Describes four stages of policy formulation (issue definition, deliberation on policy options, authoritative allocation, and performance oversight) and four types of policy-relevant social research (descriptive, explanatory, critical, and forecasting). Proposes a model showing the linkages among research types, policy-making stages, and policy…

Focusing on whether and how research actually contributes to the formation of public policy, this paper explores the critical problems in the linkage between science production and the systems that formulate educational policy. The authors suggest that the utilization of social research is limited more by problems of integrating research into the…

This paper explores the politics of education with emphasis on the uses and influences of educational research in educational policy formation. Objectives are to identify information needs of policy makers and to shed light on the educational policy process. The hypothesis is that there is a lack of unity in studies of the political aspects of…