Sub-national governments across the United States implement a variety of policies to address large societal problems and needs. Many policies are picked up or adopted in other states. This process is called policy diffusion and allows researchers to analyze and compare social, political, and contextual characteristics that lead to adopting certain policies, as well as the efficacy of these policies once adopted. In this paper, we introduce PDViz, a visual analytics approach for social scientists to dynamically analyze the policy diffusion history and underlying patterns. It is designed for analyzing and answering a list of research questions and tasks posed by social scientists in prior work. To evaluate our system, we present two usage scenarios and conduct interviews with domain experts in political science. The interviews highlight that PDViz provides the result of policy diffusion patterns that align with their domain knowledge as well as the potential to be a learning tool for students and researchers to understand the concept of policy diffusion.
翻译:美国各个州和地区实行各种政策来解决大规模的社会问题和需求。许多政策被其他州采用或采纳。这个过程被称为政策扩散,它允许研究人员分析和比较导致采用某些政策的社会、政治和背景特征,以及这些政策一旦被采用的有效性。在本文中,我们介绍了 PDViz,这是一种用于社会科学家动态分析政策扩散历史和潜在模式的可视化分析方法。它旨在分析和回答社会科学家在之前的工作中提出的一系列研究问题和任务。为了评估我们的系统,我们介绍了两个使用场景,并对政治学领域的领域专家进行了访谈。访谈强调了 PDViz 提供的与其领域知识相符合的政策扩散模式的结果,以及成为学生和研究人员理解政策扩散概念的学习工具的潜力。