These are my first weeknotes for a fortnight as I’ve had a short break. To get my momentum back up, I’ll keep this week’s write-up short, leaving out the reading I’ve been doing until later weeknotes.
Before I took the break, I had been reading impact summaries in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). A few of these, which were all on a very similar topic, had stood out for me and I spent several days of my break wondering if I should focus solely on this topic area. It felt intriguing but somewhat risky to narrow my scope so much.
Then, at the end of my break, I had a fabulous chat with Aaron Thierry about his work considering the impact of emotion in climate communication and he suggested some very useful pointers for where my work was heading. I recalled my very first explorations on this thesis in which I’d realised how I wanted my study to also go a little beyond the rationalism of science and policy. I had been searching for a topic in which I could understand how scientists had been “successful”1 in influencing policy. But I was missing out a vital introductory step - to discover, for better for for worse, what that experience at the science-policy interface is for scientists. If my research were a conversation, I’d missed out the “hi, how are you?” part.
Having started wide (the science-policy gap), I had narrowed and narrowed my scope. This last and final (I believe and hope) shift has widened my scope slightly to allow for all experiences, influential or otherwise, to be considered.
I have since spent a more time with the 2021 REF and a little time with the 2014 REF (which is a somewhat different beast) and identified some interesting case studies that I’m keen to learn more about the scientists’ experiences. I am looking elsewhere for case studies too. The assumption with the REF is that the interaction with the policy arena was “successful”, it certainly appears that way (that’s the point of these impact summaries). But I’m also taking the view that impact changes over time and thus these case studies can be used to understand different aspects of the experience of scientists.
With all this in mind, I have submitted my application for ethics and GDPR clearance and started drafting my interview questions. This last effort is rather difficult. Just about everything I’ve written here is in theory. I need to unspin some of the case studies to consider if my assumptions and hypotheses, and thus interview questions, make sense in each context. Probably, I won’t really find this out until I start interviewing for real.
the meaning of “success” was - and remains - to be defined ↩
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