Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy (2012) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix A: Selected Major Social Science Research Methods: Overview
Appendix A: Selected Major Social Science Research Methods: Overview
Pages 91-102
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From page 91... ...
Research that can reach causal conclusions has to involve well-defined concepts, careful measurement, and data gathered in controlled settings. Only through the accumulation of information gathered in a systematic fashion can one hope to disentangle the aspects of cause and effect that are relevant to a policy setting.
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From page 92... ...
The latter, called randomized controlled field trials (RCFTs) , assess effectiveness, or whether the intervention produces the intended effect in practice.
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From page 93... ...
and its successor journal, Randomized Social Experiments, provide many examples. OBSERVATIONAL STUDIES Observational studies are nonexperimental research studies in which subjects or outcomes are observed and measured.
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From page 94... ...
Even if a policy is based on carefully designed RCFTs or other studies, implementation beyond the confines of the original study population requires careful monitoring and evaluation to make sure that the results observed in the study hold in a larger context. A researcher must always ask if the new program is producing similar desirable outcomes in the general population as it did in the experimental setting.
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From page 95... ...
(2012) on the effects of childhood physical and mental problems on adult life, based on an analysis of longitudinal data from the British National Child Development Study.
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From page 96... ...
Although developed for engineering processes, where it is known as evolutionary operation (Box and Draper, 1969) , the approach appears to be well suited for the social sciences, in which the relationship between inputs and outputs is typically difficult to measure precisely (see the discussion in Fienberg et al., 1985)
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From page 97... ...
An example of success, however, is researchers in early childhood intervention who have integrated knowledge about the developing brain, the human genome, molecular biology, and the interdependence of cognitive, social, and emotional development. These researchers have built a unified science-based framework for guiding priorities for early childhood policies around common concepts from neuroscience and developmental-behavioral research and broadly accepted empirical findings from four decades of program evaluation studies: see, for example, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University (2007)
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From page 98... ...
. Archival data may include public data sets collected by academic institutions or government agencies, such as Supreme Court records and corporate filings, or private data sets, such as medical records collected by public or private organizations.
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The increasing "democratization of data" will enable policy analysts and policy makers to obtain much information for themselves, and it will continue to open new frontiers for social scientists. Automated information extraction and text mining have the potential to extract relevant data from the unstructured text of emails, social media posts, speeches, government reports, product reviews, and other web content.
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From page 100... ...
Panel to Review Evaluation Studies of Bilingual Education, M.M. Meyer and S.E.
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From page 101... ...
. Sum marizing historical information on controls in clinical trials.
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