Characteristic of the compiling of evidence within the field of employment policy - will set-theory improve this compiling of evidence?

Title: Characteristic of the compiling of evidence within the field of employment policy – will set-theory improve this compiling of evidence? The problem formulation for this master thesis sounds as following: What type of knowledge does the Ministry of Employment develop through its evidence strategy? – And how can set-theory improve the compiling of evidence? The Ministry of Employment is viewed as a particularly suitable case to explore the evidence strategies developed within the area of welfare policies. The empirical ground for this thesis is in form of evaluations created, or funded by the Danish Agency for Labour Market and Recruitment. The thesis explores five different approached to causality, these are the neo-Humean regularity, counterfactual, manipulation, set-theory and mechanism and capacity. The thesis own compiling of evidence will follow a combination of the neo-Humean approach and the mechanism and capacity approach towards causality. The Ministry of Employment’s compiling of evidence is characterised by its rich application of different data-collection methods. Subsequently, the knowledge being produced by these methods have a narrow focus. The thesis finds the neo-Human approach to causality to be the most dominant approach among the evaluations analysed, regardless of the aim and data-collection method of the evaluation. The mechanism- and capacity approach and the counterfactual and manipulation approach are applied for more specific evaluation criteria.The Ministry of Employment demands diversity-oriented knowledge, but the Ministry does not fully develop this. The thesis recommends the use of set-theory in order to advance the measurement of validity for diverse-oriented aims. Set-theory will furthermore improve the internal validi-ty by making a triangulated mixed-method design more accessible. However, the use of triangulation will not advance the reliability, compared to a pragmatic mixed-method design. The external validity in the compiling of evidence can be strengthened by means of focusing on case-selection in both the qualitative and experimental evaluations. By applying a set-theory or a mechanism- and capacity approach the case-selection will be broad to attention.This thesis recommends to apply approaches to causality, which have its strength in regards to objectives of cognition and data-collection methods. A greater emphasis on evidence typologies could thereby be a solution. However, this calls for evidence typologies, which aim at targeting approach to causality rather than focusing on data-collection methods only.