Social Science Space

What’s Wrong with WeChat? The Problem with Social Media Censorship

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 19:11:32 GMT

WeChat is a Chinese social media app that, until recently, was probably not widely known in the Western world. This changed with a decision of the US government to prohibit its hosting, distribution and maintenance, as well as its use for financial transactions, alongside the more widely known TikTok. This decision has had significant implications for many Chinese people living in the United States.

So what is WeChat, and what does it do? In short, WeChat is Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, and many public services all rolled into one. Published by the giant Chinese media corporation Tencent, WeChat plays a central role in social life in China as well as among overseas Chinese people. Within China, the app has accrued functions that reach far beyond Western social media, such as Facebook, Instragram, and so forth. It serves as a platform for instant communication, voice and video calls, photo sharing, blog posts and discussion fora, takeaway and taxi orders, and so on. At the same time, it can be used to pay taxes, settle your utility bills, transfer money and make payments, engage with a range of public services, and identify yourself vis-à-vis a range of public officials. It is only rivalled by Alibaba Group’s equally ubiquitous app Zhifubao (支付宝), known in English as Alipay. For overseas Chinese and Chinese Americans, it may be a crucial communication tool to stay in touch with friends and family, and to send and receive money. There is an international version of WeChat, but its use recently seems to have become severely restricted, requiring a Chinese mobile number or sponsorship of one’s account by a Chinese user.

In any case, the sudden threat to its services in the US is likely to have severe effects for WeChat’s users, and it has been criticized as an expression of racism on the part of the Trump administration and an undue targeting of the Chinese American community. At the time of writing, the ban has been successfully challenged in US courts, in response to concerns about infringements of free speech that may result from the prohibition of a major online communications platform. (The same has been the case for TikTok, as a ruling Sunday illustrates.)

However, the US government justifies the ban with the threats WeChat allegedly poses to national security:

“While the threats posed by WeChat and TikTok are not identical, they are similar. Each collects vast swaths of data from users, including network activity, location data, and browsing and search histories. Each is an active participant in China’s civil-military fusion and is subject to mandatory cooperation with the intelligence services of the CCP. This combination results in the use of WeChat and TikTok creating unacceptable risks to our national security.”

Critics of WeChat have likewise argued that the app serves as a propaganda and surveillance tool that targets both its Chinese and its international users and extends repression to Chinese dissidents overseas (1, 2, 3).

These arguments require careful disentangling. Beyond the obvious racism of the Trump administration’s anti-Chinese rhetoric throughout the present year (1, 2, 3), it is important to critically interrogate the roles which WeChat may play in the political project of the Chinese Communist Party. At the same time, as Wanning Sun has rightly pointed out in The Conversation, it is essential not to overlook the diversity of the app’s users at the international level and the heterogeneity of the discourses that may flow through it.

WeChat primarily operates as a smartphone app. There is a desktop client, but its functions are limited in comparison to the software’s smartphone version. The identity of smartphone users in China is registered upon the purchase of a SIM card, and to set up a new WeChat account, it is likewise necessary that users identify themselves. This has two important consequences. On the one hand, in the absence of robust privacy protections in China, WeChat’s users become enmeshed in what Shoshana Zuboff has termed ‘surveillance capitalism’, as users’ data are systematically collected and appropriated by a range of public and private commercial actors in the pursuit of profit.

Just as much as the actions of social media corporations such as Facebook have provoked concern elsewhere, the collection of big data and citizens’ rights to privacy have become an issue of concern in China. From this perspective, there seems to be no particularly strong rationale for singling out WeChat for a ban in the USA, as it is only one element of the global challenge posed by surveillance capitalism.

On the other hand, though, WeChat forms part of what might be termed the ‘China bubble’. Totalitarianism works best when its operations are invisible, and when the norms, values, and beliefs that sustain totalitarian rule are internalised, as fully as possible, by its subjects. This is where the problem lies. WeChat is closely monitored by the Chinese authorities, and censorship operates by way of bans on certain topics, keywords, and so forth. Alongside such censorship, the close surveillance of its users has entailed direct repression (1, 2). In this sense, Wanning Sun’s argument that WeChat “censorship […] did not amount to direct intervention of the platform or control of its content by the Chinese Communist Party” and that its users in Australia use the platform to engage in civic debate and action seems misleading. It is possible to articulate diverse opinions and political positions on WeChat only as long as these do not contradict the positions of the Chinese Communist Party or the interests of China’s political leaders. The consequences of this pattern became readily apparent during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, when censorship allowed the virus to spread and whistle-blowers found themselves punished for publicly discussing it (1, 2). Free speech this is not.

WeChat therefore confines public debate to topics, arguments, ideas, and facts that China’s rulers regard as permissible. It operates within an online ecosphere which, through the systematic censorship of non-Chinese spaces, has become largely self-enclosed. Within this ‘China bubble’, diverse views and opinions circulate in detachment from the international media environments, allowing the Chinese Communist Party to mould, by censorship and manipulation, the ways in which people think and feel about the social world. This social engineering of modes of everyday experience and public attitudes is most intense in China. The promotion of aggressive forms of nationalism in media spaces in China is one obvious recent examples here (1, 2). At the same time, WeChat, as an indispensable feature of everyday life for many overseas Chinese, extends the reach of such social engineering to the international level. In making WeChat an omnipresent feature of life in the People’s Republic of China, Tencent have created a digital dystopia.

And yet, it appears doubtful whether WeChat should be banned in response. Politically, the ban seems unwise. It is unlikely that censorship in response to censorship will convince many of WeChat’s users of the dangers of the Chinese Communist Party’s politics. More importantly still, there are obvious and strong concerns about the rights of WeChat’s many users around the World, as communication among families and friends is cut, digital communities are separated, and long-distance social and economic ties are severed. In order to counteract the global extension of the CCP’s totalitarian project, less heavy-handed and authoritarian measures will be needed.

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The Case For Democracy In The Covid 19 Pandemic

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 09:00:53 GMT

South Korea and Sweden were among the few places where political leaders struck out on an independent course.

This book, written between March and May, during ‘lockdown’ in the UK, is a spontaneous analysis of a disturbing global drama that continues to disrupt normal standards of science, public health, human rights and medical ethics in ways few people thought possible at the start of 2020.

For weeks, in the initial stages of the pandemic, governments took advice almost exclusively from like-minded epidemiologists and public health doctors. This small collection of establishment people simply disregarded entirely predictable negative impacts on so many other aspects of social life.

There was no attempt at democratic consultation, and the assumption that we live in accountable democracies, with unalienable rights, was erased with Orwellian disdain. It quickly became clear that it is impossible for citizens to challenge governments. The cherished notion of informed consent to health measures has been replaced by a slew of hastily drafted legislation which has made previously normal, innocent actions criminal offences.

The Case for Democracy includes many examples of the failure of decision-makers to understand the meaning of evidence, to balance risks of disease with multiple other risks, and to follow the advice of their own professional bodies about what to do if there is a pandemic.

However, cataloguing unfounded decision-making is not the main purpose of the book. After all, any competent person with internet access and a little determination can discover the deluge of errors, unethical laws and false reasoning for him or herself. Rather the book tries first to understand how apparently sane people could possibly think it made sense to implement such massively damaging policies, and secondly asks how we, the public, might ensure that such a disastrous episode can never happen again.

My explanation is simple: the ‘experts’ are subject to biases and errors of thought well-known to every first-year psychology student, yet none of them seem to realise it. The text-book examples of mistaken thinking include: ‘social amplification’ where new risks are falsely perceived as worse than existing dangers; ‘attentional bias’ where only very specific things are noticed while other relevant matters are ignored; and ‘confirmation bias’ in which only information that strengthens one’s prior view is valued – making it extremely difficult to assess alternatives fairly, and even harder to admit when you are wrong.

‘Group think’ amongst politicians has been ubiquitous. Apart from Sweden and South Korea, politicians right, left and centre have rushed either to copy or outdo each other, without seeming to question the sense of this. The ‘Dunning-Kruger Effect’, in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their competence while feeling superior to others has been equally widespread.

In the book, I use the notion of ‘rational field blindness’ to illuminate these elementary mistakes. Rational fields do involve evidence, logic, and science, but these factors are always selected and interpreted according to values, human instincts, linguistic classifications, and the physical and social environment. When policymakers are blind to this, their reasoning, choices, and actions inevitably become dangerously skewed and short-sighted.

These factors underpin the book’s argument for inclusive, participatory democracy: if the chief problem has been an unduly limited number of options for action, an obvious alternative is to broaden decision-making processes to include diverse voices, knowledge, values, experiences and cultures – as a practical, effective way to arrive at well-informed consensus.

The Case for Democracy is published by SAGE Publishing, which is the parent of Social Science Space.

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Is Assessment Fair: Finding a Language to Understand and Evaluate the Issues

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 09:00:00 GMT

Ofqual — the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation — did not have a pleasant August.

In January this year, with great sighs of relief, we submitted our final manuscript to SAGE. Entitled “Is assessment fair?” it examines what is meant by fairness in educational assessment, considers examples from this country and overseas and makes recommendations for the future. The book was written before the COVID-19 pandemic (with its tumultuous impact on education), but its subject matter has been set ablaze by the row this summer about the awarding of grades for A levels, GCSEs and equivalent qualifications when it was not possible for students to sit actual exams. The approach initially taken in all the countries of the UK, involving grades calculated using statistical information, was howled down as ‘unfair’. A scathing email to one of us from an academic colleague ended, “Fair assessment by algorithm? I don’t think so.” So, were the critics right? Was the approach originally proposed this summer unfair? And was the action eventually taken – awarding grades assessed by schools and colleges – any fairer?

We believe that our book will help provide a conceptual framework and a language for understanding and addressing such questions.

The first response may be obvious, but is no less important for that: it depends what you mean by “fair”. In our book we distinguish several senses of “fair” that are all potentially relevant to assessment. One of these is relational fairness – treating (relevantly) like cases alike. Most (if not all) assessments involve some kind of ‘discrimination’, meaning distinguishing between levels of achievement or between candidates who perform differently in relevant respects. The discrimination is fair if it is based on relevant considerations and unfair if it is based on something else, such as the candidate’s race or gender. Whilst no-one expects every exam candidate to get the same mark, we would think it was unfair if students from some schools, boys/girls, or students from particular ethnic backgrounds were marked more strictly/generously than others. We expect the same criteria to be applied to all candidates.

Another form of relational fairness is the expectation that the standards used for marking exams will remain stable over time. This concern, which is written into Ofqual’s statutory objectives, does seem relevant to fairness, at least over a limited period of years – if my son is competing for a scarce university place with someone whose exam was marked more generously a year later, then that might be unfair.

Isabel Nisbet, left, and Stuart Shaw

But that is not the only relevant meaning of “fair” – another is that a fair outcome is deserved. In the book we consider discussions of fairness by philosophers, going back as far as Aristotle. These largely derive from fundamental notions of some kind of equality (relational fairness) and desert. We tend to think of desert at an individual level – it is fair for a student to get the grade that his or her work deserves. Where that doesn’t happen for any reason, that seems unfair. This concern lies behind many of the distressing personal accounts which we heard when students received their results this summer. Linked to the importance of desert is the sense of “fair” in which a fair outcome is what those affected can legitimately expect.

A second response – perhaps just as obvious but also highly relevant – is that something can be fair in some respects and unfair in others. Traditional exams are often thought of – perhaps uncritically – as a paradigm of fairness, but there are unfairnesses in using them as s as a source – let alone the only source – of evidence for assessment.

Relational fairness can be judged at different levels. An exam in which economically disadvantaged students have poorer outcomes than those of their richer contemporaries may be technically fair in many senses – for example, it may have been scrutinised to avoid bias in the test questions – but the outcomes may be unfair at a higher level, because they reflect unjust inequalities in society. Some of the inequalities observed in the results this year may reflect those factors rather than the statistical model used.

Also, some aspects of fairness may be judged to be more important than others. And that judgement may differ in different circumstances. For example, it could be argued that although the maintenance of standards over time is one kind of fairness – and in normal times it helps to sustain confidence in the system – given the abnormality of this year, it was not as important as attempting to give each individual student the grades they deserved. Once the decision had been taken that the exams could not go ahead in the summer, the problem was how to enable students to get the grades they deserved in the absence of exam-based evidence about each individual, while maintaining relational fairness as much as possible.

So, was the approach proposed this summer fair? In our view it was an attempt to use statistics to help achieve relational fairness between as many candidates as possible. Statistical information has for many years been taken into account in marking exams, but it carried greater weight this year. Much analysis took place of alternative models to try to achieve that and there were voluminous consultations at various stages. In the event, there was a lot of criticism of the calculated grades for favouring some kinds of centre and disadvantaging others. But these criticisms may also apply to the centre-assessed grades – possibly more so?

No statistical model could guarantee to give each individual student the grade they deserved. That was recognised at the time, and the main means of remedying individual unfairnesses that the statistical analysis could not capture was to be the appeals process. However, even if the eventual outcome is fair, should a student not have a legitimate expectation of receiving a grade that is as fair as possible, without having to go through the emotional turmoil of huge disappointment and lodging an appeal? There needed to be some way of balancing individual desert with systemic fairness. The approach proposed – using statistics for systemic fairness and picking up individual unfairnesses through appeals – was placing a burden on the appeals process that could not be sustained.

There is no silver bullet to guarantee fair assessment for all candidates in normal times, let alone now. We hope that our book will help to provide a language for understanding and evaluating assessment issues relating to fairness. That vocabulary should support the debate that is needed and which should be public and inclusive, not held behind closed doors. In the book we advocate a “situated” view of assessment – considering assessments in the broader context in which they are taken, rather than isolating them from their context and just getting them technically right. In the academic year that is starting now, when many students will have missed months of learning and society is still coping with a totemic crisis, the moral judgement required may be that relational fairness between candidates – and maintenance of standards over time – are less important than providing the best quality of evidence (whatever the precise nature of that evidence) to enable students to progress in their lives and in their education. That may mean more inconsistency in outcomes than is usually deemed acceptable. It should also require a more humane way for individuals who are not typical of their school or of any category in which they are analysed to produce evidence to show what they can really do.

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Will the 2020 Census Be the Last of Its Kind?

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 21:24:46 GMT

(Photo: U.S. Census Bureau)

Could the 2020 iteration of the United States Census, the constitutionally mandated count of everyone present in the nation, be the last of its kind? Former census director Ken Prewitt, currently president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and Carnegie Professor of Social Affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, asked that question during his keynote at the Data Science for the Public Good Annual Symposium last month.

With a California-based federal appeals court just today ordering the Census Bureau to continue its counting a month beyond the cut-off announced by the Trump Administration, you might think Prewitt focused on current threats to the institution. Instead, he looked at opportunities. Prewitt offered a deeper dive into what the Census could evolve into, with technological advancement and a deluge of data from other sources that aren’t competitive but collaborative mattering more than the current kerfuffles.

Prewitt didn’t deny the issues of 2020, which he has seen subject to more political influence – more “messing around” with an inherently apolitical production process — than any in U.S. history. “The only thing that comes close is 1920,” he said, and that census’s results were rejected by Congress. Should this census not achieve the quality of past ones, he argued, “I would argue very strongly to continue to use the 2010 Census.”

In addition to its steady longitudinal data of such value to social science, an estimated $1.5 trillion is at stake in census-based federal spending, while the redistricting of legislatures is based on census data, so the U.S. Census is fundamentally important to the country. And so how the census comes together also matters.

Kenneth Prewitt

Prewitt outlined three different models the United States has used to conduct the Census. The first, and archetypal model, centers on the idea of the enumerator as a physical person who contacts people directly. And indeed, for the first 17 censuses, Prewitt explained, this “basic knock-on-the-door model” was the standard, starting in 1790 when federal marshals asked three questions.

In 1960, the Census Bureau experimented with mailing people a census form, but then having an enumerator physically show up and pick up the completed form. That worked well enough that by 1970 the bureau went entirely to mail-out. It was, said Prewitt, “quicker, cheaper and generally more accurate.” An enumerator went to the door only in cases where there was a non-response.

This postal process, Prewitt’s model 2, saw response fall off, with each count being roughly 10 percent lower than the previous one. By 1990, he explained, “there was a lot of anxiety in the Census Bureau and in particular in the Congress” as cost rose and participation fell. With a predicted 55 percent response, a panicky Congress told the bureau it needed a new model for the new millennium.

“And so in 2000 mail-out got a facelift – and I mean that literally,” Prewitt said. It spent $165 million on paid advertising and created partnership with what were considered “trusted voices.” This meant the face of the Census was no longer the enumerator but a local person or organization with credibility, although there was an effort to show Census personnel in an almost heroic light. Prewitt, who was director at this point, recalled being filmed on a bobsled in Alaska to count the first person that year. It was, he added, such a media success that something in that vein is now standard part of the count’s media rollout.

The confederation with outside parties also meant that there was now a volunteer force “loosely managed” by the Census Bureau. Meanwhile, the year 2000 also saw, for the first time, corporate, advocacy, foundation and local government money being spent to ensure participation. These parties have their own interests, and while the Census Bureau aims to be agnostic on the red state/blue state divide, “the public cannot distinguish between what the bureau is doing and what all these quasi-independent actors are doing all under the banner of ‘The Census’,” Prewitt lamented, adding that local promotion (or non-promotion) can bias census results and complicate the bureau’s basic fairness principles.

Nonetheless, if a measure of model 3’s success was in stopping the fall, then 2000 was a success at 66 percent self-response, Prewitt said, with subsequent improvements in 2010 and yes, even in this census. However, looking at in a different light, more effort has only managed to hold the line on the self-response rate. “More dollars and more effort just to stand in place,” as Prewitt termed it, adding that model 3 will always have a non-response problem – “a structural weakness at heart of the model” — which will require an heroic effort to redress.

Prewitt offers a heroic solution.

He suggests “a 21st century information model” that is tasked more with data curation than with data collection. “The country is swimming in information,” he said. “It’s not like there isn’t data around.”

For a start, there’s already troves of federal administrative data that can give a baseline of would be considered “essential data,” the traditional stuff of where everyone is on April 1 of a year ending in 0. The Bureau’s annual American Community Survey, which takes place every year, could be enlarged and other sources of administrative and so-called “register” data could be enlarged.

Secondly, better linkage to federal statistics would give those figures more value for money already spent; “much of the value of this data is wasted by remaining in silos rather than being shared.”

While Prewitt’s case is prescriptive, it’s not speculative – to an extent, it’s already happening. The Household Pulse Survey, in which seven agencies are working together under the aegis of the Census Bureau to gather a much richer – and much quicker — data set than the decennial census alone would provide. The survey was sparked by the need for breaking news on COVID-19, and so was “designed to be a short-turnaround instrument that provides valuable data to aid in the pandemic recovery” with information about employment status, food security, housing, physical and mental health, access to health care, and educational disruption being gathered.

Prewitt also touched on the possibility of including data from private industry, such as social media, in a new census mosaic. The Dutch, he noted, have already started down this route of augmenting government data with commercial data.

This model of corralling federal statistics (and more) under one roof leads Prewitt to call for Department of Data Curation, since even just the existing firehoses of information would overwhelm existing structure and make it nigh impossible to routinely judge the quality of the data arriving daily. Integral to the department, he said, would be social scientists who would both fuel the enterprise and be its investigators.

More so than the mechanics, though, Prewitt feels public acceptance of this new curation effort is important. “If people feel government is making new surveillance state, we’re finished,” he predicted. “It won’t work unless American people trust it,” adding that it’s his belief that mistrust of government underlies the nettlesome and persistent non-response rate of the census.

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Call for Abstracts: Information-Communication Technology and Social Science

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 21:00:00 GMT

Social science and humanities researchers should be awakened to the huge possibilities and avenues for research based on information-communication technology or ICT. The future of science is about multidisciplinary collaboration and applying new technologies. ICT tools for SSH researchers already exist, such as research-oriented social networking sites and tools to support scientific research, to manage labs and data, and to enable better communication. These tools could change the way SSH researchers carry out research, collaborate, disseminate and evaluate research outputs.

The International Conference on Information-communication technologies enhanced Social Sciences and Humanities (ICTeSSH) is a three-day annual conference (https://ictessh.uns.ac.rs/), scheduled for Jun 28-31, 2021, that aims to bring together leading SSH researchers, computer scientists, informaticians, publishers, librarians, vendors of research ICT tools, SSH decision makers and others, to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects of ICT enhanced Social Sciences and Humanities. In addition, the conference aims to discuss promising new ideas and identify new potential collaborators.

It follows on the successful first ICTeSSH conference organized this June, which shifted from an in-person to a virtual conference. ICTeSSH 20201 will be virtual, and will also be free to attend. It is also free to present and publish at ICTeSSH 2021, meaning there is no registration fee nor publishing fee for authors/presenters.

You can find more details about the call at https://ictessh.uns.ac.rs/call-for-papers/. The deadline for submission of extended abstract is December 1st, 2020.

Important Dates

Dates of the conference: June 28th – 30th, 2021
Deadline for abstract submission: December 1st, 2020
Notification of acceptance: January 31st, 2021
Deadline for workshop/training proposal submission: January 15th, 2021
Registration: May 31st, 2021

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Advancing Research Impact in Society: Broader Impacts 101

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 19:08:40 GMT

Would you like a deeper understanding of NSF’s Broader Impacts (BI) criterion? Would you like tips and strategies for addressing the BI criterion in more compelling (and, hopefully, more fundable) ways?

The NSF-funded Center for Advancing Research Impact in Society (ARIS) is the national leader in supporting BI professionals and providing BI training for researchers and grantwriters. Our “BI 101” workshop has helped thousands of people make sense of the BI criterion and empowered them to approach their grantwriting with more clarity and confidence, and we are now offering this time-tested workshop as a 2-hour webinar.

This activity-based workshop will cover the history of the BI criterion, provide strategies for conceptualizing, developing, implementing and evaluating BI activities, and share tips on leveraging existing resources and establishing robust partnerships to build your “BI identity.”

BI 101 is offered monthly via live webinars using Zoom. Future sessions are:

Wednesday, Oct. 1, 12-2 p.m. CT
Wednesday, Nov. 4, 1-3 p.m. CT

Thursday, Dec. 3, 2-4 p.m. CT

For more details and to register, visit their website.

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Participants Sought for Colorism in Academia Survey

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 17:16:59 GMT

(Image: PinClipArt.com)

Colorism, also called skin tone bias, is discrimination based on the shade of an individual’s skin tone, typically favoring lighter complexions, within or outside of the same racial group.

Aimee Haynes, a Ph.D. candidate at Florida’s Nova Southeastern University, is conducting research on colorism experiences among non-White women leaders in higher education careers. She’s asking readers of Social Science Space who fit certain criteria to fill out her anonymous online survey by September 30.

For this study, potential participants should identify as a minority/person of color/non-Caucasian female and currently, or previously have held, a managerial/leadership position in higher education. Participants may be of any age.

For purposes of the survey, a managerial role may include, but is not limited to, team or course lead, supervisor, manager, department chair, chief academic officer, any level of deanship or directorship, governing board member, president, vice president, etc.

Participants can expect to spend 10-15 minutes completing the survey regarding their thoughts, personal experiences, and perceived impact of skin tone bias in the higher education industry. Participants only need a PC or cellphone with internet service and some time.

Haynes’ “Colorism in Academia” online survey can be reached here: https://is.gd/ColorisminAcademiaSurvey Submissions are sought by September 30.

Haynes has said her findings will inform research on workplace conflict, inclusion, diversity, and social justice in higher education.

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Scientists’ Data is Here to Make an Impact

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 16:54:13 GMT

The big idea

Scientists don’t take time away from their research to share their expertise with journalists, policymakers and everyone else just to let us know about neat scientific facts.

They share findings from their research because they want leaders and the public to use their hard-won insights to make evidence-based decisions about policy and personal issues. That’s according to two surveys of Canadian and American researchers my colleagues and I conducted.

Scientists from both countries reported “ensuring that policymakers use scientific evidence” is at the top of their list of communication goals. Helping their fellow citizens make better personal decisions also scores high. Further, scientists say they’re not communicating just to burnish their own reputation.

Why it matters

In just one recent week, American President Donald Trump said top health scientists were making “a mistake” about the value of masks in slowing COVID-19 transmission and that he doesn’t “think science knows” whether climate change is part of the reason the American West is beset by wildfires this summer.

The scientific community has come to expect this sort of historically unusual disregard for scientific advice from the current administration. But our new study underscores that scientists prioritize sharing their research so it can have an impact in the real world. They aren’t satisfied just producing knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but rather want it to inform such matters as pandemic response and wildfire management.

We know from other interviews and surveys that many scientists will often initially indicate that their communication “goal” is simply to increase knowledge or correct misinformation. However, if prodded by questions like “But why do you want to increase knowledge?” or “What do you hope will happen if you correct misinformation?” they will often identify their ultimate aim as helping people make better decisions.

Highly trained scientists seem especially willing to share what they’ve learned if they think it can help society make smarter choices. For example, forest scientists I’ve worked with in New England want to help land managers and policymakers find ways to protect Northeastern forests from urban sprawl and other threats. There also appears to be broad demand among scientists of all types to take part in policy fellowships that help them connect with policymakers on issues like managing health and environmental risks.

Science isn’t infallible, but the premise of scientific research is that it’s among the best available ways of trying to understand a complicated world. Years of survey research also show that Americans have more confidence in scientists than in most other groups in society and want scientists to be involved in a range of different types of decision-making.

This article by John C. Besley originally appeared on The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title “Scientists don’t share their findings for fun – they want their research to make a difference”

What still isn’t known

Our surveys didn’t ask about every possible goal. For example, we did not ask scientists about how much they aim to push policymakers to adopt specific laws or regulations. We also didn’t investigate how much effort scientists put into the goal of learning from those with whom they communicate, which might have implications for what they choose to research.

Another thing that’s missing from our research is direct information about what might lead scientists to prioritize specific goals.

However, we do know from past research that scientists are more likely to say they’re willing to communicate, as well as to prioritize specific objectives or tactics, if they see a choice as ethical, able to make a difference and within their capacity.

What’s next

My colleagues and I continue to study scientists’ communication goals and overall views about communication. We’re especially interested in understanding how scientists identify their goals and how to encourage them to draw on evidence-based strategies that could help them achieve those goals. This increasingly includes efforts to encourage scientists to collaborate with communication experts within their organizations.

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Here Are the Blocks You Need to Tell Your Impact Story

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 19:01:43 GMT

Impact Evaluation Framework ‘Building Blocks’

The increasing pressure placed upon research organisations of all kinds (not just universities) to demonstrate impact is often passed along to researchers and research managers without the support of an accompanying cultural change within the institution.

With this in mind, Forest Research, the government research agency that supports the United Kingdom’s forestry sector, has committed to promote a culture of knowledge exchange and interdisciplinarity in its research. This mission stemmed from a 2012 external impact evaluation which recommended directing attention toward helping researchers generate and record impacts. In addition to program activities such as training workshops and small-group conversations, the initiative identified an additional challenge: that of demystifying and operationalizing impact evaluation in a coherent and accessible way that nonetheless allows for diversity, subtlety and uncertainty.

A new evaluation framework: building blocks

To undertake this almost contradictory challenge, we developed a new evaluation framework that we tested across multiple projects in a pilot exercise. Working with the draft framework made it possible to produce a dozen full impact case studies from initial observations. Analysis of this exercise indicated that the components of the framework were sufficiently clear and comprehensive for researchers and stakeholders to understand and use in constructing a range of very different narratives.

We envisioned the framework as a set of building blocks which could be combined in multiple ways to tell almost any impact story, each shedding light on the complex interactions between research, policy and practice. In fact, when we gave a demo at the 2019 UK Knowledge Mobilisation Forum, we represented each component with different wooden tiles (fitting for work with a forest research agency!) and then used them to tell two contrasting impact case study narratives, showing how we could manipulate the tiles into different configurations to reveal the relationships between them. The audience seemed to appreciate our main messages of dynamics – in terms of multi-directional interactions unfolding in varying sequences – and heterogeneity – in terms of impact types, causes and stakeholders – as an alternative or complement to conventional linear logic models that tend to dominate the field of impact evaluation.

What are the building blocks?

There are: five types of impacts; five broad categories of stakeholders; and eight causal factors, along with a set of over-arching questions.

Five impact types

From previous impact evaluations and other research, we had found that providing a range of impact types to consider often makes people feel ‘liberated’ and ‘authorized’ to go beyond conventionally-sought instrumental changes when searching for their impacts. The five impact types are:

1) Instrumental: changes to plans, decisions, behaviors, practices, actions, policies

2) Conceptual: changes to knowledge, awareness, attitudes, emotions

3) Capacity-building: changes to skills and expertise

4) Enduring connectivity: changes to the number and quality of relationships and trust

5) Culture/attitudes towards knowledge exchange, and research impact itself

There is no fixed hierarchy or linear sequence inherent in this typology, and all have value in their own right, although the last two, process-based impacts may make other sorts of impacts more likely.

Asking ‘How do we know?’ leads towards gathering of evidence, including recognition of telling indicators of change.

This article by Laura Meagher and David Edwards originally appeared on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog as “How to tell an impact story? The building blocks you need” and is reposted under the Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0).

Five categories of stakeholders

To stimulate further definition (or mapping) for a particular situation, the framework offers five broad categories of stakeholders, which of course can be subdivided further, and may influence as well as be influenced by the research process and its outputs.

Policy-makers: government agencies and regulatory bodies, local, national and international

2) Practitioners: public, private, NGOs

3) Communities: of places or interest, general public

4) Researchers: within and beyond the project and the institution

5) Other

Eight causal factors

Because impact generation is a dynamic process, it is important to ask: ‘Why/how did changes occur?’ The framework offers eight causal factors:

1) Problem-framing: Level of importance; tractability of the problem; active negotiation of research questions; appropriateness of research design.

2) Research management: Research culture; integration between disciplines and teams; promotion of research services; planning; strategy.

3) Inputs: Funding; staff capacity and turnover; legacy of previous work; access to equipment and resources.

4) Outputs: Quality and usefulness of content; appropriate format.

5) Dissemination: Targeted and efficient delivery of outputs to users and other audiences.

6) Engagement: Level and quality of interaction with users and other stakeholders; co-production of knowledge; collaboration during design, dissemination and uptake of outputs.

7) Users: Influence of knowledge intermediaries, e.g. ‘champions’ and user groups; incentives and reinforcement to encourage uptake.

8) Context: Societal, political, economic, biophysical, climate and geographical factors.

Reflective questions

The questions underlying the framework are: ‘Who or what changed? (And how do we know?); Why or how did changes occur? and What lessons can be learned?’

These are centered around two questions which encourage the framework’s users to step back and think about what lessons have been learned regarding impact identification and generation, to plan actions and improve future efforts:

1) What worked? What could (or should) have been done differently?

2) What could (or should) be done in the future?

The framework can be used to stimulate critical reflection by individual researchers or teams, ideally involving end-users and other stakeholders, throughout the project cycle, at the planning, mid-course and final stages.

From simplicity to complexity

When assessing impacts, there can be a temptation to package notions of impact into readily countable and comparable units which come about as a result of a simple linear sequence of events. Instead, we tried to encourage researchers to see impact as complex, developing over often lengthy periods of time, in a dynamic context in which different causal factors, stakeholders and impacts themselves interact. Ultimately, impacts are highly heterogenous and travel different developmental pathways. Their stories are multi-dimensional and based on complex interactions.

Forestry was an ideal field in which to develop a framework of this kind, as it draws together a ‘real world’ orientation with an interdisciplinary approach spanning the natural and social sciences. However, we see the framework as having a wider application and being flexible enough to meet the needs of other disciplines and research organisations.

The ‘building blocks’ (impact types, stakeholders and causal factors) we identified can be assembled in multiple combinations to construct nuanced impact narratives in a way that is helpful for accountability (e.g. for funders), communication (e.g. for stakeholders) and learning (e.g. for researchers/managers).

Whatever their organisation, sector or country, we encourage readers to try it out and judge for themselves!

Drawn from

David M. Edwards and Laura R. Meagher. 2019. Forest Policy and Economics. A framework to evaluate the impacts of research on policy and practice: A forestry pilot study. Forest Policy and Economics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2019.101975

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Jennifer Richeson to Receive SAGE-CASBS Award

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 16:00:00 GMT

Jennifer Richeson (Photo: Aynsley Floyd)

Social psychologist Jennifer Richeson, whose research into intergroup interactions has created a much deeper understanding of inequality and racism in the United States, will receive the 2020 SAGE-CASBS Award. Established in 2013, the award – sponsored by SAGE Publishing and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University — recognizes outstanding achievement in the behavioral and social sciences that advance our understanding of pressing social issues.

Richeson, the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University, has generated original insights into the cognitive, affective, and behavioral dynamics of intergroup interactions – some of which shape basic mind and brain processes related to memory, attention, and decision-making. Most of her work examines ways in which gender, race, and socio-economic status influence how people think, perceive, and behave, particularly when they interact with members of different sociocultural groups. This includes investigating how people from both culturally devalued groups and traditionally dominant groups experience and respond to societal diversity, inequality, and injustice, as well as exploring both the antecedents and consequences of prejudice and stereotyping.

Her studies on the effects of demographics on political attitudes – showing that politically independent white Americans who gain greater awareness of the relative decline of whites in the population reveal increasingly conservative attitudes – have received high-profile media coverage and stimulated public discussion.

She is actively translates basic scientific research into applied knowledge and practice, for example serving as a Faculty Fellow at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies, affiliating with the Stone Center on Socioeconomic Inequality at CUNY, and serving as an executive committee member on the Societal Experts Action Network, part of the National Academies.

In recent years, Richeson wrote opinion articles and commentaries appearing in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Foreign Affairs. A recent essay in The Atlantic explores an “enduring narrative” about the “mythology of racial progress” in the United States that distorts our perception of reality. She currently is developing this theme in a book-length manuscript.

“Thanks to Jennifer’s superb past and continuing contributions, we better understand not only the psychology of racism, but also the dynamics of intergroup conflicts and inequality in general, permitting us to better detect and confront these social ills,” said CASBS director Margaret Levi. “CASBS shares her deep and abiding commitment to realizing the promise of culturally diverse environments and building more equitable communities for both individual and societal flourishing. We’re proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her in this pursuit.”

Richeson’s work has garnered her numerous awards and honors, including a 2007 John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (known as the “genius award”), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2015), the Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth B. Clark Distinguished Lecture Award from Columbia University (2019), the Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (2019), and a Carnegie Foundation Senior Fellowship (2020). Richeson received an honorary doctorate from Brown University, her undergraduate alma mater, in 2019. She is an elected fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Richeson will deliver an award lecture at CASBS on a date to be named.

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