Policy Analysis Assignment -

Project Name: Development of policy options for Early Researchers Awards (ERA) and finding scope for mid-career researchers in Ontario.

Deliverable Description - Following the ERA performance analysis report and consultation feedbacks, the student will perform a critical analysis to find -

• Is the program design doing what it intended to achieve?
• Does it still have the right focus?
• Is it having the desired impact?
• Are there programmatic gaps?

AND

Based on the Naylor report, the student will recommend policy measures need to be taken to boost further research and innovation in Ontario targeting Early and Mid-career researchers.

Scenario

Ontario is supporting researchers to make new discoveries that will benefit people, through funding for projects across the province. Ontario's support will help researchers across the province build teams, and cover the costs of research equipment and facilities, leading to new products and services, companies and jobs in fields like health care, advanced manufacturing, clean tech and computer technology.

Ontario has three flagship programs that support world-class academic research at its universities, colleges, and research hospitals: Early Researcher Awards (ERA), Ontario Research Fund - Research Excellence (ORF-RE) and Ontario Research Fund - Research Infrastructure (ORF-RI).

Investing in research and innovation is part of Ontario's plan to create fairness and opportunity during this period of rapid economic change. The plan includes a higher minimum wage and better working conditions, free tuition for hundreds of thousands of students, easier access to affordable child care, and free prescription drugs for everyone under 25 through the biggest expansion of medicare in a generation.

Project Details: For this assignment you will work on Early Researcher Awards (ERA) only.

Consider yourself as a 'Policy Consultant' working for the Ontario Government! You have to advise on the current design of these programs, their breadth and effectiveness, as well as gaps and how to address them. More specifically, you have attempted to answer these key questions:

• Who are the most likely ERA recipients? Those in the earliest stages of their career? Are those who are closest to the eligibility limit the most likely to win an award?
• Did the ERAs help the early career researchers advance their career in Ontario?
• Do the ERA application eligibility criteria need changes allowing to create a new, separate option for mid-career researchers or focus on those in the earliest stages of their careers (like 1-5 years post-PhD)?

In addition, you have been tasked with advising on how the programs should adapt to new approaches and opportunities, with a focus on supports for early and mid-career Ontario researchers. Your mandate is to undertake the review within the current status/allocation for the programs.

In this report, you will present the findings from the review of available data (quantitative) collected earlier (performance measures analysis) and the feedback from consultations with stakeholders (qualitative).

ASSIGNMENT TASKS - Qualitative Analysis Activities:

Generate themes/code, find out the weighted percentage and show in a table (word frequency, count, and same words/theme) and make a word cloud in Nvivo.

Key Issue to consider:

Remember, our priority is to locate the words/quotes for the theme/code which fulfill the objectives (need, success) of the ERA and scope for a potential mid-career program.

Most important issue here is to answer our 3 questions. Whatever work you do must match with their answer.

The Nvivo needs to be used only for the General feedback, ERA, ECR/MCR (Early-career researchers, Mid-career researchers) rows in the consultation excel documents. 

You also need to go through the quotes manually and generate appropriate codes/themes and then find the similar to match for Nvivo work.

Tree Map and Cluster Analysis are not mandatory. The requirement is very specific. So, be precise. We are not trying to explore anything rather finding supportive points to our quantitative works.

Attachment:- Assignment Files.rar