‘Good’ evidence for improved policy making: from hierarchies to appropriateness
2013
Within the field of public health, and increasingly across other areas of social policy, there
are widespread calls to increase or improve the use of evidence for policy making. Often
these calls rest on an assumption that improved evidence utilisation will be a more efficient
or effective means of achieving social goals. Yet, a clear elucidation of what can be
considered ‘good evidence’ for policy use is rarely articulated. Many of the current
discussions of best practice in the health policy sector derive from the evidence-based
medicine (EBM) movement, embracing the ‘hierarchy of evidence’ in framing the selection
of evidence – a hierarchy that places experimental trials as preeminent in terms of
methodological quality. However, there are a number of difficulties associated with applying
EBM methods of grading evidence onto policy making. Numerous public health authors
have noted that the hierarchy of evidence is a judgement of quality specifically developed
for measuring intervention effectiveness, and as such it cannot address other important
health policy considerations such as affordability, salience, or public acceptability (Petticrew
and Roberts, 2003).
Social scientists and philosophers of knowledge have illustrated other problems in the direct
application of the hierarchy of evidence to guide policy. Complex or structural interventions
are often not conducive to experimental methods, and as such, a focus on evidence derived
from randomised trials may shift policy attention away from broader structural issues (such
as addressing the social determinants of health (Solar and Irwin, 2007)), to disease
treatment or single element interventions. Social and behavioural interventions also present
external validity problems to experimental methods and meta-analyses, as the mechanisms
by which an intervention works in one social context may be very different or produce
different results elsewhere (Cartwright, 2011). In these cases, policy makers may be better
advised to look for evidence about the mechanism of effect, and evidence of local
contextual features (Pawson et al., 2005).
We argue that rather than adhering to a single hierarchy of evidence to judge what
constitutes ‘good’ evidence for policy, it is more useful to examine evidence through the
lens of appropriateness. It is important to utilise evidence to improve policy outcomes, yet
the form of that evidence should vary depending on the multiple decision criteria at stake.
Policy makers must therefore start by articulating their decision criteria in relation to a given
problem or policy, so that the appropriate forms of evidence can be drawn on – from both
epidemiological and clinical experiments (e.g. for questions of treatment effect), as well as
from social scientific, social epidemiological, and multidisciplinary sources (e.g. for questions
of complex causality, acceptability, human rights, etc.). Following this selection of types of
evidence on the basis of appropriateness, the rigour and quality of the research can be
assessed according to the evidentiary best practice standards of the discipline within which
the evidence was produced. This approach speaks to calls to improve the use of evidence
through ensuring rigour and methodological quality, yet recognises that good evidence is
dictated by specific public health or social policy goals.
Keywords:
- Correction
- Source
- Cite
- Save
- Machine Reading By IdeaReader
0
References
5
Citations
NaN
KQI