a report for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA). This will be synthesised with ideas around causation and around deliberation to produce a paper on single case causation in the Working Well programme; K4U Student Richard Williams and Post-doctoral researcher (PRDA) Andrew Fletcher are using the Case Study to illustrate a talk on deliberation at a K4U workshop on June 27th 2018.
• In the Health Economies Case Study (Case Study 4) we combined: a desktop literature search; one-to-one interviews with stakeholders and interested parties; and video recorded GMCA committee meetings. This data was synthesised to examine trends in evidence use around health reconfiguration.
1.1.3.4 What role should values play?
• The thesis of K4U’s first PhD student, Tamlyn Munslow, addresses whether science should be value-free. It identifies several places where values enter into science, from the choice of research aims and how they are framed, through modelling choices and how to operationalise the measures that we are interested in. This matters for using scientific knowledge to inform policy formulation and deliberation. The PhD includes empirical studies related to concerns about people’s local experiences, interests and needs and contrasts these with concerns derived from policy makers’ interests and values, using examples in the field of international development evaluation, including evaluations of nutrition advocacy and women’s empowerment interventions. Policy evaluator. Advisor to K4U, Elliot Stern has offered useful guidance on these issues.
• Julian Reiss’s main work in this area has been an analysis and defence of the ‘entanglement thesis’ according to which factual claims and value judgements are inherently intertwined in science. His focus has been on the social and policy sciences, but many arguments carry over to the natural sciences to some extent. In the area of ‘judgement and expertise’, Reiss has worked on two relatively independent projects. The first is a development of his ‘pragmatist theory of evidence’, which is in fact a theory of inferential judgement and puts the (scientific) expert at the heart of scientific methodology. The other is an examination of the implications of the ‘entanglement thesis’ for the role of scientific expertise in broader society. The question of values also intersects with the work of the second student, Richard Williams, who is interested in the interaction between value judgements and individual interests.
1.1.4 ‘Deliberating Policy’ Workstream (WS2)
We promised to deliver ‘a radically new model of deliberation’. The need for such a new model originates from an argument formulated along the following lines:
Formal methods in decisions are suspect.
Rules of inference restrict what inputs are legitimate for making a decision.
But in the absence of rules there are no limits to the kinds of information and values which enter into good decisions.
So we need another method, which can still secure objective outputs leading to a new model of deliberation.
After launching the Work Stream in Year 1 (2016) we started thinking of how to build this new model. In particular we focused on three questions:
What building blocks do we need? (a mix of different ingredients well beyond formal rules, e.g. practical reasoning: emotions, cognition, judgement, expertise, group thinking)
How do we combine them? (the construction of credible narratives – in tandem with causal narratives of RS1)
How can we retain objectivity? – through reconceiving objectivity in such a way that it retains a role for practical purposes.
We held four progress meetings at the LSE to monitor thinking on practical reasoning and objectivity for policy and prepared the framework for a workshop on judgement. Some of the work done in the first year was discussed in a number of conferences and workshops, and then materialised in a number of papers:
J. Hardie, ‘Objectivity – What it is for, when we can have it and when we can’t’, CHESS Working Paper No. 2016-01, February 2016
E. Montuschi, ‘Using science, making policy: what should we worry about?’, to appear in European Journal in Philosophy of Science, 7 (1), 2017.
E.Montuschi ‘Scientific Evidence vs. Expert Opinion: A False Alternative?’, to appear in Politeia, special issue ‘Science and Democracy’, XXXIII (126) 2017.
Montuschi and Hardie also finalised the part on deliberation and judgement for the K4U book,Munro, E., Cartwright, N., Hardie, J. and Montuschi, E., Improving Child Safety: deliberation, judgement and empirical research.
As suggested in the project Timeline, Montuschi was among those team members who took part in the 2016 PSA Biennial Meeting in Atlanta USA partly in view of promoting the new project idea of a practical philosophy of science – an idea that, in particular, makes central use of a case study methodology. She talked at a special panel on ‘Expertise, Method and Value’, where she analysed the methodological advantages of including local knowledge in the formulation of expert opinion, finessing the point in the context of a real case of ‘expertise in action’. The topic was also chosen as it proves central to our goal of reconceptualizing the idea of objectivity in practice and in view of figuring out the different types of knowledge that can contribute to the formulation of good decision-making (which is a central pillar of the new model of deliberation that we envisage producing as an outcome of this Work Stream).
In year 2 (2017) we tried to capitalise on work done in year 1 to address issues raised by some of the case studies. Those working on the two K4U work streams joined monthly meetings with case study leaders at the LSE, discussing the implications of views of K4U work on objectivity, expertise, causality and evidence for Case Studies 1, 2 and 3. We read and discussed a number of papers to acquire a cross-cutting terminology for both theory and practice. We encountered difficulties with this. It often appeared unclear what the more practice-oriented work requires from theoretical and conceptual investigation and how theoretically-inclined reflection can profit from applied thinking. Nonetheless, joint brainstorming has been useful in highlighting concomitantly areas in which to concentrate future joint work and contested features which require further work in view of shared resolution.
Richard Williams is primarily researching the role objectivity can and should play within democratic deliberation. Through 2017, Williams focused on James Buchanan’s ‘public choice’ approach towards democratic politics which explicitly addresses the problem of strategic individuals abusing democratic procedures to pursue their own economic interests and how to protect against it. He presented a paper on this, arguing that it is unclear whether an objective common good is a coherent concept, and if it is, whether we should interpret individual voters as impartially pursuing it, at the ‘Information, Epistemic Norms, and Democratic Choice’ workshop in Munich, Germany.
Deliberating Policy (WS2) also intersects with the case studies. For example, around judgement and expertise: in the Mental Health Case Study (Case Study 3) we are exploring the power discrepancy between keyworkers and talking therapists. This was a matter of perceived expertise (keyworkers were highly experienced; talking therapists were highly qualified and also worked in the health sector). Consequently, this reduced the scope for keyworkers to negotiate with the talking therapists.
If the aim of year 5 is to ‘produce research articles exemplifying philosophy of social technology and on K4U’s philosophical lessons on objectivity, evidence and causality’, creating optimal conditions for a dialogue between conceptual inquiry and empirical investigation is mandatory.
1.1.5 Case Study 1: Child Welfare
This Case Study, which focuses on how we can learn the effects of using Signs of Safety as the practice framework in child protection service, is proceeding well. The Department for Education in the UK provided funding for further work with ten local authorities who are implementing the Signs of Safety organizational framework and aiming at creating the feedback loops and organizational culture that enables them to be learning organisations. The staff survey has been modified slightly to include the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire that was developed in aviation and widely used in the health sector. This measures organizational culture on a number of dimensions which are known from research to be associated with higher or lower levels of error and poor practice. This adds to our data about how the practice is being conducted and will be useful when seeking to find patterns in how cases progress.
There has been a lot of work done on quality assurance. The need is to replace a system that focused primarily on recorded data on task completion and timescales with a system that measures not just whether the work was done but also how well it was done. A substantial QA methodology has been created and is now being trialled. The work in Ireland is following a similar path but offers specific learning opportunities. A major challenge was responding to a newly legislated mandatory reporting of suspicions of maltreatment - it is known that in other countries when this legislative change was introduced it triggered a big increase in reports. A methodology for assessing initial reports has been developed and follow-up of the case data will provide some evidence on the accuracy of the criteria being used to judge the seriousness of a report.
1.1.6 Case Study 2: HIV/AIDS Policies
Hakan Seckinelgin has been developing and framing how this Case Study should be undertaken. This involves development of an appropriate conceptual lens by considering various theoretical debates and available conceptual frameworks. The approach requires a multidisciplinary focus. Therefore there has been focus on thinking about deliberation, knowledge and judgement (decision-making) from multiple perspectives. Work on this Case Study has been delayed slightly due to new university duties Seckinelgin has acquired since the original K4U planning, but it is not expected that this delay will impact significantly on the overall project.
1.1.7 Case Study 3: Mental Health
The project design and ethical approval were confirmed and, after some initial delays in agreeing meeting times with the GMCA, most of the data is now collected. 32 hours of audio has been recorded and transcribed, comprising interviews with keyworkers and talking therapists as well as managers and commissioners on the Working Well project. We were able to gain access to a protected group of participants (keyworkers and talking therapists) through negotiation with the GMCA, yielding some extremely useful insights into joint working between health and social care policy areas that would not have otherwise been available.
Data analysis and report writing are on-going. The report will be presented to the GMCA on July 27th 2018. This represents a significant engagement with policy makers and is expected to inform wider health policy, which is becoming increasingly integrated with social care. We also have a great deal of qualitative data in the form of vignettes about single cases on the programme. This will inform at least one paper on single case causation and another paper is planned around objectivity, both to be written between August and December 2018.
Andrew Fletcher and Richard Williams are working together to extract philosophical questions from this Case Study that can be replicated in the other studies.
1.1.8 Case Study 4: Reconfiguring Local Health Economies
Reading and research has been carried out using academic and policy material, as well as video recordings of council committee meetings. Seven individuals have been interviewed, including academics, Directors of Public Health, the head of a local Think Tank and the head of the Socialist Health Association – generating a range of perspectives. We produced a proposal for a Policy Press ‘shorts’ publication. Feedback indicated that this was too Manchester-centric, so the publishing plan has been reframed to make our research more transferrable and more relevant to a wider audience. We hope to advance a new argument about the use of evidence in health service reconfiguration. Two to three further papers are to be written over the next six months: ‘evidence types and policy, a case study of devolved health and public administration’ and a more theoretical paper around evidence as a process rather than an object.
1.1.9 Case Study 5: Occupational Health, Work and Wellbeing
Andrew Fletcher has contributed a section to a paper in progress by Linda McKie and Anni Raw for the journal Social Politics. This will be finished and submitted in July 2018. The paper examines how individuals find their own care solutions when employment policy is inadequate or irrelevant and indicates new approaches to policy design based on this evidence. Two further papers are planned over the next ten months. These will develop the ‘carescapes/caringscapes’ framework, indicating the need for further research with employers to examine and reshape their care policies to achieve better results for both employers and employees, especially women.
1.1.10 Case Study 6: Climate Services
Wendy Parker was on maternity leave from March 2015, returning to full-time employment only in Michaelmas 2016. This delayed work on this Case Study. Preliminary scoping for the study was carried out by Parker during the 2016-17 academic year. During Michaelmas 2017, collaborator Greg Lusk (University of Chicago) visited the K4U team in Durham and joined in research meetings throughout the term. During Lusk’s extended visit, he and Parker further investigated current practices in climate services, identified decision points at which greater attention to user values would be beneficial and began drafting a journal article outlining their findings and argument.
In late December 2017, a proposal for the article was accepted at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), a very prominent venue that reaches many climate services practitioners. Parker and Lusk are currently completing the preparation of the manuscript, This article, tentatively entitled ‘Managing Inductive Risk in Climate Services’, reflects the achievement of the main objective outlined for this Case Study in the Description of the action: “this study explores how the social, economic and ethical
values of users migh
The project is generally on track and the expected results are largely in line with original expectations.