Public Administration and Public Policy

The challenges societies face today, from inequality to climate change to systemic racism, cannot be solved with yesterday's toolkit. Solving Public Problems shows how readers can take advantage of digital technology, data, and the collective wisdom of our communities to design and deliver powerful solutions to contemporary problems.

This book about responsible and evidence-based decision making is written for those interested in improving the decisions that affect people's lives. It describes how to define policy research questions so that evidence can be applied to them, how to find and synthesize existing evidence, how to generate new evidence if needed, how to make acceptable recommendations that can solve policy problems without negative side effects, and how to describe evidence and recommendations in a manner that changes minds.

The study of public policy and the methods of policy analysis are among the most rapidly developing areas in the social sciences.

This book in the QRM series is designed for a wide variety of research methods courses taught in various departments.

Using a set of rules as a guide for cost-effective policy analysis, Communicating Social Science Research to Policy Makers helps applied researchers avoid costly mistakes in policy planning and public administration research.