The primary purpose of this book has been to showcase a wide range of social science methods and how they could make a contribution to policy making. However, throughout the book, we have indicated that the connection between good evidence and policy making is far from automatic. In this concluding chapter, we return to the issues of how to connect social science and policy making.

Revisiting the barriers

There are four key barriers to bridging social science and policy (see Edwards, 2004, 2010; Lomas, 2005, 2007; Evans, 2007) that stand in the way of building meaningful knowledge networks between government and universities:

• 1. disconnection, mistrust and poor understanding between the worlds of ideas/research and action/practice;

• 2. a static view of academic research as a product, and system decisionmaking as an event, versus a dynamic view of both as social processes that need to be linked in ongoing exchange;

• 3. few skills or incentives in universities to do applied research; and

• 4. few skills or incentives in the system to use research.

Crucially, we see the problem as lying both with government and universities. For many decades now, there has been much discussion about how to obtain a better match between the kinds of research that governments want (the demand side) and the kinds of research that researchers undertake (the supply side). Indeed, there appears to be a significant disconnect between the two.

Peter Shergold (former Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in Australia), in launching an Academy of Social Sciences book on Ideas and influence (Saunders and Walter, 2005), referred to the ‘fragility of relationships’ between public policy and the social sciences. He saw ‘[t]he relationships between social science and public policy, and between academic and public servant, are ones of the utmost importance’, but he went on to say that ‘They are not, I think, in particularly good shape’ (cited in Saunders and Walter, 2005: 2). He elaborated little but could have gone on to mention, as others have, that academic research often deals with issues that are not central to policy and management debates, and can fail to take the reality of people's lives into account in setting research questions. Conversely, when research tries to be relevant, it can be seen as being driven by ideology dressed up as intellectual inquiry