An Evolving Need for Trusted Information

In “Informing Decisionmakers in Real Time” (Issues, Fall 2023), Robert Groves, Mary T. Bassett, Emily P. Backes, and Malvern Chiweshe describe how scientific organizations, funders, and researchers came together to provide vital insights in a time of global need. Their actions during the COVID-19 pandemic created new ways for researchers to coordinate with one another and better ways to communicate critical scientific insights to key end users. Collectively, these actions accelerated translations of basic research to life-saving applications.

Examples such as the Societal Experts Action Network (SEAN) that the authors highlight reveal the benefits of a new approach. While at the National Science Foundation, we pitched the initial idea for this project and the name to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). We were inspired by NASEM’s new research-to-action workflows in biomedicine and saw opportunities for thinking more strategically about how social science could help policymakers and first responders use many kinds of research more effectively.

SEAN’s operational premise is that by building communication channels where end users can describe their situations precisely, researchers can better tailor their translations to the situations. Like NASEM, we did not want to sacrifice rigor in the process. Quality control was essential. Therefore, we designed SEAN to align translations with key properties of the underlying research designs, data, and analysis. The incredible SEAN leadership team that NASEM assembled implemented this plan. They committed to careful inferences about the extent to which key attributes of individual research findings, or collections of research findings, did or did not generalize to end users’ situations. They also committed to conducting real-time evaluations of their effectiveness. With this level of commitment to rigor, to research quality filters, and to evaluations, SEAN produced translations that were rigorous and usable.

There is significant benefit to supporting approaches such as this going forward. To see why, consider that many current academic ecosystems reward the creation of research, its publication in journals, and, in some fields, connections to patents. These are all worthy activities. However, societies sometimes face critical challenges where interdisciplinary collaboration, a commitment to rigor and precision, and an advanced understanding of how key decisionmakers use scientific content are collectively the difference between life and death. Ecosystems that treat journal publications and patents as the final products of research processes will have limited impact in these circumstances. What Groves and coauthors show is the value of designing ecosystems that produce externally meaningful outcomes.

Scientific organizations can do more to place modern science’s methods of measurement and inference squarely in the service of people who can save lives. With structures such as SEAN that more deeply connect researchers to end users, we can incentivize stronger cultures of responsiveness and accountability to thousands of end users. Moreover, when organizations network these quality-control structures, and then motivate researchers to collaborate and share information effectively, socially significant outcomes are easier to stack (we can more easily build on each other’s insights) and scale (we can learn more about which practices generalize across circumstances).

To better serve people across the world, and to respect the public’s sizeable investments in federally funded scientific research, we should seize opportunities to increase the impact and social value of the research that we conduct. New research-to-action workflows offer these opportunities and deserve serious attention in years to come.

Daniel Goroff

Arthur Lupia

As Robert Groves, Mary T. Bassett, Emily P. Backes, and Malvern Chiweshe describe in their article, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the value and importance of connecting social science to on-the-ground decisionmaking and solution-building processes, which require bridging societal sectors, academic fields, communities, and levels of governance. That the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and public and private funders—including at the local level—created and continue to support the Societal Experts Action Network (SEAN) is encouraging. Still, the authors acknowledge that there is much work needed to normalize and sustain support for ongoing research-practice partnerships of this kind.

In academia, for example, the pandemic provided a rallying point that encouraged cross-sector collaborations, in part by forcing a change to business-as-usual practices and incentivizing social scientists to work on projects perceived to offer limited gains in academic systems, such as tenure processes. Without large-scale reconfiguration of resources and rewards, as the pandemic crisis triggered to some extent, partnerships such as those undertaken by SEAN face numerous barriers. Building trust, fostering shared goals, and implementing new operational practices across diverse participants can be slow and expensive. Fitting these efforts into existing funding is also challenging, as long-term returns may be difficult to measure or articulate. In a post-COVID world, what incentives will remain for researchers and others to pursue necessary work like SEAN’s, spanning boundaries across sectors?

One answer comes from a broader ecosystem of efforts in “civic science,” of which we see SEAN as a part. Proponents of civic science argue that boundary-spanning work is needed in times of crisis as well as peace. In this light, we see a culture shift in which philanthropies, policymakers, community leaders, journalists, educators, and academics recognize that research-practice partnerships must be made routine rather than being exceptional. This culture shift has facilitated our own work as researchers and filmmakers as we explore how research informing filmmaking, and vice versa, might foster pro-democratic outcomes across diverse audiences. For example, how can science films enable holistic science literacy that supports deliberation about science-related issues among conflicted groups?

At first glance, our work may seem distant from SEAN’s policy focus. However, we view communication and storytelling (in non-fiction films particularly) as creating “publics,” or people who realize they share a stake in an issue, often despite some conflicting beliefs, and who enable new possibilities in policy and society. In this way and many others, our work aligns with a growing constellation of participants in the Civic Science Fellows program and a larger collective of collaborators who are bridging sectors and groups to address key challenges in science and society.

As the political philosopher Peter Levine has said, boundary-spanning work enables us to better respond to the civic questions asking “What should we do?” that run through science and broader society. SEAN illustrates how answering such questions cannot be done well—at the level of quality and legitimacy needed—in silos. We therefore strongly support multisector collaborations like those that SEAN and the Civic Science Fellows program model. We also underscore the opportunity and need for sustained cultural and institutional progress across the ecosystem of connections between science and civic society, to reward diverse actors for investing in these efforts despite their scope and uncertainties.

Emily L. Howell

Nicole M. Krause

Ian Cheney

Elliot Kirschner

Sarah S. Goodwin

I read Robert Groves, Mary T. Bassett, Emily P. Backes, and Malvern Chiweshe’s essay with great interest. It is hard to remember the early times of COVID-19, when everyone was desperate for answers and questions popped up daily about what to do and what was right. As a former elected county official and former chair of a local board of health, I valued the welcome I received when appointed to the Societal Experts Action Network (SEAN) the authors highlight. I believe that as a nonacademic, I was able to bring a pragmatic on-the-ground perspective to the investigations and recommendations.

At the time, local leaders were dealing with a pressing need for scientific information when politics were becoming fraught with dissension and the public had reduced trust in science. Given such pressure, it is difficult to fully appreciate the speed at which SEAN operated—light speed compared with what I viewed as the usual standards of large organizations such as its parent, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. SEAN’s efforts were nimble and focused, allowing us to collaborate while addressing massive amounts of data.

Now, the key to addressing the evolving need for trusted and reliable information, responsive to the modern world’s speed, will be supporting and replicating the work of SEAN. Relationships across jurisdictions and institutions were formed that will continue to be imperative not only for ensuring academic rigor but also for understanding how to build the bridges of trust to support the value of science, to meet the need for resilience, and to provide the wherewithal to progress in the face of constant change.

Linda Langston