After the successful online launch of Storylistening, we reflect on the main themes that came up in the Q&A in this blog for Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy. We discuss truth and lies, rigour and incentives, and the need for plural voices and plural listening.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated narratives, qualitative or quantitative, can shape, guide and make sense of public policies. However, the way in which the listeners and readers of these narratives receive and engage with them is often taken as a given. In this short introduction to the concept of storylistening on the LSE Impact Blog, we outline how different narratives can contribute to and enhance the use of evidence in policymaking and present a framework for how qualitative and humanistic research can play a key role in this process.
Claire wrote for the International Public Policy Observatory about how public decisions get made, and about how narrative models and narrative futures methods might help inform them. “Jane Austen’s novels vividly model aspects of middle-class life in her lifetime but do not directly model much about colonialism; an epidemiological model shows disease outcomes but not educational ones, and so on. The model has to be simple to be useful, but if it’s useful then there is a risk that its users rely on it too much and pay insufficient attention to the other important parts of the world which the model must ignore in order to function. This gap applies both to computational models, with their compelling charts and numbers; and to narrative models, with their seductive detail and rhetoric.”