Closing remarks by Hans-Peter Blossfeld from University of Bamberg, Germany at the EXCEPT final conference

In his closing speech Hans-Peter Blossfeld raised a list of important remarks regarding social research and policy implications. He talked on the importance of context and historic development to understand why the same policies have different effect in different countries. He went on to talk about the importance to differentiate among different groups of young people. finally, he discussed why implementation of policy recommendations based on social research is often difficult and suggested the need to focus on evaluation research.

“Policy making has to do with power, power struggles, with different actors, with values, with normative issues, and sometimes it is completely different from what we could recommend. There is also an issue, as we have herd here, that there is a trade-off between different goals […] And the most important is that people are strategic, they react strategically to policy making. […] And what happens very often, it does not work if things are implemented as planned.”