“…when we’re doing social and behavioral science, we’re not looking for a needle in a haystack; rather, we’re trying to catch a slippery fish that keeps moving. All this is even harder in political science, economics, or sociology. An essential aspect of social science is that it understands people not in isolation but within groups. Thus, if psychology ultimately requires a different model for each person (or a model that accounts for differences between people), the social sciences require a different model for each configuration of people (or a model that accounts for dependence of outcomes on the configuration).”
I enjoyed this statistical (or almost meta-statistical) piece from Andrew Gelman yesterday on social/behavioral science research, where the same concerns seem to re-occur again and again over time:
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