What exactly is ‘best practice’? April 2, 2009
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Evaluation debates, Impact evaluation, Outcomes theory, Philosophy of science, Use of terms, Using the approach , trackbackIdentifying and communicating best practice is widely recommended in many sectors and disciplines. But I’ve sometimes wondered as I’ve sagely recommended in a serious voice, ‘I think that we should use an approach based on identifying and implementing best practice here’ exactly what best practice is? I think that doing it is often a good idea and I can work out how to identify it and share it, and I will blog about that tomorrow, but what I’m not clear on is exactly how we define ‘best’ in the term ‘best practice’. It’s not clear whether best practice consists of: 1) claims that practitioners, from their own experience, believe the practices concerned to be feasible and ‘useful’ to implement; or 2) practices which have been proven to improve high-level outcomes (through making a strong outcome/impact evaluation claim of some sort such as is made using some of the types of designs listed here).
The issue is a particularly interesting one in that a best practice sharing approach is often suggested as an alternative in situations where it is not appropriate, feasible or affordable to do an outcomes/impact evaluation. I’ve made this recommendation myself a number of times.
I’ve posted an article in the Outcomes Theory Knowledge Base about this issue of what exactly best practice is and made a suggestion regarding what we should call best practice and what we should call evidence-based practice. However, I’m very uncertain that what I am suggesting regarding the use of these terms makes sense. What I’m trying to do, as usual within outcomes theory, is to make totally transparent the nature of the evidential claims we are making when we use particular terms such as best practice.
Outcomes theory combines this approach, which it shares in common with advocates of more crunchy high-level impact-orientated evaluation where it can be done, with a brutal realism in regard to the fact that often such impact-orientated evaluation is not appropriate, feasible and/or affordable, so a naive insistence on just doing impact-orientated evaluation is an unrealistic position to take in regard to evaluation. [Yikes, that's exactly the type of sentence that would put my wife into a tailspin if she was editing this blog - I haven't got time to fix it now! I will just have to hope that she doesn't read it! It's a side issue to what I'm talking about here in regard to best practice and actually deserves a blog posting or even a Knol article all of its own some time].
Anyway, if you have any interest in best practice sharing and have a minute, check out the Knol article and put any comments at the bottom of it.
Paul Duignan, PhD
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