Researching social policy: trends, tragedies and triumphs
Peter Saunders
Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW
Contact Email:   p.saundersunsw.edu.au

This paper will draw on my experience at SPRC to reflect on the changing nature of Australian social policy research, including its relationship with other academic disciplines. It will also explore how the funding of research affects its content, dissemination and impact on debate and policy. Attention will focus on the nature and contribution of Australian social policy research, its strengths and weaknesses, and its current and longer-term challenges in providing attractive career opportunities in research. Examples drawn from SPRC (and other, primarily Australian) research will be used to illustrate the features that make research effective and the barriers that prevent it from being utilised and/or exerting an impact. These will include my own research on poverty, inequality and attitudes to welfare reform and the numerous social program evaluations that others at SPRC have been involved in over the last decade. The discussion will highlight the role of the research community itself, as well as that of other key players including federal and state government departments, interest group advocates and the agencies that collect and disseminate different kinds of data. Key themes will include the important role of high-quality data in supporting research that has a practical focus, and the need to ensure that such data are widely available for the purpose of validation and replication - key components of any reliable and robust evidence base. Recent developments in data quality and access will be used to illustrate the importance of this issue. Finally, attention will focus on the need to overcome the largely artificial barriers that exist between different kinds of social policy research - quantitative and qualitative, theoretical and practical, economic and sociological, and contextual (big picture) and specific (problem-solving) - if social policy research is to achieve its potential.

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