Think Piece: Addressing a perceived crisis in verification in social care research involved with policy.
Abstract
The dominating demand for a selected evidence basis for policy and practice is obscuring a crisis of verification.
The role of the researcher in an active factor in research, and is often omitted in their considerations and reception by others. Their verification of evidence must necessarily involve a history of involvement in the area of study or development, long diverse experience, and an acquired honed know-how.
Evidence has become in itself, and for itself. Though the call is for evidenced based policy it has been turned to become policy-based evidence, the reported solutions turn out to be those desired that led to the commissioning of the research. Research does not conclude with diverse, even contradictory, findings. They are a reinforcement of the present and result in a small variation of the dominant rationality. Such research is not an engagement with complexity. It acts to substantiate that which already exists. It is an act of institutionalisation.
There is obscuration of the subject of study and the methodology. The function of the research and researcher are not reflected upon.
The result is repetition. In an increasingly intersectional aware world research and policy are unidimensional.
Researchers are engaged in the decomposition of the social, the disaggregation of social relations through the reduction of milieus of life to only one of the elements that compose them.
The productive capacity of any research results from the richness of the relations. Polymorphous polycentric research is the antidote for the recentralisation strategy of the government.
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A critique of the current “evidence-based” paradigm of research and policy is needed.
We are observing a shift where research has transitioned from a discovery tool to a validation tool, effectively functioning as a closed-loop system that reinforces the status quo.
There are several critical tensions in the modern role of the researcher:
1.1 The Crisis of Verification
It can be identified that ‘evidence’ has been narrowed to a technical output. When policy dictates the parameters of the ‘solution’ before the research begins, the process becomes performative.
Verification should not be a snapshot (the study), but a diachronic process rooted in deep, historical involvement and honed ‘know-how’. Without this longitudinal context, research lacks the teeth to challenge the commissioning body.
1.2. Decomposition and Reductionism
There is a decomposition of the social, in the drive for clean data and measurable outcomes, researchers often strip individuals and communities of their complexity. By isolating variables, they lose the relational fabric of the milieu. This results in unidimensional policy that addresses a symptom rather than the intersectional reality of life.
1.3. Institutionalisation vs. Complexity
The modern researcher is often pressured to produce consensus rather than highlight contradiction. By smoothing over diverse or discordant findings to provide a deliverable, research acts as an agent of institutionalisation. It substantiates existing power structures, the dominant rationality, rather than acting as a site of critical inquiry or unexpected discovery.
1.4. The Antidote: Polymorphous Research
We are making the proposal for polymorphous, polycentric research that serves as a vital counterstrategy. Two aspects are prominent:
- Richness of Relations: The quality of the findings is dependent on the depth of the social ties formed during the process.
- Decentralisation: Moving away from a top-down commissioning model toward a model where knowledge is produced in multiple centres of expertise, including the lived experience of those being studied.
This shift would require researchers to move from being objective observers (which often masks a specific bias) to being situated participants who acknowledge their own function within the power dynamic.
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Social care
A critique of the current evidence-based social care paradigm shows research has transitioned from a discovery tool to a validation tool, effectively functioning as a closed-loop system that reinforces the status quo.
Highlighted are several critical tensions in the modern role of the researcher:
2.1. The Crisis of Verification
Evidence has been narrowed to a technical output. When policy dictates the parameters of the solution before the research begins, the process becomes performative. Verification should not be a snapshot (the study), but a diachronic process rooted in deep, historical involvement and honed ‘know-how.’ Without this longitudinal context, research lacks the teeth to challenge the commissioning body.
2.2. Decomposition and Reductionism
The point regarding the decomposition of the social is particularly poignant. In the drive for clean data and measurable outcomes, researchers often strip individuals and communities of their complexity. By isolating variables, they lose the relational fabric of the milieu. This results in unidimensional policy that addresses a symptom rather than the intersectional reality of life.
2.3. Institutionalisation vs. Complexity
The modern researcher is often pressured to produce consensus rather than highlight contradiction. By smoothing over diverse or discordant findings to provide a “deliverable,” research acts as an agent of institutionalisation. It substantiates existing power structures, the dominant rationality, rather than acting as a site of critical inquiry or unexpected discovery.
2.4. The Antidote: Polymorphous Research
Polymorphous, polycentric research serves as a vital counterstrategy. It suggests that:
- Richness of Relations: The quality of the findings is dependent on the depth of the social ties formed during the process.
- Decentralisation: Moving away from a top-down commissioning model toward a model where knowledge is produced in multiple centres of expertise, including the lived experience of those being studied.
This shift would require researchers to move from being “objective observers” (which often masks a specific bias) to being situated participants who acknowledge their own function within the power dynamic.
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Residential Child Care research
In residential child care in England, the crisis of verification is particularly acute because the home setting is treated as a site of intervention rather than a milieu of living.
3.1. Verification vs. Regulation
The role of the researcher (and the inspector) has shifted toward substantiating the present through compliance metrics.
- Honed Know-How vs. The Checklist: Verification is no longer rooted in a history of involvement or the honed ‘know-how’ of the residential workers. Instead, it is outsourced to Ofsted frameworks. These frameworks act as the dominant rationality, where a home’s evidence of quality is a paper trail of risk assessments and incident logs.
- The Obscured Subject: The child’s subjective experience of belonging is obscured by the methodology of the graded judgment, which prioritises the institutionalisation of safety over the complexity of emotional development.
3.2. Decomposition of the Milieu
There is a decomposition of the social visible in how residential care is currently marketised and researched:
- Disaggregation of Relations: Policy treats ‘the bed’ as a unit of supply. Research often evaluates outcomes”(e.g. educational attendance or reduction in ‘missing’ episodes) by isolating the child from their milieu of life.
- The Unit of Care: By reducing the home to one of the elements that compose it, for example, the staff-to-child ratio or the physical building, research ignores the polymorphous relations (peer dynamics, local community ties, the rhythm of the house) that actually determine the therapeutic success of the setting.
3.3. Policy-Based Evidence and the Sufficiency Crisis
The government’s response to the crisis in residential placements is an example of policy-based evidence:
- Reinforcing the Present: Rather than addressing the reasons for the failure of a market approach identified in commentary as private equity firms owning the vast majority of homes, research is commissioned to find innovative small-scale variations of the same model.
- Continued Supply: The system confounds unexpected demand with continued supply by building more secure or welfare beds, rather than investigating the relational failures in the community that led to the institutionalisation in the first place.
3.4. The Result: Unidimensional Care
In an intersectional aware world, residential policy remains unidimensional.
An example of unidimensionality in the life of a child. Research, and practice, can perceive a child’s ‘challenging’ behaviour as a pathology that results in the actions of the carers to manage the behaviour through ‘evidence-based’ trauma-informed models (the prescribed solution), rather than an understandable response to a decomposition of their social world that has been impinged by the carers. The origin of the event starts with the carers not the child. The child’s behaviour is a communication that they have been placed in a challenging situation. The behaviour is a communication of that act, an action apportioning responsibility for the psychological stress and physiological effects, to the carers, and seeking an emotionally holding and containing understanding by deeds not words.
