ABSTRACT
Methodological issues undergirding the social sciences (and hard sciences for that matter) are one key factor explaining why public managers do not in many cases use this research in decision or policy making; if they do rely on it, critics believe they do so at their own peril. Methods of evidence-based management (EBMgt), and its cousin evidence-based policy (EBP), attempt to eliminate from consideration poorly done research and focus on the implications of the remaining high-quality research to improve public decision making. However, because it relies so heavily on problematic social science studies, EBMgt is subject not only to the criticisms leveled against these studies, but also to attacks on its own methodological underpinnings (Hansen and Rieper 2009). Before public managers and researchers place too much credence in EBMgt approaches as the silver bullet in improving public decision making, they must understand some basic issues in the social sciences that these approaches, at least in principle, attempt to solve.1
