Description in the social sciences I

Social Science and Its Frontiers Myron P. Gutmann (bio) Mark Solovey,Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the “Other Sciences” at the National Science Foundation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2020. X+ 398pp. Figures, notes, index. $50.00. Americans often date the emergence of a strong commitment to government support of science to the launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 satellite in October 1957. That event certainly spurred policy decisions that increased federal investments in education and science, and thus is an appropriate starting point for the popular narrative about science. At the same time, policy developments of the Sputnik era built on earlier events, widely recognized by historians of science. That perspective starts the story with the presentation in July 1946 of Vannever Bush’s report, Science, The Endless Frontier, to President Truman, advocating for a large, organized federal investment in scientific research, based on the role of science and technology in the Second World War. Early efforts to enact legislation based on the Bush report failed (Truman vetoed the first bill that passed because it lacked presidential control over the appointment of the Foundation’s leadership), but in 1950 Truman signed the National Science Foundation Act, establishing an enduring basis for publicly—especially federally—funded scientific research in the United States. The debates about the creation of the National Science Foundation pitted progressives against conservatives and advocates of public and congressional control of science against advocates of exclusive control by scientists.1 One of the topics of debate—although hardly the loudest—was whether the social sciences would be included in the Foundation’s charge.2 Vannever Bush was opposed to their inclusion, sometimes arguing that they should be supported by a separate organization; on the other side, Democratic West Virginia Senator Harley M. Kilgore, a leading sponsor of a more progressive approach, supported their inclusion in the Foundation’s mission. In the end, the compromise legislation that Truman signed in 1950 did not include support for the social sciences, but at the same time did not prohibit such support. The Foundation did not totally exclude the social sciences for long; it hired sociologist Harry Alpert in 1953, and in 1954 introduced a first, extremely modest, program to support the linkage between the social and natural sciences. [End Page 396] The first Social Sciences Division was not established until 1960 (in an era in which the Foundation was divided into four scientific divisions reflecting major disciplinary categories). Later, when the Foundation was reorganized into seven directorates (three of them disciplinary, one for education, and three for administrative activities) in 1975, the Divisions of Social Sciences and Behavioral and Neural Sciences were part of an expanded Directorate for Biological, Behavioral and Social Sciences (p. 179). Only in 1991–92 did the Foundation establish a separate Directorate for the Social, Behavioral and Economic (SBE) Sciences, an organizational status that still exists today. The road from the origin of the Foundation to the creation of the SBE Directorate was not linear, with ups and downs in support for the social and behavioral sciences mostly reflecting political and institutional challenges. This history spanning the period from the first discussions of the National Science Foundation through the end of the 1980s (with an added discussion of recent events and recommendations for the future) is the topic of Mark Solovey’s Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the “Other Sciences” at the National Science Foundation. In this book he builds on his earlier book, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (2013), on extensive archival research, and on interviews with surviving participants. Social Science for What? is an impressive accomplishment, capturing the connections between partisan politics, scientific inquiry, tensions among scientific disciplines, and the institutional development of the Foundation. It is instructive for all readers, including for me, who served for four years (2009–13) as one of the Foundation’s Assistant Directors and head of the Directorate for Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). Social Science for What? articulates consistent themes that define social science at NSF, along with a lively narrative arc. To define that arc, Solovey divides the main...

Political science and other closely related social science disciplines could certainly benefit from the creation of a Directorate for the Social and Behavioral Sciences within the National Science Foundation. I present the case for such organizational restructuring on behalf of the American Political Science Association and the Western Political Science Association, and as a charter member and former President of the Social Science History Association. That a benefit would accrue from a reorganization would seem likely in the face of two organizational imperatives. First, political science and its sister disciplines need direct representation by senior officers of their own directorate in the policy making and resource allocation of at least three additional existing directorates: the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, and the Directorate for Scientific, Technological and International Affairs. The needs of political science in these three domains are similar to those of the other social sciences and are distinctly different from the needs of either the life sciences, the geosciences or the mathematical and physical sciences. Social science needs will not, and most likely cannot, be articulated by Foundation officers whose organizational responsibilities are overwhelmingly defined by the needs -and current resources-of the biosciences and whose professional backgrounds lie in one of the biosciences. We believe that the manifold resources of the Foundationprofessional and technical as well as budgetary-have not successfully addressed the needs of the social sciences in large part because the social sciences are not directly represented at the appropriate organizational level within the Foundation. The second organizational imperative stems from the need for greater organizational differentiation within the social sciences. Even though few of the social and behavioral science disciplines are as diverse as the array of subfields in chemistry or its sister disciplines, the full panoply of research specialties across the several social sciences is on a par with the diversity represented in the other substantive directorates. Many of the existing activities of the present Division of Social and Economic Science could be relocated as divisions of the new directorate. For example, without attempting to provide an organizational blueprint for the future, it may be suggested that, as with the other substantive directorates, each of the present disciplinary programs in S.E.S. might well be a division within a Social and Behavioral Science Directorate. They might be joined by a Division of Methods, Measurement and Instrumentation needed to address those problems of data generation and analysis that the disciplinary divisions have in common. Similarly, there should also be a separate division for large-scale multi-purpose data collection and resource development. A quite new division might also be established for activities centered on increasing the scientific usefulness of data generated by governmental agencies. Finally, and still illustratively, a separate division might be created for multi-disciplinary or multi-institutional projects or programs. To give greater clarity to the foregoing prescriptions, consider the following. First, with regard to representing social science needs in other directorates, the computer has become as central-and totally indispensable-to the work ways of social science as to the other sciences. And yet the central tasks for the computer are somewhat different. Certainly in contrast to mathematics, social science does much more data management of numeric data, more archiving and retrieval of non-quantitative materials, and much less sheer computation. On a quite different dimension, social science has its own version of the adaptation of the computer to data generation. In the harnessing of the computer in Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing, in improving methods of textual analysis, and in the use of the lap top computer for data collection in the field (and quite apart from use in simulation exercises), we are only beginning to exploit fully this technological wonder. As a third illustration, it can be noted that in the absence of large laboratories or research centers which bring together scientists working on common problems, the computer network is becoming an essential feature of the social scientist's life. Both the transmission of data by computer nets and inter-personal exchanges among scientists are probably more crucial for the maturing social sciences than for the more developed disciplines. Many of these and other needs of the social scientist are served indirectly and inadvertently by computer developments in other realms. However, without a new directorate in the Foundation, it seems unrealistic if not unreasonable to expect strong and direct representation of social science computing needs that should affect future Foundation policy and resource allocation. A separate Directorate for the Social and Behavioral Sciences is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition to have an impact on Foundation decisions concerning the development of computer and information science.

Health and human behavior: areas of interest common to the social and medical sciences.

Research results in the social and behavioral sciences are often conceded to be less replicable than research results in the physical sciences. However, direct empirical comparisons of the cumulativeness of research in the social and physical sciences have not been made to date. This article notes the parallels between methods used in the quantitative synthesis of research in the social and in the physical sciences. Essentially identical methods are used to test the consistency of research results in physics and in psychology. These methods can be used to compare the consistency of replicated research results in physics and in the social sciences. The methodology is illustrated with 13 exemplary reviews from each domain. The exemplary comparison suggests that the results of physical experiments may not be strikingly more consistent than those of social or behavioral experiments. The data suggest that even the results of physical experiments may not be cumulative in the absolute sense by statistical criteria. It is argued that the study of the actual cumulativeness found in physical data could inform social scientists about what to expect from replicated experiments under good conditions. Psychologists and other social scientists have often compared their fields to the natural (the hard) sciences with a tinge of dismay. Those of us in the social and behavioral sciences know intuitively that there is something softer and less cumulative about our research results than about those of the physical sciences. It is easy to chronicle the differences between soft and hard sciences that might lead to less cumulative research results in the soft sciences. One such chronicle is provided by Meehl (1978), who listed 20 such differences and went on to argue that reliance on tests of statistical significance also contributes to the poorer cumulativeness of research results in the social sciences. Other distinguished researchers have cited the pervasive presence of interactions (Cronbach, 1975) or historical influences (Gergen, 1973, 1982) as reasons not to expect a cumulative social science. Still others (Kruskal, 1978, 1981) have cited the low quality of data in the social sciences as a barrier to truly cumulative social inquiry. These pessimistic views have been accompanied by a tendency to reconceptualize the philosophy of inquiry into a format that implies less ambitious aspirations for social knowledge (e.g., Cronbach, 1975; Gergen, 1982). Cumulativeness in the scientific enterprise can mean at least two things. In the broadest sense scientific results are cumulative if empirical laws and theoretical structures build on one another so that later developments extend and unify earlier work. This idea might be called conceptual or theoretical cumulativeness. The assessment of theoretical cumulativeness must be rather subjective. A narrower and less subjective indicator of cumulativeness is the degree of agreement among replicated experiments or the degree to which related experimental results fit into a simple pattern that makes conceptual sense. This idea might be called empirical cumulativeness. The purpose of this article is to suggest that it may be possible to compare at least the empirical cumulativeness of psychological research with that of research in the physical sciences. An exemplary comparison suggests that the differences may be less striking than previously imagined. The mechanism for this comparison is derived from recent developments in methods for the quantitative synthesis of research in the social sciences. Some of the methods used in meta-analysis are analogous to methods used in the quantitative synthesis of research in the physical sciences. In particular, physicists and psychologists use analogous methods for assessing the consistency of research results, a fact that makes possible comparisons among quantitative reviews in physics and in psychology. One such comparison is reported in this article. This comparison was not chosen in a way that guarantees it to be representative of either social science research or physical science research. However, some effort was exerted to prevent the comparison from obviously favoring one domain or the other, and additional examples are provided to suggest that the case for the empirical cumulativeness of physical science could have been made to look far worse. More data would obviously be needed to support strong conclusions. It seems, however, that the obvious conclusion that the results of physical science experiments are more cumulative than those of social science experiments does not have much empirical sup-

From mobile phones and laptop computers to in vitro fertilization and social networks on the Internet, technological devices, products and services are increasingly shaping the lives of people around the world. The pervasiveness of technology and the underlying science that makes it possible has led to a certain ambivalence: most people trust that ‘science’ will eventually help them to live longer, healthier and happier lives. However, they also feel increasingly uncomfortable about certain new technologies, often those that challenge or improve on ‘nature’. Genetically modified crops, gene therapy, stem cell research, cloning, renewed interest in nuclear power: the list of controversial topics involving science and technology is growing steadily and debates on these topics regularly occupy centre stage in public and political arenas. > …the research process itself constitutes a largely overlooked opportunity for addressing social concerns Policy‐makers have responded by calling for increased attention to be paid to the ethical, legal and social aspects of scientific research and technological developments. In particular, new and emerging areas of research—such as genomics, synthetic biology and nanotechnology—have been accompanied by studies of their broader societal implications as well as public‐engagement efforts, in order to guide research and development in ways that respect societal concerns. Such attempts to shape technological trajectories have traditionally occurred both before scientific research, for example, through research policy, technology assessment or public participation, and afterwards, through regulations or market mechanisms. Although these stages are crucial points at which to intervene, the research process itself constitutes a largely overlooked opportunity for addressing social concerns. Indeed, if one acknowledges the central role that scientific research has in the innovation process, this is an area well worth examining. Shaping technological trajectories will, at some point, include shaping the very research processes that help to characterize them (Fisher et al , 2006). Social and …

Recently, initiatives to share data on peer review (Squazzoni et al, 2020) have brought about better understanding of the peer review process across different disciplines (Buljan et al, 2020, Squazzoni et al 2021a, Squazzoni et al 2021b). Some studies (Strang & Siler, 2015; Siler & Strang, 2016) examined the changes from initial submissions to journals to publication. Another study (Teplitskiy & Bakanic, 2016) explored how well peer reviews predict the article’s citation impact. A study of almost half a million peer review reports from 61 journals (Buljan et al., 2020) showed that peer review reports were longer in social science than in medical journals. It also showed that their language characteristics differed across disciplines (Buljan et al., 2020).The aim of our study was to further examine structural and linguistic differences between articles and the characteristics of the peer review process, including the language used and outcomes of peer review reports, in medicine and health sciences vs. social sciences.To select the articles we used the search engine of the Open Research Central (ORC) platform, which covers different fields, and applied the following filters: “Subject area: Medical and health sciences”, and “Subject area: Social science”. “Article type(s): Research article” filter was also applied. We ended up with 1912 medical and 477 social science articles. To create the samples of articles with clear medical/health vs. social sciences content, we excluded those with a tag for medicine and health sciences and any other disciplinary field except biology and life sciences and those with a tag both for social sciences, and biology and life sciences. This left 408 medical and 54 social science articles. Using the DOIs of filtered articles, we downloaded them manually in an XML format. Articles that had not been reviewed were excluded, yielding a total of 51 articles with a social sciences tag and 361 articles with a medicine and health sciences tag, as well as their peer review texts.We analysed them using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) text analysis software and word embeddings, a method in which words are given mathematical vector representation. To assess the differences between the articles and their reviews across medical and social sciences, we used the one-way ANOVA and post hoc Tukey’s test. For multivariate frequency distribution of the variables we used the contingency test. All analyses were carried out in JASP, version 0.14.1. Articles from medicine and health sciences and those from social sciences differed in structure. The median word count in the introduction section was 674 (IQR=308.0–637.0) for social sciences and 431 (IQR=420.5–1029.0) for medical sciences. The conclusion section was also longer in social sciences, with 263 words (IQR=135.5–516.0) vs. 94 words (IQR=64.0–168.0) in medical sciences (p<0.01, Mann Whitney). The percentage of articles with merged discussion and conclusion was higher in social sciences, whereas medical articles followed the IMRaD structure more often and contained fewer declarations and non-IMRaD sections. They also contained more figures. Linguistic analysis showed that social science articles had higher word count, higher clout, and a less positive tone.Longer wording was also dominant in peer review reports on social science articles. However, the social and medical sciences did not significantly differ in the characteristics of the peer review process and comments from all stages of review or in the outcome of the peer review process (approved, approved with reservation, or rejected) between the two disciplines. There were also no statistically significant differences in manuscript changes between the disciplines, with the exception of text changes in the introduction section that changed more in the social sciences. The review process for articles in social and medical/health sciences may not differ as much as is usually believed. This, however, may be partly owed to the use of the same ORC platform, which may have uniform policies and processes.

A healthy lifestyle is fundamental for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease and other noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Investment in primary prevention, including modification of health risk behaviors, could result in a 4-fold improvement in health outcomes compared with secondary prevention based on pharmacological treatment. The American Heart Association (AHA) emphasized the importance of lifestyle in its 2020 goals for cardiovascular health promotion and disease reduction. In addition to defining “cardiovascular health” based on criteria for blood pressure and biochemical markers (lipids and glycemia), the AHA Strategic Planning Committee further identified lifestyle characteristics of central importance: nutrition, physical activity, smoking, and maintenance of a healthy body weight.1 The World Health Organization estimated that ≈80% of NCDs could be prevented if 4 key lifestyle practices were followed: a healthy diet, being physically active, avoidance of tobacco, and alcohol intake in moderation.2 To support healthy lifestyle initiatives, major changes are necessary at the societal level to improve population health. Numerous strategies might help to create a culture that promotes and facilitates healthy behaviors, including creating laws and regulations, mounting large-scale public awareness and education campaigns, implementing local community programs, and providing individual counseling.3 Physicians are uniquely positioned to encourage individuals to adopt healthy lifestyle behaviors: Approximately 80% of Americans visit their primary care physician at least once a year. Physicians directly communicate with their patients during clinical encounters across numerous settings, and research indicates that patients highly value recommendations provided by their physicians.4,5 However, data further indicate that lifestyle counseling does not routinely occur in physicians’ offices, thereby representing a lost opportunity. Physicians report that they perform lifestyle counseling during ≈34% of clinic visits.4 Patients, in turn, report an even lower frequency of physician lifestyle counseling. For example, obese patients reported receiving physical activity and …

The News of the Week article that reports on Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) questioning the need to fund social science research at the National Science Foundation is alarming and shortsighted (“Senate panel chair asks why NSF funds social sciences,” 12 May, p. [829][1]). Social science research is at the fundamental core of basic research and has much to contribute to the economic viability of the United States. Twenty years of direct and jointly funded social and ecosystem science research at Colorado State University's Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory has produced deep insights into environmental and societal impacts of political upheaval, land use, and climate change in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Beyond greatly advancing our understanding of the coupled human-environmental system, the partnership of social and ecosystem science has brought scientists and decision-makers together to begin to develop solutions to difficult problems. Insights from the social sciences about the vulnerability, sustainability, and resilience of social and environmental systems have greatly increased our understanding of the complex interactions of the world on which we depend. The contributions of social and ecological science for data analyses associated with spatial relationships, transfer of goods and services, valuation, and decision-making processes have improved our understanding of how human activities are altering environmental systems worldwide. These findings have become the core of policy and development decisions used throughout the world. It is critical that the NSF support social science funding and that, as budget decisions are made, the social science allocation should move forward equally with increases as in other basic and applied research. Failure to do so will further hinder U.S. competitiveness in the future and will slow transfer of knowledge and usefulness to the public. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.312.5775.829a

In the last century, a paradigm shift in the scientific field has transformed our perspective on issues and events, our ability to discern cause-and-effect relationships, and our approach to them. This shift has led to radical changes in the scientific field and has accelerated the development of social and educational sciences, enabling such methods to become more prevalent than quantitative ones in the social and educational sciences. As a result, qualitative and mixed method approaches have increasingly replaced quantitative methods, giving rise to various new fields within the social sciences and providing diverse research opportunities. This evolution in research methods has also led to the proliferation of books on research methodologies in these fields. To reach a global audience, these books are predominantly written in English as the Lingua Franca and later translated into national languages if needed, or they are initially written in the native languages of the authors. The choice of translated books can be influenced by the preferences of researchers or translators, gaps in the national literature, the juvenile and unsettled nature of the national literature experiencing significant changes, or their unfamiliarity with current literary innovations. This article examines the justifications provided by translators and translation editors for translating books on research methods in social and educational sciences from English into Turkish within the framework of themes regarding the formation of poly-system theory, as coined by Itamar Even-Zohar as a functionalist pioneer in translation studies, newly emerging in social sciences in the last century. The content analysis, a qualitative research design for document analysis, was utilized in the research through using criterion sampling and maximum diversity, by selecting the prefaces of the translated versions of 20 research methods books by different authors and publishing houses between 2013 and 2022 and exclusively focusing on social sciences and educational sciences. Examining translators’ and editor’s statements deductively through the themes from the poly-system theory, we concluded that there are gaps and turning points in this field both in the national literature and in the world literature, that the relevant literature is not yet settled and trying to become primary and canonized via translated books, resulting in an increasing interest in the field.

The integration of natural and social sciences has been recognized as a key aspect of Earth System (E.S.) research, a cross-disciplinary field involving the study of the geosphere, the biosphere, and society (IGBP, 2006; Leemans et al., 2009; Pfeiffer, 2008; Reid et al., 2010; Young, 2008). Because of societal and political correlates between environmental change and socio-economic development, the study of the Earth System has been increasingly ascribed social and political dimensions emphasizing the need for greater collaboration between the social and natural sciences (Beven, 2011; Kates et al., 2001; Leemans et al., 2009; Reid et al., 2010; Saloranta, 2001; Shackley et al., 1998). The problem of inter-disciplinary articulation between the social and natural sciences is not specific to E.S. research, and its challenges can be traced back to the very origins of the notions of science and social science (e.g. Comte, 1830-1842; de Alvarenga et al., 2011; Latour, 2000, 2004). To a degree, these challenges could be explained in terms of the increasing gulf between two cultures – those of the sciences and the humanities – as suggested by C.P. Snow (1905-1980) in an instigating essay (Snow, 1990 [1959]), due to the high specialization in science and education, and, not less important, to a “tendency to let our social forms to crystallise” (Snow, 1990: 172). More to the point, the increasing importance attributed to the problem has motivated a growing number of analyses concerning the high level of specialization and fragmentation of science and university education (e.g. de Alvarenga et al., 2011; Moraes, 2005; Snow, 1990), but also the societal and political questions concerning research agendas (e.g. Alves, 2008; Kates et al., 2001; Latour, 2000, 2004; Schor, 2008), the disparities between developed and developing countries not just in affluence level, but also in research capacity (Kates et al, 2001; Pfeiffer, 2008; Schor, 2008), and, finally, from a more methodological point of view, the multiplicity of theoreticomethodological perspectives admitted by the social sciences (e.g. de Alvarenga et al., 2011; Floriani et al, 2011; Giddens, 2001; Leis, 2011; Moraes, 2005; Oliveira Filho, 1976; Raynaut & Zanoni, 2011; Weffort, 2006). Yet, in the E.S. field the problem of bringing together social and natural sciences has been a permanent and still unresolved challenge (Alves et al., 2007; Alves, 2008; Geoghegan et al.,

Imagining a Place for Sustainability Management: An Early Career Call for Action

The schools of natural science, especially since Newton, have continuously influenced the social science in two ways. As seen in the example of the systems theory or social Darwinism, many social scientists have got insights from the ideas of natural science. It is quite natural that a scientist discovers a new way of thinking or an implication from a different academic discipline; however, the mainstream social scientists have trapped themselves by confining their science with the methodology obtained from natural science in order to validate it. This paper aims to reveal this methodological trap of social science by showing the influence of natural science to social science in the context of validation and by contrasting the differences between social and natural science issue by issue. The issues raised in this paper include the possibility of the monology and the normal science in social science, the debate over fact-value dichotomy and obtaining objectivity in social science, and the role of science and methodological reductionist issue. Considering such idiosyncrasies of social science, it is claimed that social science should keep its methodological uniqueness and autonomy.

Basic and strategic research for infectious disease control at the interface of the life, health and social sciences

In this paper I have tried to argue that the two widely used paradigmsof Individualism in Western social science, and Collectivism in Soviet socialscience, are not appropriate for Islamic social science on account of thesecularism (disregard of revelation) of the former and the "scientific atheism"of the latter. I have funher tried to argue that the hypothetico-deductive andempirical methodology (often called logical positivism) of natural and physicalscience is not appropriate for social and behavioral science in general, andIslamic social behavioral science in particular. It would be more fitting toregard the various disciplines of social and behavioral science as moral sciencesin order to incorporate the values, morals, and purposes of society in theorybuildingand hypothesis-formation. Accordingly, I am arguing in favor ofa moral explanation of human behavior and social processes. A moralexplanation is one which seeks to discover the causes (immediate antecedents)as well as reasons (including motives and intentions) behind human behaviorwith the greater responsibility for the explanation resting with the latter.A paradigm, conceptual framework, or what is called grand theory isessential for the formulation of theories in various fields of social and behavioralsciences, on the one hand, and for guiding empirical research. on the other.Western social science and Soviet social science have their respectiveparadigms. The immediate need of Islamic social science is to construct adistinguishable paradigm of its own. I have tried to formulate a list of theunderlying concepts of such a possible paradigm, conceptual framework,or grand theory, but not such a theory per se.Finally, I have made the suggestion that, inasmuch as the understandingof human behavior is our goal, the social and behavioral scientist could enhancethe understanding of human and social phenomena by trying to understandhis/her own motives, behavior, and actions ...

Communication Climate as Predictor of Perceived Corporate Governance and Organizational Success