Public opinion: Your blogs

Why is it so hard to be soft?

Soft and hard are strange words. They carry a lot of baggage, a lot of it gender-based. And much of it involves value-judgements that are questionable at best.

I've been thinking a bit about this as I've been researching the second part of a series of features I'm writing for New Start on the future of regeneration in the UK. Among the documents I've been looking at is a discussion paper from the Young Foundation's Local Wellbeing project, and some interesting facts and figures on the economic and social outcomes of government policies (especially from the weighty but worthwhile Towards a More Equal Society?, essential reading from John Hills and friends at LSE).

In policyspeak people talk a lot about soft and hard outcomes, and soft and hard evidence. The main difference is that 'hard' is stuff you can attach numbers to. The unstated value-judgement here is that hard is better: hard is firm, it's what you can trust, while soft is slippery and malleable.

This matters because politicians (and their critics) are obsessed with 'hard' measures. These are the values of the auditor: look at the numbers first. So a project to help people into work is judged on the numbers of people who go through the doors, how many of them get jobs, and how long they stay in those jobs. 'Soft' measures would look at how they feel about their lives, how confident they are, what skills they've developed, how their attitudes have changed, and the impact on their relationships (see this summary, for example). Hard is quantitative; soft is qualitative. And just as quantitative research is generally held in higher esteem than qualitative, and the econometrist held in greater awe than the ethnographer, so policy is judged mainly on 'hard' measures.

We shouldn't be so macho about being hard. Here are a few thoughts using two other definitions of hard and soft: hard as in difficult, soft as in foolish (and while both of those have negative connotations, it's interesting how people tend to read their value-judgements across from one definition to another).

So:

It's hard to measure the quality of a person's life. But you'd have to be a bit soft to think you could do it entirely by calculating their income.

It's hard to assess the success of a policy against a range of desirables, such as economic output, sustainability and equality. But you'd have to be a bit soft to think the one that's easiest to measure numerically is by definition a good proxy for all the others.

It's hard to measure how worthwhile and rewarding a person's job is, and harder still to measure it across a workforce. But you'd have to be a bit soft to think that the net number of jobs was more important than the sense of self-worth, motivation and aspiration people feel in doing them.

It's hard to calculate the value of a cultural asset like a theatre or art gallery or public artwork or live music venue. But you'd have to be a bit soft to think you could do it just by bums on seats or spending on merchandise and tickets.

It's hard to calculate how people feel about where they live and how involved they are in their communities. But you'd have to be a bit soft to imagine the price of houses or the proportion of people voting will tell you the whole story.

As we get nearer the election, expect numbers to dominate the arguments. Numbers are great, especially if you have lots of them. But quantity isn't a substitute for quality - it's a different way of measuring different things. If you're tempted to assume it's better, remember the old saying about lies, damned lies and statistics.