Policy Research

New Evidence on Instrumental, Conceptual, and Symbolic Utilization of University Research in Government Agencies

Nabil Amara, Mathieu Ouimet, Rejean Landry

Summary

The authors first define three types of research used within the government domain: instrumental, conceptual, and symbolic. Instrumental involves research applied in specific, direct ways, conceptual denotes research used for general enlightenment, and less tangibly connected to specific use than instrument. Symbolic research uses results to legitimate and sustain predetermined positions. The authors of the article surveyed 833 Canadian government employees who work in a variety of Canadian government agencies. The authors found that conceptual research (22%) was the most important in the day to day professional activity of respondents when compared to instrumental (12%) or symbolic research (16%). With 22% of respondents saying that conceptual research had a strong impact on their work, compared to 12% (instrumental) and 16% (symbolic). The authors found very little differences in research utilization across different government agencies.

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Policy Implications

While applying the data to the United States Government may seem difficult, the expectation would be for the results to hold, perhaps with an overall decrease of research usage across issues. The low utilization of instrumental research, i.e. research pointed at a specific problem highlights legislators cherry picking research for their own uses. Further, the lack of research usage variation across departments also indicates an underutilization of issue specific research, which one would expect to have a high variance across departments.