Inquiry concentrates where measurement is easy rather than where the answer is likely to be.
Named from the drunkard searching for keys under the lamppost. It is why so much social science measures what surveys capture, and why administrative data reshapes fields when it becomes available.
In practice
- A firm optimises the checkout because it has checkout data, and never measures the customers who left before the catalogue finished loading.
- A ministry evaluates the one programme that had a survey attached, and the three that did not are written up as lacking evidence.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- The catalogue of predictable errors