Wine reception 5.30pm, talk at 6.00pm

In this public lecture, Professor Morris will reflect back over 25 years’ experience working as a civil servant, independent researcher and in academia. He will look at how research methods and understandings of causation in policy and programme evaluation have changed over this period, and discuss some of the debates and points of contention that have emerged. The talk will focus particularly on the role of experimental methods, the history of their use in social policy evaluation and some of the controversies and debates that have arisen. It will recount particular examples from Stephen’s own work and discuss how these debates shaped the practice of applied research and evaluation. Finally, it will reflect on the connections between research methodology, policymaking and politics, and show how these concerns might relate to current popular debates around the role of experts and expertise within public policy making.

Stephen Morris is Professor of Evaluation based in the Policy Evaluation Research Unit within the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. Stephen’s career spans 25 years working in applied social science research with a particular emphasis on the evaluation of interventions and programmes funded through the public purse with social /economic objectives. During this time, Stephen worked for 13 years as a social scientist within the UK Government and has held senior research posts at the Institute for Employment Studies, Policy Studies Institute and the National Centre for Social Research (now NatCen Social Research). Stephen is a social science methodologist whose work has focused on the use of experimental methods in evaluation and issues of causation in the social sciences more widely.

This lecture will be introduced by Professor Malcolm Press (Vice Chancellor of Manchester Metropolitan University) and will be followed with a response from David H Greenberg (Professor Emeritus in Economics at The University of Maryland, Baltimore county, USA).

David Greenberg is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He is a labor economist and cost-benefit analyst who received his PhD at MIT. Much of his research focuses on the evaluation of government programs. Before coming to UMBC, he worked for the Rand Corporation, SRI International, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Professor Greenberg has been a visitor for a year or longer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; at the Budapest University of Economic Science; and at the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University, the Policy Studies Institute at Westminster University, and the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, all of which are in England. He is a long time consultant to MDRC, Abt Associates, and other research organizations.

David Greenberg has published widely on social experimentation, cost and cost-benefit analysis, employment, training programs, evaluation, and other topics. He is co-editor of the Randomized Social Experiments Abstract, which is published weekly by the Social Science Research Network. With his co-authors, he has written four editions of a widely used textbook on cost-benefit analysis, which is published by Prentice Hall, and has completed work on the fifth edition, which will be published in 2018 by the Cambridge University Press.