{"id":5709,"date":"2011-05-14T11:06:56","date_gmt":"2011-05-14T10:06:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=5709"},"modified":"2011-05-14T11:06:56","modified_gmt":"2011-05-14T10:06:56","slug":"the-need-for-evidence-based-policy-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=5709","title":{"rendered":"The need for evidence-based policy-making"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a political person but, I hope, I am also a rational individual. So I have my values and principles, but I like to make decisions based on evidence and some of the best evidence comes from trials.<\/p>\n<p>Therefore I was pleased to read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/commentisfree\/2011\/may\/14\/bad-science-ben-goldacre-randomised-trials\">this article<\/a> today which puts the case for evidence-based policy-making in these terms:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Randomised trials are our best way to\u00a0find out if something works: by randomly assigning participants to one  intervention or another, and measuring the outcome we&#8217;re interested in,  we exclude all alternative explanations for any difference between the  two groups. If you don&#8217;t know which of two reasonable interventions is  best, and you want to find out, a trial will tell you.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a political person but, I hope, I am also a rational individual. So I have my values and principles, but I like to make decisions based on evidence and some of the best evidence comes from trials. Therefore I was pleased to read this article today which puts the case for evidence-based policy-making in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5709"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5711,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5709\/revisions\/5711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}