On research uptake and quantitative research: a conversation in a park

It’s a typical English Summer day, an overcast sky,  an intermittent drizzle and the two British academics I am scheduled to meet are seated , equally typically, outside the café, in the rain,  under a garden umbrella.  They are undoubtedly Sri Lankanophiles, and our conversation is largely social and mostly about Sri Lanka and about the Olympics, but we touch on the subject of DFID’s funding of research in general, their social science research funding in particular.   It’s clear that the academics are uncomfortable with concepts like research uptake, or theory of change – the stuff that constitutes my day to day work.  Obviously loads to be done in the bridging research and policy area.   The academics find the articulation of a theory of change for a research project difficult,  because they see it as needing to presume the outcomes of the research before the research is conducted, and insist that that is what is in the ‘guidelines’ provided by the grant giving institutions.

We also talk about what they see as the grant giving institutions’ preference for quantitative analysis over qualitative, and how they knowingly used a methodology with a strong quantitative component, despite its limited appropriateness to the research question, so they could get the funding.  They do not see this as problematic.  They have a dual approach:  the outcome of the quantitative study is for the funding agency and doesn’t really count; what does count is what is tagged on to that, that is their own research that  will be shared with academia and provide them with their academic credentials. They were a little amused at my protestations, and assured me it was necessary to play the game if funding was to be accessed (and research jobs secured, careers developed, and mortgages paid).  The system was too powerful to challenge, but it could be subverted in this way.

A document I am reading prepared by DFID’s antipodean counterpart about the history of research funding in Indonesia, describes the constraints to developing a strong knowledge base in that society as stemming from “the New Order government that operated less by direct repression than by using the machinery of public administration and finance to bring presumptively independent institutions into orbit and control of the New Order bureaucracy”.   Do we dare see a parallel here?