Methodological Issues in Working with Policy-Advisers and Practitioners

Abstract

Abstract: This chapter considers what policy advisers and practitio-ners arguably need from researchers, and what they can reasonably expect. It goes on to discuss the implications of these needs and expec-tations for the methodologies used in research. But we begin with some definitions — what we mean by policy adviser, practitioner and researcher in this context, and why they need definition. DEFINING TERMS It may seem odd to begin a chapter with the definition of such ba-sic terms as policy adviser, practitioner and researcher, but there are some specific characteristics of these individuals that are central to their expectations and their capabilities and it is, therefore, worth spelling these out. This is particularly true in the context of crime prevention, where the assumptions and beliefs of the general public form the backdrop against which policy makers and practitioners operate (Tilley and Laycock, 2000). They would not be performing their jobs properly if they were to ignore the public view. The same is far less true of the researcher, who, in theory at least, should be try-ing to acquire knowledge independently of the public's views. So let us begin with the "policy adviser. " In the United Kingdom we are talking about senior civil servants, in the United States of America, political advisers at federal, state or even local levels whose responsibility it is to advise the governors and legislators about crime Crime Prevention Studies, volume 13, pp. 205-237.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.