Alternative Social Science
Now is the time for social scientists to take responsibility for guiding societal improvement.
Twenty-first-century societies are rapidly changing. We’re witnessing historic levels of partisan discord and institutional breakdown, and multiple simultaneous sea changes in norms around gender and ethnic identity, sexual expression, and the definitions of criminality. These political and cultural shifts, often amplified and accelerated through Internet platforms, are occurring alongside major economic upheavals, including the deaths and births of entire industries, renewed international trade wars, and inequality levels rivaling those of feudal times. Worse, there is no end in sight for these tumultuous trends. What are people to do? How are we to make sense of all this turmoil and find some working consensus about social reality (if not a social contract) allowing more of us to find a stable and comfortable way in the world?
No more tradeoffs: The era of big data content analysis has come
For centuries, being a scientist has meant learning to live with limited data. People only share so much on a survey form. Experiments don’t account for all the conditions of real world situations. Field research and interviews can only be generalized so far. Network analyses don’t tell us everything we want to know about the ties among people. And text/content/document analysis methods allow us to dive deep into a small set of documents, or they give us a shallow understanding of a larger archive. Never both. So far, the truly great scientists have had to apply many of these approaches to help us better see the world through their kaleidoscope of imperfect lenses.