Abstract
It would not be appropriate here to present a full discussion of the role of policy research in modern society. Instead I will content myself with arguing that major changes have come about in the way in which society is organised and that these chanes demand much more systematic evaluation and improvement of policy that we have had in the past. However, it will also be argued that the role to be performed by policy researchers is very different from what most people have, in the past, taken it to be. It is, for example, not so much to answer administrators' questions as to change the questions which get asked and to set particular aspects of policy in the context of a consideration of wider social processes. The objective is as much to evaluate the goals of policy as to evaluate policies. Policy evaluation needs to be concerned with developing alternative ways of thinking about the policy goals and the steps to be taken to reach them. To these ends, policy research needs to be reflective and contexturalised. For this reason, the primary goal of policy evaluation must be to be as comprehensive as possible. This is to be sharply contrasted with the primary goal of academic research --- which is to be accurate and theoretically relevant as possible. For this reason, policy researchers will often find themselves using item statistics to sample a domain of relevant outcomes rather than using 'reliable' scale scores and attempting to "explain" variance in the outcomes. Because of this generally unrecognised difference in objectives and procedure, policy researchers will often find themselves at odds with academics in relation to the perceived value of both proposed projects and their outcomes
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