Empirical Research for Public Policy: With Examples from Family Law

Drawing on three family law studies as examples, this article discusses strengths and weaknesses of policy-relevant empirical research. Its main message is that policy-relevant empirical legal research should be encouraged, but the policy relevance of research, especially single studies, should not be oversold. It concludes with five points that consumers of policy-relevant empirical research should keep in mind: (1) do not rest policy change or analysis on a single study, no matter how good it is; (2) when reading the report of an empirical study, look beyond the researcher's bottom line to other relationships revealed in the data; (3) no matter how unversed one is in statistics, commonsense and a close reading of tables, graphs, and methodological narratives can take one a long way; (4) always ask about mechanism: understanding why a situation exists is as important to policy analysis as knowing whether it exists; and (5) if results seem too good to be true, this is often because they are not true.