Winter 1994 (v6n1)
	From the Director Legitimate Sources of Information (Editor's Note: Jill Shore Auburn, SAREP associate director, is the program's acting director during 1993-94 while Bill Liebhardt is on sabbatical.) It's often said that the role of the university is to convey scientific information to farmers and consumers. But we rarely question what is meant by "scientific information," and whether the information that we convey is most relevant to the people we serve. To many of us, "scientific" means "based on replicated research, "where comparisons are made of experimental treatments applied in a systematic manner to different animals or plots of land. Well-accepted experimental designs for assigning treatments and analyzing results help to ensure that results can be accurately judged to be due to treatments versus chance. These methods have been very successful, and we highly recommend that farmers use them in their own on-farm trials [see Auburn and Bugg, "On-Farm Research and the Transition," Sustainable Agriculture News 3(2), Winter 1991], rather than dismissing them as irrelevant "number crunching." There is, however, a broader view of scientific method that comes from the social sciences, where experimental manipulation of people is often not as easy as it is with plots of land. Systematic observations without manipulation, and comparisons of treatments that are only partially under the experimenter's control, are a part of "quasi-experimental designs" that have their own methods for analysis. A book on these methods by two prominent social scientists (Cook, T.D. and D.T. Campbell, Quasi-Experimentation: Design and Analysis Issues for Field Settings, 1979, Rand-McNally College Publ. Co.) includes a thoughtful discussion of how both experimental and quasi experimental designs can help, but not guarantee, that our observations are free of bias and error. In reality, we gain our knowledge of the world through a continuum of methods ranging from observation to experimental manipulation. If we restrict ourselves to using information derived from the latter only, we are giving the public a fraction of what they need. Education based on "decision cases" has long been popular in business and law schools. It is just now being explored by agricultural schools, most notably at the University of Minnesota (see M.J. Stanford et al., Decision Cases for Agriculture, 1992, College of Agriculture, Univ. Minnesota, St. Paul). Ann Drescher Mayse, SAREP analyst, has begun exploring the perception of case studies by farmers and farm advisors in California (see p. 6). The Sustainable Agriculture Network, a national cooperative effort to make information available has declared "experiential" information (that which comes from practical experience rather than scientific experiments) to be an equally valuable, although different, data source on sustainable agriculture. It makes many of us uncomfortable because there are relatively few accepted methods for collecting and sharing it, compared to experimental knowledge. Information from a poorly-designed and executed experiment is just as worthless as unsubstantiated anecdotal information, but we have a long-standing system for conducting and reporting the former that helps us identify research that is, or is not, credible or useful. Can we develop a similar system for collecting and sharing experiential information that will help us do the same with the great wealth of experience that farmers and other citizens are developing from their day-to-day observations?-Jill Shore Auburn, associate director, UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program. [ Back | Search | Feedback ]