Providing Public Servants What They Need: Revealing the “Unseen” through Data Visualization

• Author: Diana M. Hicks,Kimberley R. Isett
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12904
• Date: 01 May 2018
• Published date: 01 May 2018

Providing Public Servants What They Need: Revealing the “Unseen” through Data Visualization 479

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 3, pp. 479–485. © 2018 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12904.

This manuscript was originally submitted

and accepted as an Evidence in Public

Administration article. The feature

editors, Kimberley R. Isett, Brian W.

Head, and Gary VanLandingham, are

gratefully acknowledged for their work

in soliciting and developing this content.

Effective with Volume 78, the

Evidence

in Public Administration

feature has been

discontinued.

Abstract : Electronic media has enabled new forms of communication with the potential to provide more effective

means of conveying evidence to public servants. This article explores what is known about the use of these new

capacities in public affairs to visualize the results of research. The authors first explore the value of visual engagement

for increasing comprehension. Then, they examine what is known of studies of the effectiveness of visualization and

offer basic design principles that underpin effective visualization. Finally, two original public affairs examples are

presented to illustrate what is possible .

Kimberley R. Isett

Diana M. Hicks

Georgia Institute of Technology

Diana M. Hicks specializes in metrics

for S&T policy. She was the first author on

the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics

published in Nature, which has been

translated into 17 languages She has

advised the Organisation for Economic

Co-operation and Development, Flanders,

the Czech Republic, and Sweden on

national research evaluation systems. She

co-chairs the Atlanta Conference on Science

and Innovation Policy and is an editor of

Research Evaluation . She earned her

master ’ s and doctoral degrees from the

Science Policy Research Unit, University

of Sussex.

E-mail: dhicks@gatech.edu

Kimberley R. Isett is associate

professor at the Georgia Institute of

Technology. Her research focuses on

institutional pressures and dynamics in

implementing government services, with

a particular interest in the delivery of

evidence-based services to vulnerable

populations. She has worked with elected

officials and policy makers at all levels of

government and currently volunteers as

research chair for Techbridge, a nonprofit

dedicated to transforming communities

through intergenerational poverty

alleviation.

E-mail: isett@gatech.edu

Providing Public Servants What They Need:

Revealing the “Unseen” through Data Visualization

Viewpoint

Stephen E. Condrey,

Associate Editor

Information is cheap, meaning is expensive .

—George Dyson

I f we desire evidence-informed policy, we must

attend to the gap between the time frames and

approaches of scholars and public servants.

Scholars are rewarded for clever design and

sophisticated statistical analysis and so take the time

required to produce high-quality results. In contrast,

public servants need to make decisions quickly,

with the best available information (Isett, Head,

and VanLandingham 2016 ). As Trautman ( 2016 )

points out, sometimes that best available information

is only one part data and other parts constituent

voice. Although some authors have recently

declared the divide between the “two communities”

overstated (Newman, Cherney, and Head 2016 ), the

incompatibilities of their professional realities are well

established.

Despite knowing the challenges related to using

empirical evidence in practice, scholars still do not

effectively communicate their research, rendering it

ineffectual (Huber 2016 ). Arguably, the problem has

intensified in recent years. In many areas, methods

and data have become more sophisticated, meaning

that the substance of what needs to be conveyed is

more arcane and more difficult for stakeholders to

understand. Anne-Marie Slaughter, former dean

of Princeton University ’ s Woodrow Wilson School

of Public and International Affairs, was quoted in

a Washington Post opinion piece as saying that the

research coming out of public policy schools is “less

and less accessible to the lay reader. The jargon has

become more and more specialized” (Pierson and

Riley 2013 ). As the Post writers note, if policy makers

cannot understand policy school research, what can

scholars hope to accomplish?

The cognitive inaccessibility of empirical research is

compounded by the daily operating realities of public

servants and other professionals who are subject to

information overload. They have no time to read,

can spend less than 10 minutes on any piece they

do manage to read, and do not have the luxury of

pondering the implications of the material (Huber

2016 ). Exacerbating these constraints is the fact

that policy makers and public servants operate in

a knowledge-centric field and are bombarded with

information regularly. Because of limits on the

capacity to absorb and process large amounts of

information, public servants rely on prepackaged

solutions and heuristics when encountering routine

situations ( Jones 2003 ; Ostrom 1998 ). Thus, it

is unclear whether the demands and constraints

surrounding the use of evidence in policy making are

compatible with actually using it (Cairney, Oliver, and

Wellstead 2016 ; Head 2016 ).

The disappointing uptake of policy research has

concerned the scholarly community for several

decades (Weiss 1979 ). The area of policy evaluation

exemplifies the problem. Thinking about the problem

of getting evaluation results used has led evaluators

to investigate facilitative factors, to expand their

perspective on what counts as use, and to encourage

participatory evaluation to induce stakeholder

engagement (Teirlinck et al. 2013 ). Although

somewhat lower in profile, communication requires