Statistical and Data Literacy, a practitioner's view for policy-making: How to provide independent, objective and authoritative data and information for policy-making

Abstract

Data literacy is the ability to search, read, understand, create and communicate with data; to ask the right questions about the data; to know what can or cannot be said; to explain a story, or better, provide insights with data, in the form of infographics or other visually appealing elements. The respective knowledge profile can be referred to as that of a data scientist. Within policy-making a key question is what role the data scientist, working with or for policy-makers, should play. Moreover, the skills and capabilities they should master are crucial to understanding, for instance, what type of information policy-makers need, or what is the right format to communicate data and statistics to them. Likewise, for policy-makers it is important to recognise the skills needed to understand the messages deriving from data, and how data scientists can help them to understand such data. This article gives a practitioner's view on data literacy for policy-making. It highlights the steps that a data scientist follows to communicate insights from data and statistics in the form of data visualisation and infographics. It looks at the tasks performed by a data scientist when preparing such papers. The ability to undertake such tasks can be regarded as essential skills or know-how to help those who cannot work effectively with data.