📚 Save Big on Books! Enjoy 10% off when you spend £100 and 20% off when you spend £200 (or the equivalent in supported currencies)—discount automatically applied when you add books to your cart before checkout! 🛒

Copyright

Ilaria Pretelli;

Published On

2025-05-09

Page Range

pp. 309–344

Language

  • English

Print Length

36 pages

9. Policy

A brief guide to understanding and influencing real-world decision making

Chapter of: A Field Guide to Cross-Cultural Research on Childhood Learning: Theoretical, Methodological, Practical, and Ethical Considerations for an Interdisciplinary Field(pp. 309–344)
This chapter focuses on one often overlooked outcome of behavioral research: its potential to guide policymakers and local actors in designing projects with real-world impact. Research impact is not only of interest to funding agencies and university hiring committees. It is also a sincere concern for many researchers, but we often lack the tools to effectively interact with policymakers. In this chapter we provide researchers with a general understanding of the policy world, provide examples of real-world interventions, and outline pathways by which researchers working in education, psychology, and anthropology can influence real-world outcomes. Much charitable action focuses on children, and research on children’s learning across cultures can provide important avenues to make this action more culturally appropriate, effective, and ultimately beneficial to children across the globe.

Contributors

Ilaria Pretelli

(author)
Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse at Toulouse School of Economics

Ilaria Pretelli is an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Toulouse School of Economics & University of Toulouse Capitole, France. She is interested in the evolution of human life history, with a focus on the emergence of childhood, learning, and cooperative breeding. She carried out her doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. She has done f ieldwork on the island of Pemba, Zanzibar. Her research combines cross-cultural, statistical, and observational methods to study the evolution of human behavior.

Stephen Asatsa

(contributions by)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1045-2583
https://cuea.edu/FASS/?personnel=dr-stephen-asatsa

Stephen Asatsa holds a PhD in Counselling Psychology and is Senior Lecturer at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Kenya. He researches Indigenous knowledge systems with a focus on decolonization of theory, research, and practice. He has published on traditional mourning rituals, traditional marriage rites, traditional circumcision curriculum and use of taboos in behavior regulation. He contributes to multidisciplinary research collaboration networks globally, specifically on personality psychology, cultural evolution, child development, and trauma and death literacy.

Tatjana Puschkarsky

(contributions by)

Tatjana Puschkarsky has worked with hunter-gatherer and other Indigenous communities in Africa and Latin America for more than ten years. In 2015, she co-founded OrigiNations (www.origi nations.org), an NGO offering social spaces for Indigenous youth to strengthen their own capacities, determine their own priorities, and develop strategies to support their communities. These often include initiatives to safeguard their cultural and natural heritage, promote intergenerational knowledge transmission, and design alternative education models adapted to their own culture.