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Social Science Research: Challenges and Strategies

Social Science Research: Challenges and Strategies. Shyam Sunder, Yale University Conference on Social Science Research: Issues, Challenges and Strategies Institute of Public Enterprise, Hyderabad, India January 10-11, 2013. Science.

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Social Science Research: Challenges and Strategies

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  1. Social Science Research: Challenges and Strategies Shyam Sunder, Yale University Conference on Social Science Research: Issues, Challenges and Strategies Institute of Public Enterprise, Hyderabad, India January 10-11, 2013

  2. Science • Traditionally, science had been confined to natural phenomena involving inanimate (non-sentient) objects • Examples: physics, chemistry, and most biology • Discovering laws that govern the behavior of a pen, chair, or electric bulb • Universality of these laws in time and space, and their high predictive content, earned enormous prestige for sciences

  3. Adding Social to Science • Over time, attempts have been made to discover laws that govern human behavior at individual and social levels • To the extent our discoveries about human social behavior have universality and predictive power, social sciences may also earn the claim to be a science, and some of that prestige • But extending the enterprise of discovering laws of behavior to sentient beings (us) presents major challenges for several reasons

  4. Challenges for Social Science • As sentient beings we are endowed with faculties of awareness, learning, recoverable and managed memory, and willful reaction to scientific treatments • Consequently, social phenomena tend to be transient • At what level can (or should) we seek to identify the laws of social sciences? At a moment in time; rate of variation; or second derivatives, and so on. • How robust are the laws of social science to their own discovery? • Do discoveries in social sciences induce changes in behavior that tend to invalidate them? • Ethical dimensions of manipulative controls and treatments when we apply the standard methods of science to social phenomena • We often refrain from experimental approaches for this reason

  5. Experimental Social Sciences • In my remarks in the following session, I shall discuss some of the achievements and limitations of using experimental methods in economics—an important branch of social sciences

  6. Thank You. Shyam.sunder@yale.edu www.som.yale.edu\faculty\sunder\research

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