Social Science Questions Research Articles

Communities of Communication: Making Sense of the “Social” in Social Media

As social media usage permeates people's lives, an increasing portion of their daily behavior leaves digital traces to be used by researchers. Social scientists can hope to gain new insight into the previously hidden but digitally recorded aspects of our digital social lives. Beyond aggregate and individual-level studies of user behavior, the digital traces also enable scientific examination of the structure of social interaction through networks. At the same time, the large scale and networked nature of social media data pose a new set of challenges to be overcome through the development of sound methodologies. We take stock of current methodological promises and challenges in social media analysis. Community detection, a set of methods for the discovery of closely knit groups, is then presented as an intermediary step that enables application of existing traditional and network analytical approaches in a smaller setting more suited to social scientific questions. In closing, we argue that this network proximity-based clustering is often more useful for social media analysis than demographic grouping.

Does Wealth Inequality Matter for Growth? A Look at the Uber-Rich

A fundamental question in social sciences relates to the effect of wealth inequality on economic growth. Yet, in tackling the question, researchers have had to use income as a proxy for wealth. We derive a global measure of wealth inequality from Forbes magazine's listing of billionaires and compare its effect on growth to the effects of income inequality and poverty. We find that wealth inequality reduces economic growth, but when we control for the fact that some billionaires acquired wealth through political connections, the effect of politically connected wealth inequality is negative, while politically unconnected wealth inequality, income inequality, and initial poverty have no significant effect.

Towards a genetically informed approach in the social sciences: Strengths and an opportunity

Researchers agree that heritable effects influence almost all traits of interest for social science. A corollary of ubiquitous heritability is that measurement and control of genetic differences is essential for basic and applied social science. Despite this, remarkably few studies in the social sciences use genetically informative samples. Here we discuss how complex-trait behavior genetics can be used more effectively to address a range of social science questions, including multivariate genetic modeling, discordant twin designs, studies of gene-environment interaction, and adoption studies. We next advocate a concerted effort to build a new openly accessible resource to increase the utilization of genetically informative designs in social science research. Specific criteria for this proposed resource are defined and include full coverage of socio-economic status, multiple and complementary family, environmental, and genetic relationships, an open and extensible method for low–cost testing, and an open-access data repository. We suggest the cost would be moderate and returns high, generating benefits for many hundreds of researchers, maximizing impact for funders, and increase the rate of scientific progress in social science.

The durability of private sector-led marine conservation: A case study of two entrepreneurial marine protected areas in Indonesia

This paper investigates the durability of entrepreneurial marine protected areas (EMPAs) by exploring the role of the private sector in marine conservation. Set within a wider set of social science questions around the marine protected areas as negotiated interventions, we focus on whether and how tourism entrepreneurs can instill a long-term vision for marine conservation, funding and management, thereby overcoming commonly cited implementation and enforcement failures in state-led marine parks. The analysis is based on an empirical comparison of the Yayasan Karang Lestari coral restoration project in Pemuteran on the Northwest coast of Bali, and the marine tourism park around the island of Gili Trawangan off the west coast of Lombok in Indonesia. Our results show that the private sector is able to increase awareness of conservation amongst tourists and coastal communities, provide new income alternatives, and provide financial capacity to support marine conservation activities. It does not, however, appear to have the capacity to create durable, institutionalised arrangements without state support. These findings feed into a wider discussion on the formation of EMPAs, the role of alternative organisational structures and technologies in facilitating change in coastal areas, and how traditionally economic concepts such as entrepreneurship can contribute to a wider understanding of marine conservation governance.

The Challenge of a Theologically Fruitful Method for Studying African Christian Ethics: The Role of the Human Sciences

Abstract There are attempts from different theological circles to keep the debate on inculturation ethics alive. Such attempts seek to contribute towards the development of inculturation ethics as an important area of study and its acceptance as a valuable source of Christian moral sensibility and practice. This essay joins the discourse by focusing on the methodological challenges involved in the study of inculturation ethics and proposes that a ‘critical appropriation’ of knowledge from the social sciences could yield a fruitful theological method for the study of African Christian ethics. Inculturation itself presupposes certain social scientific questions which cannot be ignored. The essay therefore suggests that the challenges and suspicions associated with attempts to adapt knowledge from the social sciences for the study of philosophical and theological questions dwindle in the face of the theological fruitful method that such an approach can generate.

Who benefits? A critical reflection of children and young people’s participation in sensitive research

This article aims to contribute to debates about the current orthodoxy in relation to involving young people as participants in social research. This article will reflect on the increasing trend of including young people to greater degrees in social science research and questions whether ‘user involvement’ necessarily benefits the users or produces ‘better’ research. The dilemmas encountered in establishing and working with a Young People’s Advisory Group for a research project on young people’s experiences of violence in their intimate relationships are discussed in a way that illustrates the complexity of achieving benefits both for the young people and for the research.

Making Drill Down Analysis of the Economy a Reality

To address core questions in social science, analysts need to be able to drill down from key aggregates (as examples, economic indicators like productivity, job creation, and unemployment) to the person and business level with rich contextual information about person and business characteristics. Such drill down capability need to be accessible to the social science research and policy communities without jeopardizing the privacy and confidentiality of person and business level data. Much progress has already been made but there are significant bureaucratic, legal, and methodological challenges to achieve the vision of drill down analysis.

Challenges for Social Sciences: Institutions and Economic Development

Why some countries are much poorer than others is one of the oldest questions in social science. It will also be one of the most challenging and important questions in the next several decades. This is for several reasons. First, despite spectacular growth in per capita incomes in much of the world during the 20th century, the gaps between rich and poor countries, rather than abating, have expanded. This pattern is challenging to most of our theories because many of the barriers to the spread of prosperity have disappeared: ideas travel around the world almost instantaneously, and any nation should today be able to easily copy any economic or social practice that it wishes; various impediments to trade in goods and to financial flows and foreign direct investments have largely disappeared. But the wide gaps in incomes and living standards remain. Second, these gaps have meant that while the rich world has become richer, poverty, disease and social injustice are still widespread in many parts of the world, notably in much of sub-Saharan Africa, in parts of South Asia and in various pockets of poverty in the Caribbean and Central America.Challenging though these issues may be, we are now much better equipped to understand, and perhaps work towards redressing, the causes of these widespread disparities. Much of the progress on this issue has been made in economics (see Acemoglu, 2009, for an overview), but the next step will require us to combine the insights and tools developed in economics with perspectives from other social sciences.

Key Outstanding Questions in Social Sciences

This short piece outlines some of the topics I see as part of the “Grand Challenges” for the social sciences over the next 10-20 years. I have focused on three areas where I see the policy agenda being particularly constrained by the lack of high-quality research.

Letting stories breathe: a socio-narratology

Stories accompany us through life from birth to death. But they do not merely entertain, inform, or distress us - they show us what counts as right or wrong and teach us who we are and who we can imagine being. Stories connect people, but they can also disconnect, creating boundaries between people and justifying violence. In Letting Stories Breathe, Arthur W. Frank grapples with this fundamental aspect of our lives, offering both a theory of how stories shape us and a useful method for analyzing them. Along the way he also tells stories: from folktales to research interviews to remembrances. Frank's unique approach uses literary concepts to ask social scientific questions: how do stories make life good and when do they endanger it? Going beyond theory, he presents a thorough introduction to dialogical narrative analysis, analyzing modes of interpretation, providing specific questions to start analysis, and describing different forms analysis can take. Building on his renowned work exploring the relationship between narrative and illness, Letting Stories Breathe expands Frank's horizons further, offering a compelling perspective on how stories affect human lives.

Forest Service Interdisciplinary Teams: Size, Composition, and Leader Characteristics

Abstract Interdisciplinary (ID) teams were created by the US Forest Service in response to environmental legislation. In 2008, we surveyed ID team leaders for National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analysis of 106 recreation-related projects conducted between 2005 and 2008. Results were compared with current workforce data and previous studies of ID team leadership and composition for NEPA assessments. ID teams were large in size and diverse in composition, with representatives of a broad range of disciplines and functional areas. The composition of ID teams may be changing from traditional natural resource management to more discipline-specific expertise. The role of social scientists and other human dimension specialists remains modest, despite the importance of social science questions inherent in recreation projects. Results reflect changes in agency hiring practices in the last 20 years and raise questions about the interdisciplinary nature of US Forest Service ID teams.

Posting, quoting, and replying: a comparison of methodological approaches to measure communication ties in web forums

Active involvement in discussion-based communities is nowadays a firm part of people’s online activities. The measurement of communication ties and networks between contributors to such domains is thus becoming a relevant research question in social sciences. However, especially in web forums, very often almost no direct relational information exists that would indicate the presence of communication ties among contributors. In contrast with the reply-to structure of Usenet newsgroup or mailing list conversations that contain explicit relational information created by the contributors, some web forums only enable participants to add new posts to threads or to quote preceding posts in threads. When discussions emerge, it is difficult to identify who is replying to whom. Drawing on the social network studies dealing with the conversational patterns in Usenet and web forums, this paper presents an alternative approach to identifying the ties between authors of posts. Several assumptions are discussed, and different measures are developed and empirically evaluated. The findings provide a starting point for the development of a standardized methodology for studying social networks in online communities where only limited direct information about communication ties is available.

Pushing back the frontiers or still running around the same circles? ‘Interpretative archaeoastronomy’ thirty years on

AbstractThis personal perspective on the development of archaeoastronomy over the last thirty years focuses on interpretative and methodological issues, picking up for example from the debate between Schaefer and Aveni at Oxford VII. How far we have actually progressed in the last three decades? Are we at last starting to achieve the correct fusion between the social science questions that our discipline addresses and the ‘hard science’ methods that are often involved in tackling them? In this paper I argue that the need for our hypotheses to be solidly grounded in social theory, which has rightly been recognised by most archaeoastronomers in recent years, is not an excuse for avoiding the need to be scientifically rigorous in assessing them against the actual evidence. I conclude that identifying robust methodologies for weighing together the different types of data with which the cultural astronomer is faced in different sitations, so as to infer the ‘best’ interpretation, remains at once the most challenging and the most pressing issue facing our ‘interdiscipline’ in the future.

Intelligence and Substance Use

Why do some individuals choose to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and use illegal drugs while others do not? The origin of individual preferences and values is one of the remaining theoretical questions in social and behavioral sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values than less intelligent individuals. Consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is evolutionarily novel, so the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to consume these substances. Analyses of two large, nationally representative, and prospectively longitudinal data from the United Kingdom and the United States partly support the prediction. More intelligent children, both in the United Kingdom and the United States, are more likely to grow up to consume more alcohol. More intelligent American children are more likely to grow up to consume more tobacco, while more intelligent British children are more likely to grow up to consume more illegal drugs.

Crisis Early Warning and Decision Support: Contemporary Approaches and Thoughts on Future Research

Military planners and other decision makers require advanced early warning of impending crises so they can devise effective mitigation plans, mobilize resources, and coordinate responses with their foreign counterparts. Over the last 40 years, the US government has invested generously in several attempts to build crisis forecasting systems that were analytically defensible and capable of processing and making sense of vast amounts of information in real or near real time. This article describes the most recent attempt by the US military to develop an Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS). Although ICEWS relies heavily on social science theories, data, and methods, our experiences thus far reveal some strengths and limitations of contemporary quantitative approaches to addressing social science questions with real world implications. The article concludes with a sketch of a new paradigmatic approach—a Computational Social Science Experimentation Proving Ground—that could not only improve crisis early warning and response, but also revolutionize how social science knowledge is developed, evaluated, and applied more broadly.

Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent

The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical question in behavioral and social sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and atheism and, for men, sexual exclusivity) than less intelligent individuals, but that general intelligence may have no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar values (for children, marriage, family, and friends). The analyses of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Study 1) and the General Social Surveys (Study 2) show that adolescent and adult intelligence significantly increases adult liberalism, atheism, and men’s (but not women’s) value on sexual exclusivity.

Considering the Inclusion of Metabolic and Cardiovascular Markers in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics

The inclusion of biomarkers in social surveys such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has the potential to answer many elusive questions in social science and public health, including the much-studied relationship between socioeconomic status and health. This article reviews the potential inclusion of biomarkers of cardiovascular and metabolic risk in the PSID. We first discuss the considerable analytical benefits of adding these biomarkers to the PSID, including the exploration of life course hypotheses and the potential to test causal relationships between the social environment and biological systems. Next, we review evidence on the reliability of self-reports of cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors, concluding that the potential bias from relying on self-reports may be substantial. Based on evidence of biological importance as well as practical considerations of ease of in-home collection, our first tier of recommended biomarkers includes measured height, weight, waist and hip circumference, diastolic and systolic blood pressure, resting heart rate, total and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c), C-reactive protein (CRP), and cystatin C. Additional markers of secondary priority are also discussed.

Virtual Worlds

This article argues for using virtual worlds as experimental environments for social science questions at the macro level. The authors can foresee two major objections to this approach and will address them as to show why they do not prove to be significant. The first being that virtual worlds are not like the real world; therefore, one cannot generalize from events within them. The second of these foreseeable objections states that human society is too complex to be controlled in the way that controlled experimentation requires. Humans discover things by building environments suited for exploring the questions the authors have a rat maze is a very abstract environment, yet it is useful for exploring very general questions of mammalian cognition. The authors conclude that virtual worlds are no less valuable, on net, than other established experimental tools. The next stage in toolmaking, after Petri dishes, rat mazes, and supercolliders, should be virtual worlds.

The ‘Hybrid’ State: Reconfiguring Territorial Governance in Western Europe

One of the central questions in contemporary social science is the fate of the nation-state. The nation-state reached its apogee during the period of post-war economic boom and expanding welfare states. European integration was a means of ‘rescuing’ nation-states during this period. Neo-liberalism mounted a serious challenge to the welfare version of the nation-state following a series of political, economic and social crises in the 1970s. The nation-state survived albeit in a form different from the previous version. It is now more characterized by a combination of centralist interventionism and ‘choice’ in its territorial organization and policy approaches. This may be seen in patterns of central–local relations, public administration and fiscal relations. This we have called the ‘hybrid state’.

IQ AND THE VALUES OF NATIONS

The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical question in behavioural and social sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and atheism and, for men, sexual exclusivity) than less intelligent individuals, but that general intelligence may have no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar values. Macro-level analyses show that nations with higher average intelligence are more liberal (have greater highest marginal individual tax rate and, as a result, lower income inequality), less religious (a smaller proportion of the population believes in God or considers themselves religious) and more monogamous. The average intelligence of a population appears to be the strongest predictor of its level of liberalism, atheism and monogamy.