Erik Johnston & Yushim Kim
Center for Policy Informatics, School of Public Affairs
Faculty spotlight
Erik Johnston and Yushim Kim
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 Erik Johnston and Yushim Kim |
Do you have a question for Johnston or Kim regarding their research or areas of expertise?
Submit your questions here:
Question:
What does the term “policy informatics” mean, and why is it important?
Answer:
ERIK JOHNSTON: There are two sides of the policy informatics coin. First, decision makers and policy analysts face a constant influx of information, conflicting values, and political pressures.
There is a growing need for navigating the vast amounts of complex information effectively, for identifying patterns, for building justifications, for ensuring transparency of influences, and for accounting for uncertainty and risk. If we can effectively extract the useful patterns of complex policy landscapes, policy debates can be much more informed and inclusive, thus yielding more widely accepted decisions that will thoughtfully guide the future of our communities.
In the same way that the microscope enabled advances in biology and the telescope led to new discoveries in cosmology, computation is enabling great leaps in policy informatics.
The second side of the policy informatics coin is to challenge our assumptions of what types of policy and governance infrastructures are possible because of advances in technology.
A governance infrastructure is the collection of technologies and systems, people, policies, and relationships that interact to support governing activities. A healthy infrastructure of any type is invisible, functioning in the background in support of higher-level activities, and usually only garnering attention as it starts to breakdown.
Efforts to use technology to facilitate current government activities, Governance 2.0, include advances in participatory policy-making, citizen engagement, e-voting, and coordinating collaborative governance efforts. While Governance 2.0 does ease the stress on our governance infrastructure, it does not address the source of those pressures. Novel instances of smart governance infrastructures already exist and are regularly emerging in distributed organizations and online communities.
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Question:
Can you share a few examples of how the Center for Policy Informatics has helped to create new ways of questioning, understanding and solving problems in policy?
Answer:
YUSHIM KIM: I have studied an issue of fraud in public service delivery programs. My research has experimentally investigated the deterrent effect of punishment on wrongdoing using computer simulations.
This approach helps me more thoroughly examine existing social science theories, as well as draw relevant policy insights for current problems. My most recent study on risk communication regarding novel H1N1 flu is a logical extension of the effort to understand opportunities, choices, and consequences in a different context.
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Question:
What types of policy are you involved in or particularly interested in examining through your research?
Answer:
YUSHIM KIM: The main context of my research has been public health and human services. They include the Ohio Women, Infants, and Children program at the Ohio Department of Health, as well as Medicaid, and long-term care programs. These programs are very complex in structure, and policy issues are dynamic in nature.
I am interested in understanding how undesirable events occur in those programs and how to respond to the issue via policy instruments. A unique aspect of my approach is that I seriously consider how players in the program formulate, perceive, and react to policy actions, and I attempt to gain insights explicitly considering these aspects in research models. I think this is a necessary condition to design effective policies in the programs.
ERIK JOHNSTON: One focus of my research has been to increase effectiveness of civic collaborations for delivering heath services to communities.
There is a growing trend for communities to work with nonprofits, health organizations, and other community leaders to address the problems within one’s own communities. These approaches have shown the potential to be far more effective than when the same programs are mandated from the state or national government, however, the likelihood to achieve that potential is hit-and-miss.
My research uses a simulation to model the collaborative process to identify the critical periods in growing civic collaborations, and tests the interventions that can nudge them more regularly into the hit category.
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Question:
Yushim, you recently finished a research project that aims to improve the way health practitioners communicate risks to the public during a pandemic. Please tell us more about the study and what you learned.
Answer:
Risk communication is a crucial means in averting an emergency situation such as the outbreak or spread of pandemic influenza. People perceive the situation differently depending upon their previous experience or proximity to threats, and go through a social confirmation process to validate their perception or interpretation of the situation.
Without understanding social dimensions of people’s perception and reactions, it is difficult to design, plan, and test effective risk communication strategies.
Arizona’s Department of Health Services has partnered with the ASU Decision Theater to improve their planning on risk communication by better understanding the public’s perception and reaction to a current spread of pandemic influenza.
On Nov. 9, policy makers and planners, especially those in charge of public relation and risk communication, got together in a workshop to develop a strategy to effectively cope with the progress of novel H1N1 flu, analyze gaps in current planning, and address continuity of operations issues.
Our research team presented the result of a public survey on the recent flu outbreak in order to help health professionals come up with effective risk communication message pathways. Ironically, a major take-home message from the workshop for me was that we need to know how to clean up outdated messages before sending out new messages. This may reduce confusion and crisis during an emergency.
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Question:
Erik, you’ll be a keynote speaker at an advanced research workshop for NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in December. What do you plan to discuss, and how might members of NATO use that information to help societies?
Answer:
There is a push in a lot of fields, including health policy and legal studies, for evidenced-based justifications. The focus on my talk in Zagreb is to open up the conversation of what evidence can and should be included in these discussions.
Emerging fields of research provide insights on networks, complex systems, and bottom-up processes that are not as established as what is normally involved in these discussions. My talk is to identify when and how to use these new types of research and discuss what challenges still remain.
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Question:
You’re both collaborating with the University of Virginia on a research project called “the Sustainability Game.” What does that title mean, and what do you hope to accomplish?
Answer:
YUSHIM KIM: This project aims to develop a collaborative decisional environment that simulates managerial decision-making focused on making strategic choices without compromising principles of sustainability.
We hope to learn (1) whether participation in the Sustainability Game moderates/mediates managerial decision making vis-à-vis best practices for effective decision making related to water resource sustainability, (2) what roles collaborative technology plays in influencing group decision-making behavior when faced with conflicting individual and collective goal/incentives, and (3) how the individual and collective performance of the group for improving social outcomes is influenced from varying environmental conditions.
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Short bio:
Erik Johnston, Ph.D. (Co-Director of the Center for Policy Informatics)
Johnston is charged with building capacity in Policy Informatics at ASU so that as technology, growth, and scarcity challenge traditional assumptions of governance, we will have the tools to understand and thoughtfully design technology-enabled governance infrastructures that remove barriers to collective action, and leverage the participation of diverse communities to address our challenges.
He is an assistant professor in the ASU School of Public Affairs and an affiliated faculty at ASU’s Decision Theater.
Johnston earned a Ph.D. in Information and a Graduate Certificate in Complex Systems from the University of Michigan. He has a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Science in Information Technology. His undergraduate research was in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, merging his B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Psychology.
Yushim Kim, Ph.D.
Kim's research focuses on the tension between traditional rational analysis and complexity approaches to policy problems, aiming to better inform policy decisions in the provision of public services.
Kim earned a Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 2006. She is an assistant professor at the School of Public Affairs, a core faculty of the Center for Policy Informatics, and an affiliated faculty at the Decision Theater at ASU.
Prior to her position at ASU, Kim worked as a researcher for the Ohio Women, Infants, and Children program at the Ohio Department of Health for five years and a postdoctoral researcher at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University, taking part in an evaluation research of welfare (TANF) demonstration project in Ohio.
