On March 20, 2025, University of Maryland professors Sarah Tahamont and Greg Midgette discussed what makes evidence useful to policymakers and how researchers can better communicate the strength of their findings.
Policymakers rely on clear, reliable evidence to make informed decisions, yet they often face conflicting or incomplete data. To address this, researchers assess studies based on their ability to establish cause-and-effect relationships. Over the past 30 years, policy research has embraced causal inference techniques, borrowing methods borrowed from economics to measure impact.
However, many traditional rating systems haven’t kept up. In crime policy, the Maryland Scientific Methods Scale has been the gold standard since 1997, but the field’s methods have outgrown the scale’s usefulness.