One of the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is that policymakers need quality evidence to make the best decisions possible, but that information can be hard to come by. When the pandemic spread across New York state, BCTR researcher Elizabeth Day launched a research project to provide local officials with the evidence they needed to make decisions.
Day is the assistant director for policy engagement for Cornell Project 2Gen, an initiative focused on research and policies that jointly support parents and children. At the start of the pandemic, she saw how families were struggling and that county officials suddenly had lots of decisions to make in a rapidly changing environment to try to support families.
Elizabeth Day
So Day, collaborating with Johns Hopkins health policy professor Adam Levine, designed a pilot study to ask county legislators what challenges were most pressing, and how research could help solve them. Legislators in multiple counties cited the growing number of essential workers who were struggling to find child care when day care centers and public schools closed.
“We essentially provided rapid response to their needs by conducting a policy scan across New York and the U.S. to find out what other counties were doing about child care and how they were sharing information with the public,” she said.
The information helped inform the COVID-19 response in several New York counties, and also led Day and Levine to launch a larger study to promote the use of research in county governments across New York state. The project recently received $100,000 in funding from the W.T. Grant Foundation.
“In prior work studying state legislators, we’ve found that policymakers often crave research evidence they can use to better understand problems facing their constituents, educate their colleagues, and seek out solutions to these problems,” she explained. “Unfortunately, many legislators have little time and few resources for finding research evidence. At the county level, these challenges are even more present, as county legislators usually have next to no staff while simultaneously juggling critical issues, which the COVID-19 response really highlighted.”
The study will involve researchers connecting with county legislators to find out what type of support they need surrounding youth and family issues in their county. Legislators will then receive a tailored research brief that addresses the topic they choose. Day and Levine will track the legislators’ responsiveness and document their use of research evidence.
“We hope to learn more about the best ways for supporting county legislators so that they can use research evidence in their work,” Day said. “We are especially focused on exploring ways of connecting researchers and legislators that are rapid response and efficient, as researchers, too, are often very tight on time, and policymakers often rely on pre-existing relationships with experts to incorporate research into their decision-making.”
Day sees the potential for this type of work to make a big difference for kids and families. That’s because, while many child and family policies are funded by the state, they are administered regionally. “County legislators and administrators are making the big decisions around how child and family programs are rolled out,” she said. “Our novel approach to start new relationships with county legislators and assess the effectiveness of those relationships has the potential to lead to significant improvements in how researchers and local policymakers connect across the state.”
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