When Value is Created but There is No Record: An Eyewitness Account of Public Value Creation in a Student Resource Officer Program

Abstract

Conceptualizing and measuring public value presents many challenges for researchers, particularly in those cases where the program being evaluated has visible expenses and hard to quantify outputs or outcomes. Program stakeholders might not even recognize the public value (PV) they are creating. PV theory lacks empirical research and faces the possibility of theoretical stagnation. Efforts at measuring PV have not yielded consensus. This study employs ethnography to investigate how an external observer sees the PV being created by the school resource officer (SRO) program. This paper reports the key findings from a case study into the value delivered by a controversial public program, a co-operative initiative between a regional police service and the region’s educational system. This evaluation comprised ten ride alongs with SRO program officers over a five-month period. Forty-one stories of PV being created were observed, which were then grouped into six themes/focused codes. In addition to the program’s desired outcome of building safer schools, this paper identifies five other types of PV creation. These outcomes represent important contributions to the public and allow for the potential comparison of how tax dollars are spent, informing future allocation of funds and potentially saving good programs.

Keywords:

• Public value
• ethnography
• management
• measurement

Notes

1 Within the Canadian Criminal Justice System diversion refers to a variety of programs that seek to avoid the formal processing of a juvenile offender who takes accountability by means other than the laying of criminal charges and a trial.

2 https://ourworldindata.org/government-spending.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Public Safety Canada.

Notes on contributors

Gregory Dole

Gregory Dole is a research fellow at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Presently, he has been awarded a MITACS research scholarship to pursue public safety research and how the public perception of public safety in Canada is influenced by Canadian media. His research focuses on public sector management as well as public value creation and its measurement. Prior to becoming an academic, Gregory worked in sports management, most recently as an HR professional scouting professional basketball leagues around the world for the National Basketball Association’s Minnesota Timberwolves franchise.

Linda Duxbury

Linda Duxbury has completed a major study on Balancing Work and Family in the public, private, and not for profit sectors; Management Support (What is it and Why does it Matter?); generational differences in work values; the impact of office technology such as email; employee well-being; work role overload; and workforce change. Dr. Duxbury also conducts research which evaluates the organizational and individual impacts of email, portable offices, smartphones, telework, flexible work arrangements and change management and studying what makes a “supportive” manager. She has completed three national studies (1991, 2001, 2012) on work-life balance in which over 70,000 Canadian employees participated. She has also just completed a major study on balancing work, childcare, and eldercare (n = 5,000) and is currently working with the Conference Board of Canada on a study of how to motivate change in the development and implementation of policies and practices in support of balancing work and caregiving. In addition, a lot of Dr. Duxbury’s research in recent years has been done in the police sector both in Canada and international. This research focuses on employee well-being and the sustainability of policing in Canada.

Craig Bennell

Craig Bennell is the Director of the Police Research Lab. Craig received his B.Sc. in Psychology from the University of Alberta (Canada) and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Liverpool (UK), where he studied under the supervision of Professor David Canter. Craig is currently a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University with a cross-appointment to the School of Linguistics and Language Studies. In addition, he is a member of the Forensic Psychology Research Centre. He is a previous President of the Society for Police and Criminal Psychology and a previous Editor of the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology. He is also a founding member of the Crime Linkage International Network based out of Birmingham, UK, and a partner in the Canadian Society of Evidence Based Policing.