Amid uncertainty, COVID-19 has ushered in a period of reflection and call for change as the social and behavioral sciences (SBS) continue to expose opportunities for growth within society, organizations, and individuals across the world. Looking ahead, how can we effectively use this time to examine the structures, methods, and habits within ourselves and our cultures to create lasting progress in our communities? This guide of freely accessible SBS research compiled from SAGE’s Coronavirus Research webpage provides insight regarding what COVID-19 has revealed these past months and how we can utilize these lessons moving forward.
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This panel, organised by The Campaign for Social Science and SAGE Publishing, featured three speakers giving their perspectives on the role of timely, appropriately representative, and reliable social statistics in informing the COVID-19 response and recovery planning.
Read MoreThe summer exam results season in England has seen controversy over assessment unlike any year in living memory. The press, politicians and the education world have pontificated at length over a challenging and complex situation, handled imperfectly, that affects the future aspirations of millions of young people. Such discussions have focused on both the specifics of the A-level results fiasco, the algorithmic grade allocation and inconstant political and policymaker decision-making, and also broader questions about assessment and the role of summative examinations in general. Underneath all of these takes, of various temperatures, lies a basic question: is this fair?
Read MoreThe idea that led us to write the book titled Together Apart: The Psychology of COVID-19 was a very simple one. We reasoned that while waiting for an effective vaccine or a medical treatment for COVID-19, all we can do to stop the spread of the virus is to change our behavior. And what is more, because of the contagious nature of COVID-19, it is not just “my” behavior, it is the behavior of all of “us”— of all the groups that we belong to, of all our communities, and of society at large —that needs to change so that we can effectively control the COVID-19 spread.
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“Unless or until a vaccine is developed, or we discover medicines to treat the virus, our means of controlling the spread of infection depend on behavioural changes and hence upon human psychology. … Indeed, all we can do to control the virus right now is get people to behave appropriately — to ‘do the right thing.’ … However, it is not enough to understand that we need psychology as a core part of efforts against COVID-19. It is also important to understand what sort of psychology helps or hinders in those efforts.”
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In a world facing many complex, formidable problems,” Kenneth Prewitt asks, “how can the social sciences become a decisive force for human betterment?”
Prewitt’s piece, “Retrofitting the Social Sciences for the Practical & Moral,” which appeared recently in Issues in Science and Technology‘s Fall 2019 issue, is as much an examination of the nature of social science as it is a guide for mainstreaming and improving the capacity for social scientists to aid society. Click here to read the full article (which I recommend).
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The impact story of our Southern Connecticut State University Reading Evaluation And Development of Skills (R.E.A.D.S.) Lab began several years ago when two schools serving large populations of students from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds requested help to solve their response-to-intervention (RTI) crisis.
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Don’t just publish and hope - get creative to have impact.
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measuring and demonstrating social science research is political. Firstly, in the sense that measurement and the attribution of value can shape research practices themselves, but also in that the value they describe is inherently limited and if misapplied can lead to unintended consequences. SAGE Publishing has often had a role in this conversation in particular, as a convener of more expert voices.
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We all know that today’s economic inequality is bad—we can feel it—but we don’t have a clear way to articulate why this is, unless we appeal to morality. The field of economics doesn’t offer a compelling narrative, which is a major shortcoming. Don’t get me wrong, there are many brilliant economists out there doing important work and publishing insightful individual studies. But the overarching paradigms of the field of economics can’t pull together the results of these individual works in a way that convincingly condemns massive and persistent economic inequality.
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