Because Social Science Fosters Robust and Trustworthy Knowledge

As Chair of the COSSA Board, it is an honor to conclude the inaugural year of “Why Social Science?” with some reflections and aspirations. When COSSA launched this initiative in 2017, the aim was to invite persons to speak to the “Why” of social science from diverse perspectives. By design, the task was left open-ended to encourage commentators to share their stories, views, knowledge, or favorite findings through a lens that could resonate with a breadth of public audiences. 

As a social scientist who has now studied the “data,” I am struck with how compelling these 22 commentaries (typically no more than 1,000 words and written in non-technical language) are. Notably, only about half of the writers are themselves social and behavioral scientists. Also, important is that contributors were drawn from a range of occupations, roles, and work sectors—Congress, federal agencies, science advocacy groups, higher education institutions, scientific associations, and the leading academies.

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Because Language Is Essential to Human Interaction

Every day, we use language to communicate, argue, learn, negotiate, document, legislate, and celebrate. In the industrialized world, we are bombarded daily by language from radios, televisions, websites, signs, and talking devices, while in less technological societies, knowledge is transmitted orally. A better understanding of languages (individually), of language (as a collective human ability), and of their speakers helps us to better understand how society functions and how to improve it, and this is the domain of study of linguistics.

The foundations of linguistics begin with descriptions of the sounds and structures of many languages, from languages of global exchange spoken by millions, to local dialects spoken in remote corners of the world. The grammars constructed by theoretical linguists help us to see the similarities and relationships between languages, and to trace their histories. The more languages we can study, the better picture we have of the depth and breadth of the human language faculty.

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Because It Is Central in Guiding Efforts to Foster Success in STEM in Our Children and Youth

The social sciences are key to informing and supporting our national priorities. One such priority is having a strong workforce in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). As in the era of Sputnik, we are realizing that we need to catch up in this area. Reports like Rising Above The Gathering Storm sounded an alarm, calling for investments to foster a strong science and technology workforce in order for the United States to maintain competitiveness globally. 

Developmental science, or research on how children learn and develop, is helping to grow the roots of STEM—stimulating interest and competence in STEM in children and youth from all backgrounds in our country. The full set of social science “tools” is proving important in this effort, from looking at factors that influence and predict student achievement in large longitudinal datasets, to conducting evaluation studies looking at what works best in encouraging the roots of STEM to grow, to insights from smaller focused studies diving more deeply into mastery of specific concepts. 

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Because Social Science Helps Us Enhance Diversity in the Interest of Positive Societal Outcomes

As demographics of the American population shift and global interconnectedness expands, it has become increasingly important for public policymakers, and others making consequential decisions in society, to understand the impact of diversity and inclusion. Social scientists have empirically demonstrated that diversity supports positive societal outcomes—from productive workplaces to effective educational institutions and a strong scientific enterprise.

Social science research not only helps us to understand that there is value to diversity and inclusion, but also how we can enhance diversity and inclusion. An extensive sociological literature on mentoring, for example, demonstrates empirically that the most effective interventions for under-represented racial/ethnic minority scholars are based on a combination of instrumental and psycho-social mentoring. The first type focuses on giving scholarly career advice and resources, and the second focuses on fostering emotional support and well-being. Studies also indicate that the mentoring process facilitates the growth of social networks, which are strong predictors of career success and satisfaction. Mentoring happens effectively one-on-one, but diversity and inclusion are further strengthened with communal mentoring using these networks.

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Watch "Social Science Solutions for Health, Public Safety, Computing, and Other National Priorities"

On Wednesday, October 4, 2017, COSSA and SAGE Publishing hosted a Congressional briefing on Social Science Solutions for Health, Public Safety, Computing, and Other National Priorities. The event featured authors of past Why Social Science? blog posts, including Representative Daniel Lipinski (D-IL), Peter Harsha of the Computing Research Association, Nancy La Vigne of The Urban Institute, and William Riley of the National Institutes of Health. Panelists discussed the importance of social science applications to preventing cyberattacks, how social science can help identify the causes of health disparities, and how behavioral reinforcement or “nudges” can be incorporated into federal policy. More information about the the event is available on COSSA’s website.

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Video is from Social Science Solutions for Health, Public Safety, Computing, and Other National Priorities, a Congressional briefing sponsored by COSSA and SAGE Publishing on October 4, 2017 in Washington, DC.

Because Social Science Is the Fundamental Bedrock of Just Societies

I am writing this blog informed by multiple perspectives—as a publisher of social science for over 50 years; as a social activist for over 60 years; and as a philanthropist for nearly 30 years.                

In all of these aspects of my life, I have grown to believe in what I call “The Four Justices”—in alphabetical order: Economic Justice, Educational Justice, Environmental Justice, and Social Justice. They are all intertwined and my understanding of how we are to achieve justice in these arenas is deeply informed by the work of social scientists.

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Because Social and Behavioral Research Improves Health and Quality of Life

Medical research empowers the development of new interventions to prevent, diagnose and treat—even cure—disease, but it is not the only scientific discipline crucial to advancing health. By fostering a better understanding of human behavior, preferences, and motivations, social and behavioral research reveals new strategies for achieving optimal health outcomes. Social and behavioral research provides the real-world context needed to ensure the products of medical research—prescription drugs, medical devices, surgical procedures, and more—benefit patients efficiently and effectively. And social and behavioral research is nothing less than crucial to achieving more progress in prevention. Underinvesting in this research squanders countless opportunities to improve the health of our nation.

Social and behavioral research, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and other federal agencies, as well as various foundations, enables us to understand patterns among groups and individuals to help address a wide range of medical and public health threats including seemingly intractable challenges such as injury and violence. For example, NIH and CDC have funded researchers at the University of Chicago to study the root causes of violent crime in Chicago, reviewing medical-examiner records of city homicides and finding that many violent confrontations begin over something minor, such as an insult. This information led them to explore interventions that could help people avoid costly decision-making mistakes in situations they commonly face. A cognitive behavioral program in Chicago helped teenage boys think before they act, dramatically reducing arrest rates among teens. Research like this is broadly supported by a majority of Americans (60%) who say there is value in better understanding and preventing injury and violence caused by preventable accidents, deliberate acts or neglect, according to a national public opinion survey commissioned by Research!America.

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Because It Makes Computing Work for People

Two years ago, the leadership of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee looked to our organization, the Computing Research Association, to endorse an approach to reauthorize funding at a number of key Federal science agencies. The proposed legislation would provide increases for computing research funding at the National Science Foundation while keeping the overall agency budget essentially flat by bolstering computing — along with mathematics, physics, biology, and engineering — at the expense of the social, behavioral, and economic sciences (and the geosciences). The committee Chair hoped that CRA, which represents nearly 200 academic computing departments and industrial research labs — including computing research labs at IBM, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft — would support the approach, given the direct and indirect benefits increased investment in computing research at NSF would have to our member institutions.

The science advocacy community in Washington, DC, is comprised of many organizations like CRA, each representing some typically discipline-specific slice of the academic and research community, but bound by the shared goal of ensuring that policymakers understand the importance of the Federal investment in research and the value of peer and merit review in setting priorities. As such, we are typically averse to efforts that pit the disciplines against each other, like the one proposed. But that wasn’t the only important reason for us to oppose the proposal. What primarily motivated our opposition was our strong belief that cutting social, behavioral, and economic science investments would also do great damage to computing research.

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Because Social Science Informs Effective, Efficient, and Equitable Education Policies

Everybody has a connection to education: we may have taught in the classroom or be related to someone who teaches—and of course, we were all students ourselves once. This personal exposure is all too often mistaken for substantive knowledge about what constitutes effective teaching and learning. Education science—drawing from a broad range of diverse social science disciplines, including economics, psychology, sociology, and statistics—not only challenges what many policy makers, practitioners, and individuals believe about certain education practices and policies, but sometimes flat-out contradicts it. Time and again, education research has taught us how to better serve our students in and out of the classroom while more effectively targeting our limited resources.

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Because Social Science Makes Sense of the Institutions That Shape Our Lives

Throughout my career as a professor of public policy, public administration, and political science, I have been convinced of the value of social science, especially political science. For more than three decades my research has focused on the role nonprofit organizations play in public policy. This research is grounded in expanding our understanding of the relationship between government and nonprofits, including developing effective strategies for collaboration and partnership in support of innovation and social impact.

Since my appointment as Executive Director of the American Political Science Association in August 2013, I have been committed to broadening and deepening the impact of political science research in the advancement of knowledge. Indeed, social science research is fundamental to understanding—and making the best of—the world around us. As I work with our political scientist members, I have been impressed with the tremendous diversity of important research projects now underway, including why people vote, why states go to war (proven prevention techniques), effective strategies to teach citizenship in local communities, and improving the provision of public services. Overall, it is impossible to ignore the myriad ways in which social science helps us understand, create, and engage with the institutions that shape our lives.

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Because Nearly Every Challenge We Face Requires Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Human Behavior

This week, we’re highlighting the recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Value of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences to National Priorities. Produced at the request of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the report assesses the contributions of the social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) sciences to issues of national importance. Passages from the section “Why Support Research in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences?” are excerpted below. We encourage you to read the report in its entirety, which is available for free on the National Academies website.

Every month the Gallup Poll asks a representative sample of Americans “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?” The main problems identified include jobs, unemployment, the economy, health care, and race relations. Issues such as these have clear social, behavioral, and economic aspects that need to be better understood, and SBE research can contribute to understanding and addressing them. Moreover, many other problems that at first glance appear to be issues only of medicine or engineering or computer science have social and behavioral components, such as patients’ understanding of medical information and community responses to proposed highway development…

Consider, for example, the challenge of immunizing the population against infectious diseases, such as measles and influenza. Medical science has developed many effective vaccines, and when they are administered to the appropriate numbers of people they control the spread of the disease. Recent outbreaks of measles, such as those in California and Minneapolis, occurred because not enough parents had their children vaccinated for measles because they did not believe or did not accept the value of vaccination. These outbreaks show that individual beliefs and social influences can disrupt vaccination programs and place communities at risk. They also demonstrate that there is a role for SBE science in helping to understand the social and behavioral dynamics of vaccination decisions and using that understanding to develop more effective public health and public information strategies. That is, in addition to the biology of a disease, vaccination efforts require dealing with individuals’ and groups’ beliefs and decisions about vaccination.

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Podcasts Highlight the Impact of Congressional Wastebooks on Researchers

A recent episode of the new PRI podcast Undiscovered (from the team behind Science Friday) focuses on how the publication of Congressional “wastebooks” affects the researchers whose grants are ridiculed. The episode, entitled “The Wastebook,” features the 2016 event, “Wasteful” Research? Looking Beyond the Abstract, during which researchers whose grants were singled out by wastebooks had the opportunity to more fully explain their researcher to Members of Congress and their staff. The event was hosted by the Coalition to Promote Research (which COSSA co-leads) and the Coalition for National Science Funding (more information is available here). The podcast episode highlights Duke University biologist Sheila Patek, whose National Science Foundation grant was featured in a 2015 wastebook published by Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ). During the “’Wasteful’ Research” event, Patek had the opportunity to explain the value of her research to Sen. Flake himself, and the podcast describes how that meeting went. The episode was also adapted into an episode of the NPR podcast Planet Money.

This article was originally published in the June 27, 2017 issue of the COSSA Washington Update. Click here to subscribe and receive this newsletter every two weeks.

Because Social Science Drives Smart Investments in Public Safety

When I make a new acquaintance and am asked the inevitable question, “What do you do for a living?,” I’m often tempted to fib and reply that I’m a middle school teacher, a real estate agent, or an accountant – professions that most every member of the public knows and understands with little need for additional explanation. Not so when I answer honestly that I’m a criminologist. That response is often met with, “Oh, so you’re a lawyer?” or “You mean like on CSI?” My reply depends on how much time I have – usually not nearly enough!

The short answer is that criminologists are social scientists. The actors on CSI who collect crime scene evidence are playing the role of criminalists, also known as forensic scientists. They answer questions like, “What evidence exists about who was at the crime scene and what transpired there?” Criminologists answer questions like, “How does the collection of DNA at property crime scenes support investigations and case clearance rates?” (The answer might interest you: DNA evidence collection doubles the rate of suspect identification compared to traditional methods.)

Criminology is a social science offshoot of sociology, but it draws its ranks from a diverse array of social science disciplines, from demography to psychology and geography. Yes, there are a few lawyers in our ranks, but while traditional lawyers answer questions like, “What are the elements of the criminal code, and how are they applied at sentencing?” Criminologists answer questions like, “What types of community supervision are effective alternatives to incarceration, and for whom?”

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Because Information Without Meaning Lacks Purpose

At the March for Science in Washington, DC, where I participated on behalf of the National Communication Association, I held a sign that said, “Care about people? Care about Social Science!” As fellow marchers spotted me from a distance, they would weave through the crowds, maneuvering around lab coats, signs with chemical and mathematical formulas, and flyers describing climate change. When they drew near, their faces would break into smiles and they would proclaim, “I’m a social scientist, too! Can I take a picture with you and post it?” In that moment, they found meaning for participating in the March of Science; it gave them purpose.

Each day we search for purpose as we create and consume symbols, messages, and meanings through our conversations with friends, families, and coworkers, and through information disseminated by retailers, healthcare providers, government agencies, and the media. In the past, we searched for information; today, we navigate a deluge of communications as we seek support to care for an aging parent, make choices about our own healthcare, weigh public policy, contribute to the organizations for which we work, and value the diversity of the people around us. Over the course of our lives, we develop scripts for how to communicate and schemes for predicting the likely outcomes. Yet, we often walk away from a conversation, email, meeting, election, scientific report, or newscast asking ourselves, “What does this mean?”

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Because Multilingualism Is an Asset and a Goal Worth Pursuing

In late 2014, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences received two letters from Congress, one from a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators and one from a bipartisan group of Representatives, requesting a new study of the state of language learning in America.  The letters framed the request as a follow-up to the work of the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, which published its influential Heart of the Matter report in 2013. The Heart of the Matter also responded to a request from a bipartisan group, but its charge was broader than the one included in the new letters, which asked the Academy to respond to the following two questions:

  1. How does language learning influence economic growth, cultural diplomacy, the productivity of future generations, and the fulfillment of all Americans?
  2. What actions should the nation take to ensure excellence in all languages as well as international education and research, including how we may more effectively use current resources to advance language attainment?

This second question charged us with an astoundingly lofty goal.  Excellence in all languages?!?!  Yet it also led us into territory familiar to a 237-year-old learned society and independent policy research center.  In short, it asked us to initiate a study.  It also helped us identify the ultimate goal of our final report, to teach more languages to more people, and set the agenda for the next 18 months of work, as we gathered scholarship and formulated concrete recommendations to address our nation’s relatively low capacity in international languages.

That first question, on the other hand, was trouble from the start.

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Because Social Science Is Necessary to Achieve Health Equity

Living in an America in which all populations have an equal opportunity to live long, healthy, and productive lives is the vision of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. As we bring National Minority Health Month to a close, it is important to remember that not all groups have obtained health equity. Racial and ethnic minorities, rural residents, people with disadvantaged socioeconomic resources and sexual and gender minorities carry a disproportionate burden of illness and disease. The search to determine the best way to reduce health disparities and to achieve health equity remains challenging for all of us.

The potential to live longer and healthier lives is greater than ever before with the emergence of medical and technical advances in healthcare and the adoption of healthier lifestyles. Despite these advances, health disparities continue to persist. A health disparity, defined as a health difference that adversely affects disadvantaged populations, based on one or more health outcomes, results from a series of complex and interrelated factors. To truly reduce and ultimately eliminate health disparities a framework must be applied that can address the multifaceted underlying causes of the disparity.

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Because All Fields of Science Are Drivers of Freedom and Prosperity

Why Social Science Is Marching for Science

Why Social Science? is a space to talk about the unique contributions the social and behavioral sciences have made to making our society better and improving the lives of people around the world. However, this week, we’re broadening our core question as the upcoming March for Science brings the opportunity for us to join with fellow scientists, researchers, and supporters from across fields, disciplines, professions, and industries to focus on Why Science—all science—is such a fundamental driver of human progress around the world.

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Because It Is in the National Interest, Both in Interdisciplinary Work and on Its Own

As a scientist, it is easy to become absorbed in the field or even subfield you are studying and simply focus on the value of your own research within that area of study. Looking back at my time as a political scientist, I understand how easy it is to have that narrow focus and not look at the broader impacts. But today, as the value of federal funding for scientific research is being challenged in Congress, scientists can no longer afford to do this. This is especially true for social scientists.

I serve on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and for more than eight years I have been Chairman or Ranking Member of the Research and Technology Subcommittee which has oversight over the National Science Foundation (NSF). I authored the last long-term reauthorization of the NSF and continually fight for increased funding for this top-notch agency, which is emulated around the globe and has helped the U.S. lead the world in scientific research. While NSF funding for all sciences has slowed greatly since 2011, social science research has been specifically targeted for cuts. In the House, we have seen attempts to defund social sciences by eliminating funding for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) Directorate at the NSF. All of my colleagues on the Science Committee can attest to the fact that I have consistently and passionately made the case for the value of social science research by laying out numerous examples of how it has benefitted our nation.

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Because We Need to Understand What Will Motivate People to Take Action

I am not a social scientist, and must confess to having little formal classroom training in the disciplines. However, over the course of my career as a geoscientist, I have acquired a profound respect for the value of the social sciences to the Earth sciences. Social science research helps answer questions such as why are some people open to considering scientific evidence that challenges their own deeply-held biases (e.g., about climate change) while others have closed minds. Is it a function of the message? The messenger? Or the recipient? While all of these factors can be important, new social science research has revealed that having a curious and inquiring nature can promote accepting scientific evidence that is at odds with an individual’s opinions—a characteristic that can open a person’s mind to considering new ideas and viewpoints. This research finding along with the scholarship in science communication synthesized in a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provides us with the knowledge necessary to dramatically improve how we communicate and offers a roadmap for the kinds of future research we need as online information environments and new fields of science with regulatory, moral, or political implications continue to emerge.

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