Because Social Scientists Help the Federal Government Address Problems Facing the Nation

Federal agencies address issues that affect American life in critical ways.  Fulfilling those missions requires tools only social science can provide. Congress passes laws to respond to what Americans need and want.  Those laws promise Americans programs, protections, and services. Federal agencies then translate those laws into practices: what information to request from companies, what forms families complete to receive benefits, and what evidence shows that a drug's benefits outweigh its risks. Implementing these practices well requires ensuring that people can access, understand, and act on the information that they need. Behavioral and social scientists have unique expertise for ensuring those conditions are met and evaluating whether they are.

The articles collected in a recent special feature of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describe some of that work in five federal government agencies. That work reflects skills and knowledge that only specialized social science training can provide: nuanced sensitivity to the details of research design and interpretation and exposure to the cumulative wisdom of studies whose results are often surprising.  The research described in these articles are drawn from years of experience helping federal agencies pursue their missions of improving Americans’ lives by addressing challenges in health, finance, commerce, and security. Scientists working with agencies do not set the goals; policymakers do. Social and behavioral scientists can help reach those goals and provide evidence about whether they are being reached.  Below are brief summaries of three articles that illustrate the work and its impact.

Read More

Because Look at the Alternatives!

Recent Gallup polling shows that Americans believe government dysfunction, skyrocketing costs of living, economic inequality, and healthcare affordability are the most critical challenges facing our nation. At their core, all these problems stem from human thoughts and actions.

Solving these crises requires us to change these human factors. To change them, we must understand them. Reversing economic inequality or fixing broken government institutions depends on understanding the levers that drive human beliefs and behaviors. This is the domain of the social and behavioral sciences. Just like the natural sciences, the social and behavioral sciences seek accurate measurements and empirical descriptions to design effective, real-life interventions.

What happens if we look elsewhere for solutions? Imagine a world completely devoid of the social and behavioral sciences, where policy is guided strictly by alternative forces.

Read More

Because Asking People Questions Provides Important and Necessary Insights

Data are everywhere. Data are collected as we browse the internet, purchase items from stores, pay our taxes, go to the doctor’s office, enroll our children in school, and travel using a car or public transportation. But this outwardly observable information reflects only a small fraction of what humans do in a day, largely fails to reflect what we think and feel about our lives, surroundings, and futures, and does not capture why we think, feel, or do these activities. What is a researcher or policy maker to do when they need information that cannot be observed through records of people’s behavior? Long before digital traces of our lives were created to track everyday interactions, social, behavioral, and economic scientists used surveys to ask people about activities, opinions, and knowledge not easily found in records.

Survey questions can capture information about a population that cannot be known in any other way. Surveys conducted by the federal statistical system allow insights into whether someone is currently looking for work, but not employed, uses a doctor’s office versus urgent care clinic for health care, and even information about who lives in a household. Administrative data systems can be useful for understanding the quality of survey data, as some information is more reliable when found in records than survey reports. But survey data also provide insights into the quality of administrative data systems. For instance, while some might look to crime statistics based on police reports, less than half of violent crimes are reported to the police and police reporting varies dramatically across types of crimes and background characteristics of people. This information cannot be obtained from police records alone; we can only get it by asking people both about their victimization experiences and their reporting behavior. Even those who call for replacing or augmenting survey data, with administrative or commercial records or digital traces, typically require high-quality probability-based surveys for statistical adjustments. Probability-based surveys also are the benchmarks for evaluating the quality of estimates from administrative, commercial, and digital data.

Read More

Because It’s Proliferating

Social scientists and the research we pursue with such passion are being buffeted on all fronts, a fact not unknown to frequent visitors to this space. Today social scientists confront scarcities: of funding, of career opportunities in academia, of public acceptance and respect, and of trust in the credibility and value of the work we do.

Yet, at the same time, social science seems to be everywhere—not only on our laptops and data repositories, but in government agencies, human rights organizations, media reports and, especially, in tech firms and other private companies. And social scientists, if not quite everywhere, are working at these institutions as well as in the academy—indeed, for certain types of work, the demand for social science skills is high.

Read More

Because It Produces Essential Data for Our Democracy

The social sciences are vitally important to the institutions of democracy. Those institutions include a constellation of federal statistical agencies responsible for collecting and disseminating data. With these data, critical decisions are made such as where to build schools and fire stations, how to shape congressional districts, and the way more than $600 billion in federal funds are allocated.

Consider just one such agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, responsible along with the FBI, and various other federal agencies, for generating national crime statistics. With these data, law enforcement officials at the state and local levels make informed assessments of the prevalence and frequency of crimes in their areas. Social scientists, such as criminologists, sociologists and others, go a huge step further. They use the same data to discern patterns of criminal behavior thereby facilitating more effective policing and crime intervention methods. They also are best positioned to create data-supported analyses about what types of crimes are occurring, where, and in relation to other considerations such as social, political, and economic factors. They also detect when justice may not have been consistently and fairly applied.  The result is a more comprehensive and holistic approach to crime prevention and mitigation.

Read More