Most academics and PhD students receive little training in how to have policy impact. For some the desire for impact is to do good in the world, and for others policy impact is a metric that is important in grant and promotion applications.
To create this mentor's corner page on policy impact, we have interviewed three academic psychologists for their advice. Below we summarise the panel's advice on:
* Starting from the data, how to have policy impact;
* Starting from the debate, how to create and disseminate research for impact;
* Specific advice for early career scholars; and
* Specific advice for senior scholars.
In some cases, we have elaborated the original text to answer questions about what panelists said (and if you've got questions, e-mail [email protected] ; we can answer them ).
Links to the full video interviews for each are below the text.
To create this mentor's corner page on policy impact, we have interviewed three academic psychologists for their advice. Below we summarise the panel's advice on:
* Starting from the data, how to have policy impact;
* Starting from the debate, how to create and disseminate research for impact;
* Specific advice for early career scholars; and
* Specific advice for senior scholars.
In some cases, we have elaborated the original text to answer questions about what panelists said (and if you've got questions, e-mail [email protected] ; we can answer them ).
Links to the full video interviews for each are below the text.
If you think your data have policy implications, what next? 16 tips
Environmental Psychologist Kelly Fielding:
Community and Clinical Psychologist Eleanor Wertheim:
Cross-Cultural Psychologist James Liu:
- Make your findings available. Your data can inform thinking around policies – so make your data available, not in raw form but in a product that non-academics can use like a graph or summary table.
- At the high end of effort, consider a visually-attractive two-pager, or website for dissemination of results. This takes a lot of time and if it’s in the budget, you may benefit from paying for an expert (e.g., graphic designer or marketer) to create a beautiful and clear translation. But the average person can also try. If doing it yourself, be sure to seek out feedback about what end users understand, and additional questions they have. Don’t just circulate a draft that academics have looked at.
- Sometimes it’s impactful to pull out regional data from a larger sample to be relevant to policy-makers in that region so it’s helpful to collect regional demographics if you think your research may have policy implications.
- Go to where policy makers are - not just academic conferences. [Q: Where do you go exactly? A, by Winnifred: Visit their websites, sign up for their mailing lists, and attend policy-makers’ events. Consider emailing or calling to meet with their staff and tell them about your research and learn more about them. Join networks and advocacy groups with established relationships, and seek to tag along and engage.]
- Working with interdisciplinary, industry-focused teams starts you off in a much better place. They may have funding and trained staff for dissemination and translation.
- Once the info about your research starts to get out, make yourself available. Take the time to answer requests from government, industry, consultancy.
Community and Clinical Psychologist Eleanor Wertheim:
- Normally this would be part of an ongoing research program not just one paper. [Q: Why? A, by Winnifred: a finding may be more compelling to policy-makers if it is replicated, for example; lab findings may need field research; field research in another area may need a local replication; or you may need tailored evidence of the $ consequences of problems and solutions. - See below, on how to inform a policy debate.]
- To raise awareness of the research, you can use the university media office to get press releases - you can do radio, tv. You can directly approach local news - they often want to have news content.
- Disseminate your findings at conferences.
- Nowadays one uses Twitter. [Q: How? A, by Winnifred: Follow relevant organisations or policy-makers if they have a page. Tweet about your own research using relevant hashtags and @mentions of policy organisations and advocacy groups.]
- Most importantly, the biggest way to have an impact is through networking – often through organisations that you're part of. Join organisations, advisory boards, professional groups, email lists, relevant conferences. Send your paper to people that you are linked with, so that they will circulate in turn. Get involved in volunteer and advocacy organisations. All of these are more likely to provide ways to share your research through their existing relationships with policy-makers, so that starts you off with more trust, credibility, and access. They will also help you to frame the message in a way that's more persuasive.
- E.g., it helps to put the problem in dollar terms - so having a health economics person or similar say "this problem costs us x$ million per year" can be useful. You need to speak the language of policy-makers.
Cross-Cultural Psychologist James Liu:
- Thinking of the possibility of impact after you’ve done the research is not the best path for impact. [WL: See also, below, How Do You Inform a Policy Debate.]
- It’s best to start with relationships not data. The relationships should be longstanding; having an impact is not a short term process.
- For example, seek to develop relationship with a govt body that could influence policy.
- Know that relationships can also be limiting – you get embedded in their politics and networks, with reputational benefits and costs. Academics also often connect more easily to lefty people far from power. My own school/dept as a whole (50 staff) couldn't agree on stakeholders, for example.
- And you will need to translate the research implications of your data for social policy into the language of money to influence others – might need to articulate cost-benefit perspective, and phrase things in terms of the policies and catch-words of the day to mobilise policy-makers. That is, adopt the language of policy-making to better communicate with them.
- If you just have data you think is important but have no clear vision you could try to go to media - But media content is limited by their dominant frames. Often researchers describing research without a clear policy agenda can end up being presented as an entertaining sound bite vs being translated into something with policy impact. In your media communication, try to make explicit what the problem is, how your research speaks to it, and which policies need to change, in what way.
How do you inform a policy debate? 22 tips
Community and Clinical Psychologist Eleanor Wertheim:
- Educate yourself and find out what's out there - don't reinvent the wheel.
- Do reading in the literature, go to conferences, be aware of what's in the media.
- Think to yourself, what will make a real impact? This is not the same as how to get a great publication or do the most intellectually interesting project – design studies for impact.
- There is a sequence of what is needed: 1) Do research to document the prevalence of a problem that is not on the radar of policy-makers. 2) Do theoretical research to understand what the risk and protective factors are for that problem, and then empirical research to show them playing a role and demonstrate substantial effect sizes. 3) Design interventions and test them -- first in a controlled way in the lab (to show it works), then in applied research in the field at broader scale (to show it will scale up and the difference it makes). So there's a progression – you first need to understand what stage the topic you're interested in has reached.
- Features of research that decrease your impact: Addressing esoteric questions of little relevance. Skipping steps – you need to have shown that there is a problem; document its scale; show the efficacy of your proposed intervention or solution; show it works in the field.
- External validity – you get more leverage with applied / field research, not just lab - but usually there is a progression that works best, where you first do lab and then applied research.
Environmental Psychologist Kelly Fielding:
- You need to talk to people, including people from other disciplines and backgrounds. Few issues are single-discipline issues.
- Turn up to meetings that relate to that issue. When a meeting is called, read the emails, and even when you are an early career researcher or student, turn up. Sometimes nothing comes of it - but in my case, it turned into grants, and a prestigious future fellowship – because of the linkages I built up with govt, universities, partners, and because I started to do cutting-edge, topical research.
- Be really open, willing to listen.
- Decode jargon, and seek to simplify and clarify your own language.
- Being available increases the impact of your research … Creating simple, visual tools to allow people to relate to and comprehend your message. You need to make the research available to people who are not making research their top priority or career.
- Seek to prioritise interaction with policy makers, and inter-disciplinary contacts. It decreases impact if you focus on single disciplinary journals, conferences, audiences … Also collaborative careers boost impact - working only within your own university limits your impact.
Cross-Cultural Psychologist James Liu:
- Form relationships. Invest in an ethical and relationship-focused career from day 1.
- Who is making the decisions for the change you want to see made? Seek to meet the decision-makers and form relationships for the long term. [Q: How? A, by Winnifred: Look at their websites, sign up for their newsletters and emails, follow them on Twitter, and seek to attend their events. Consider calling their offices to arrange a meeting with staff to explain who you are and what your interest is in their policy area, and to learn more about them. Join existing organisations, groups, and networks of academics; this may help you to gain access, credibility, and trust.]
- Be mindful that in govt people swap in and out, so it's hard to have traction. Also there is a discrepancy where ministers will say x, while bureaucrats will do y – it can be hard to understand machinations from the outside. So having someone on the inside who can translate for you and guide you is invaluable – seek informants and allies.
- Sometimes it is easier to influence or shape NGOs because they are more open to outside relationships and more trusting of academics.
- It is also helpful to aim for local successes rather than policy at the national or sector level where the waters are murkier, and your connections to influencers are fewer and not so deep.
- Universities will not necessarily help you to achieve impact - their focus is not policy impact but marketing, media publicity. They will help you to get publicity for your research but they don't have a theoretical lens or as consistent a policy lens as you may have.
- You will need to work flexibly, outside normal channels, instead of bounded by bureaucracy or within normal channels for standard publication. Also working to a faster timescale, with focus being on vivid data for persuasion - human stories. Research provides evidence of need, efficacy, and feedback to improve implementation.
- Standard psychological approach decreases impact of research: Treating your participants as subjects, extracting info and summarising as a dictator, is one-sided - this is unlikely to have impact on your communities, and it creates disconnects. You need to be in the position of helping people to share information, and communicate between different communities and different interest groups.
- Influence is all about connecting, contextualising instead of abstracting. Decontextualised data is a long way from policy. And time frame is immediate, on the fly - not distanced; not laboriously anticipated, conducted, painfully published, but responding to serendipity, opportunistically.
- I struggle with it - the tensions and challenges of seeking to do academic work with policy impact are real and it is not easy. Element of luck!
Specific Advice for Early Career Scholars: 12 tips
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Community and Clinical Psychologist Eleanor Wertheim:
Environmental Psychologist Kelly Fielding:
Cross-Cultural Psychologist James Liu:
Further comments and Q&A [Winnifred Louis]
- Don't imagine you can do it alone - teams are more impactful. Try to find people with like-minded passions.
- Try to find people with an established track record as mentors - Who you choose as mentor is important. Have they a record of making a difference, of disseminating research? Don't just look for publications.
- Think about what difference you want to make in the world - aside from career and reputation, what difference will you make? Plan and aim for this.
- In general, international collaborations are more impactful.
- Join organisations, interest groups, be aware of who is working in the field, and approach them. Think of being in a global network.
- [Winnifred Louis adds: Yes, because often opportunities only open for change in a country for a window or moment, and in an international network it can be easier to spot them.]
- Don’t just look at what you’re interested in. Look at what government and funding bodies and inquiries and policy-makers are interested in – think of how you can find common ground, frame the pitch in terms of what you can bring to them.
Environmental Psychologist Kelly Fielding:
- Turn up, if you get invited to a meeting. Go to the meetings, sit down, be friendly, be open, be excited - show enthusiasm.
- Jump at the chance to work with people from different disciplines and outside of academia.
- Go in with low expectations – outreach increases your chance of impact, but there are no guarantees. Very many of these initiatives go nowhere. Very often a project will not lead to any action. People go radio silent. Behind the scenes in corporations and govt, things are happening that you aren't privy to – so this is demoralising, but normal; it is nothing to do with you. But keep turning up, showing up, reaching out, knowing that this will sometimes lead to opportunities and outcomes.
Cross-Cultural Psychologist James Liu:
- Seek to be part of a team or system. E.g., look for internships – you can't be out there alone.
- Know the context you’re in – get advice from your mentors about how to position your research.
- [Winnifred Louis adds: My mentor told me a good rule of thumb is ‘you have to do both’ – to reduce risks in your academic career, you should have one line of work that is more predictable, mainstream, and published using methods other high status people in your department/ discipline recognise and value, and in journals people recognise and value. Then you can take on policy work, which has uncertain timelines, controversial topics, mixed methods or under-valued methods, and may go to under-valued journals, or be disseminated in totally different formats, like websites or workshops, that others discount or see as ‘unscientific’.]
- Develop pluralistic methods - qualitative and quantitative, etc..
- Understand that you can't control a situation when you are out there in the field – the rigor of the research can be compromised, but this may open you up for insight. Don't be 100% married to natural science ideology or epistemology. If you are a believer in natural science epistemology, it may be better for you to stay in the lab or administer surveys and do discovery / basic research. In the field, you have to be flexible, be responsive to community needs and respond to what happens in the field. Community-engaged and policy-relevant research rarely goes as you planned. It’s a great adventure that keeps you growing as a person.
Further comments and Q&A [Winnifred Louis]
- Change on important issues unfolds at a slow pace. There will be lots of disappointment and fatigue along the way, so it is important to think about how to sustain your motivation. Some useful methods include working in teams, setting realistic expectations, having a long-term focus, sharing social support with like-minded people, having a growth mindset where you focus on learning and progress not outcomes alone, and having a values mindset where your focus is on how you can do what you can to enact your values with the opportunities that are available, recognising with humility that there are many factors that you do not control.
- Search for impact can bring you into contact with difficult personalities, and into arenas of passionate, bitter conflict between parties with different interests and values. There is no easy solution to this, but you can seek to become self-reflective about your own interests and values, and to skill up on conflict and change for individuals, groups, and societies. Here are some tips on conflict from Psychology Today and some principles and strategies for social change recommended by Martin Luther King to start off.
Specific Advice for Senior Scholars: 23 tips
Community and Clinical Psychologist Eleanor Wertheim:
Environmental Psychologist Kelly Fielding:
Cross-Cultural Psychologist James Liu:
Further comments:
- Ask yourself how you want to make a difference: what exactly needs to change?
[WL adds: Consider writing down your goals and steps along the pathway to change and revisiting these regularly to stay on track or adjust course.]
- Approach the existing groups, network to meet people who are advocating or making decisions in the area. Use your prestige to help those groups and provide leverage for them.
- Build skills to be in the media – go to training offered by universities, search online. Start getting out there to give a voice to the concerns that you have.
[Q: More on media skills? A, by Winnifred + Robin Banks: There are many online resources. Media training in Australia is also available at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre: www.piac.org.au. They run other useful training on working across sectors … and developing change programs. A few tips to start: Know what your key points are and repeat them clearly and forcefully. Make your take-home messages explicit. Ask print and online journalists to send a copy of their draft before it is published so you can clarify and avoid errors. Ask for a copy of the questions before live interviews. Use human stories, not just stats.]
- Sentences need to get shorter and simpler, jargon needs to be replaced with clear language.
- Workshop the pitch of your policy message with the same intelligence as a grant application so you understand what each audience understands and welcomes, and use simple clear language to make a point they understand and are convinced by. Fine tune your pitches to different audiences as you learn what they respond to.
- Don't be afraid of mistakes – in the media, either you will get across or they will forget you. Keep repeating your key messages, or the name of your book. Refine as you go. Don't be afraid of not being expert - who does know more than you? You are as well placed as any to communicate key messages on this point.
- In my case, a team of us developed a framework for cooperative conflict resolution, which we then disseminated widely in education and government contexts. We were also interested in international reach. One of the team, Connie Peck, approached Gareth Evans, then foreign affairs minister, with a series of proposals, first to conduct research at the UN and then to provide training in peace-making and preventive diplomacy for UN staff and diplomats from around the world. We asked, who do we think are the key people to influence? How do we make a difference in the whole zeitgeist or culture? It is not just through our own research but also by teaching and translating others' work into education programs.
- In the same vein, in the UN project we created a book documenting principles, history, process which further promoted ideas and programs. In Psychologists for Peace, we created tip sheets, posters, advice on how to talk about these issues. These were promoted in print and online. So beyond the initial project, use creative, powerful resources to spread the ideas and tools.
- Reach out beyond the usual funding bodies; you will find non-mainstream projects and contacts. Directly approach philanthropic funders with an idea for dissemination or impact, so that you can develop a proposal. For the book about our peacemaking training we received funding from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Norway, which resulted in the book being disseminated widely in the UN and around the world. Mentors will help you to pick people to approach and to craft messages.
- Start small. Use initial funds (e.g., $10k) as leverage for matching funds or to show a track record. Use networking to build endorsement of person A, who then persuades person B.
- It also helps to put the problem in dollar terms - having a health economics person or similar say "this problem costs us x$ million per year" can be useful.
Environmental Psychologist Kelly Fielding:
- Make time for it, make it a priority.
- Don't shy away from taking on PhD students aiming for industry and government - respect and mentor this career path.
- Create interdisciplinary connections.
[Winnifred Louis adds: E.g., Kelly founded NESS, the Network of Environmental Social Scientists: http://www.nessaustralia.org/about-ness/ - which draws people together across disciplines, across industry and government, with cool events on envt communication.] - Collaborate - get a group of collaborators for your policy work, with shared passions.
- Fold in PhD students for their energy, for their technology skills.... Mentor this.
- Understand what is topical. E.g., Create a forum : Pick contemporary, attention-grabbing topic that people will relate to as extremely important. Consider off campus venue close to policy makers - e.g., in city, close to parliament. Line up great speakers from collaborators' networks. Publicise event across multiple networks incl interdisciplinary and policy.
- Accept to be on expert panels, working parties, advisory groups - gives insights into organisations and allows input. Need to make the time and prioritise it.
- Develop ecosystem of connections, influence pathways. There is not just one path.
Cross-Cultural Psychologist James Liu:
- There are two main pathways, or power bases at a senior level - 1 is broadcasting via mass media, 2nd = inter-connections, networks.
- Using the mass media pathway, you can advocate on a particular issue, but it does need skills. The university may be helpful - workshops, etc..
- Taking the networks path is different and may be more impactful. It creates a mutuality of responsibility and obligation, by forming ethical relationships with community groups and policy-makers.
E.g., after having run a Centre or School, you may form connections with a board of advisors or particular set of stakeholders oriented to areas of academic influence. - But it is not easy to have a coherent policy agenda for large teams of academics – they are too diverse, and also many will resist different way of thinking – being outside the box is uncomfortable for many academics.
Further comments:
- There is cool work by MSEI (Melbourne Social Equity Institute) on mentoring research in community organisations, with their community fellows program: https://socialequity.unimelb.edu.au/community-fellows-program
- A principle of greater impact is to co-design research with community groups and stake-holders: https://socialequity.unimelb.edu.au/programs/community-engaged-research
The Advice in Full:
Interviews with three psychologists
Kelly Fielding, University of Queensland
Kelly Fielding's research in environmental psychology has seen her work across disciplines and in collaboration with industry and policy for twenty years. Her thoughts on policy impact are online here.
Eleanor Wertheim, La Trobe University
Eleanor Wertheim has worked to promote stronger relationships and better conflict management and negotiation in the psychology of close relationships, as well as in schools and with the United Nations. Her thoughts on policy impact are online here.
James Liu, Massey University
James Liu has worked in cross-cultural social psychology for nearly forty years. His thoughts on policy impact are online here. There is also an interesting paper elaborating on his ideas, with Veronica Hopner, online here.
Thank you to Emily Westwood for helping to develop this page for the lab!