how can you use the applied social sciences in advocacy work?
Answers
Imagine that a new Applied Social Science Program were organized very differently from traditional research efforts. Instead of funding individual university-based social scientists who submit research proposals, several million dollars might be allocated to a pre-approved array of community-based research centers in the 300 or so American cities with 100,000 or more residents. This would encourage partnerships among government, industry and local universities. Funds might be allocated every five years (after the initial round) to those centers which can demonstrate that they have successfully answered the questions they set out to address. Public opinion surveys in each city would be used to gauge whether the research results were valued by residents. This would require each center to figure out a way of communicating its findings to the public. (A failure to do so would mean no continued funding.) The national coordinators of such a program could distribute a list of questions they'd like all the community-based centers to consider, but the final choice would be up to each center. The national coordinators could also take responsibility for ensuring that work completed across the country was synthesized and shared. If the point of social science research it to help solve problems, then we need to make sure that problem-havers and problems-solvers are working together.
What I'm suggesting, of course, challenges in at least four ways the prevailing logic of how social science research is currently done. First, we would stop relying on individual university-based social scientists to decide which problems or questions should be given priority. I don't see why or how a small set of social scientists ensconced in major research universities (or running a national research program) can know which problems are most important. Second, I would not leave it to social scientists to judge the worthiness of their colleagues' performance. Social science research needs to be useful to those who have to take action. Unless social science scholars can show that their research is being used to make better decisions, they should not count on further government subsidies. So, we need to make sure that experts are working with the communities and groups that need their help. Third, I would put the burden on social scientists to figure out how to make their research findings understandable to the public-at-large. A failure to do so would mean the end of their government support. Finally, I would suggest that the usefulness of social science research findings ought to be judged in particular contexts (not in general). Context is everything in the social sciences. Efforts to generalize (in the way that makes sense in the natural sciences) don't make sense in the social sciences. Any expansion of government funding of social science research should, therefore, be decentralized (because problems are defined differently in different places), place-based (so that public officials who need to take action are involved in defining the problems that need attention in their area), and action-focused. Applied social science researchers should be accountable for the usefulness of the work they produce.
Many social scientists want to make social science more like the physical or natural sciences. That is, they want to "do science" in a way that produces generalizable and irrefutable results. To that end, economics is currently moving toward randomized control trials (RCTs) -- experiments in which proof of the sort we expect in medical trials can be achieved through social experiments that control for everything except the one variable we want to study. For instance, if you want to know whether a certain approach to getting people to eat more responsibly is working, you have to find two populations, similar in almost all respects, and give one group the information and resources you think they need to eat in a better way while withholding the same information and resources from the other (matched) group. Putting aside the ethics of withholding something important from half the subjects in such experiments, the goal of RCTs is to strip away the importance of context. The goal is to prove things that are universally true. Unfortunately, social science doesn't really lend itself to this kind of manipulation. What's true in one context, at one point in time, from one standpoint, is not necessarily true across the board.