RECOVER19 co-Principal Investigator Dr. Claudia Chaufan of York University has been driving the project’s Year 1 research. With respect to issues of governance in the COVID-19 pandemic response (Case Study 4), Claudia and her research staff recently published a critical scoping review protocol, which outlines their ongoing work towards “Appraising the decision-making process concerning COVID-19 policy in postsecondary education in Canada“. The protocol was made available as a preprint in early September and was recently published in the peer-reviewed open-access journal AIMS Public Health.
The following is the abstract of the publication co-authored with Laurie Manwell, Benjamin Gabbay, Camila Heredia, and Charlotte Daniels:
- Background:
Responses to COVID-19 in Canadian postsecondary education have overhauled usual norms and practices, with policies of unclear rationale implemented under the pressure of a reported public health emergency. - Objective:
To critically appraise the decision-making process informing COVID-19 policy in the postsecondary education sector. - Methods:
Our scoping review will draw from macro and micro theories of public policy, specifically the critical tradition exemplified by Carol Bacchi’s approach “What is the problem represented to be” and will be guided by Arksey and O’Malley’s framework for scoping reviews and the team-based approach of Levan and colleagues. Data will include diverse and publicly available documents to capture multiple stakeholders’ perspectives on the phenomenon of interest and will be retrieved from university newsletters and legal websites using combinations of search terms adapted to specific data types. Two reviewers will independently screen, chart, analyze and synthesize the data. Disagreements will be resolved through full team discussion. - Discussion:
Despite the unprecedented nature of the mass medical mandates implemented in the postsecondary sector and their dramatic impact on millions of lives—students, faculty, staff and their families, friends and communities—the decision-making process leading to them has not been documented or appraised. By identifying, summarizing and appraising the evidence, our review should inform practices that can contribute to effective and equitable public health policies in postsecondary institutions moving forward.
Source: https://www.aimspress.com/article/doi/10.3934/publichealth.2023059
The full, 16-page publication includes an introduction to the topic of COVID-19 policies on post-secondary campuses in Canada and the US. It provides detailed context on “Debates around the medical-scientific evidence informing mass mandates” along with some background on “The corporatization of postsecondary education” and “Drivers of the policy-making process in postsecondary education”, as well as an argument for “The relevance of a critical lens in policy analysis”. Lastly, the protocol design for the ongoing study is presented, including research objectives and review questions; types, sources, and methods of data collection; and the planned approach to analysis and synthesis.
In concluding, the authors write:
To the best of our knowledge, there is a dearth of scholarly analysis concerning the decision-making process around COVID-19 policy in Canadian postsecondary institutions, despite the unprecedented scope and nature of these policies in these institutions’ history, the contested nature of the “official” medical and public health positions and their dramatic impact on the lives of millions of Canadians—students, staff, faculty, their families and the broader community. As we have argued, research on this phenomenon has largely focused on assuming as a “given” the policies that were implemented or assessing whether they “succeeded/failed” according to the assumptions and standards set by the social agents—individuals and organizations—implementing those policies, without appraising the decision-making process per se and the evidence informing this process, a gap that our scoping review will fill. By identifying, summarizing, and critically appraising both process and evidence, we aim to inform practices that can contribute to effective and equitable public health policies in postsecondary institutions moving forward.
According to the team’s ambitious timeline, we can expect further news about this research as soon as April 2024!
RECOVER19 