Children and War: How “Soft” Research Can Answer the Hard Questions in Political Science

Children and War: How “Soft” Research Can Answer the Hard Questions in Political Science

A s a graduate student, two months shy of defending my dissertation proposal, I yanked a first, respectable rough draft off my advisers’ desks and replaced it with something completely new: a pitch to head to Uganda and start a study of child soldiering. My advisers were unimpressed. “This sounds more like a policy report than a dissertation,” said one, “I’m not sure you should go.” No one disa...

Why and How Political Science Can Contribute to Public Health? Proposals for Collaborative Research Avenues

Written by a group of political science researchers, this commentary focuses on the contributions of political science to public health and proposes research avenues to increase those contributions. Despite progress, the links between researchers from these two fields develop only slowly. Divergences between the approach of political science to public policy and the expectations that public hea...

How Hard Is Hard Science, How Soft Is Soft Science? The Empirical Cumulativeness of Research

" Research results in the social and behavioral sciences are often conceded to be less replicable than research results in the physical sciences. However, direct empirical comparisons of the cumulativeness of research in the social and physical sciences have not been made to date. This article notes the parallels between methods used in the quantitative synthesis of research in the social and i...

How Political Science Can Contribute to Public Health: A Response to Gagnon and Colleagues

Research Strategies: How Psychologists Ask and Answer Questions

Psychologists construct theories that organize observations and imply testable hypotheses. In their research, they use case studies, surveys, and naturalistic observation to describe behavior; correlation to assess the relationship between variables; and experimentation to uncover cause-effect relationships. Researchers use statistics to describe their data, to assess relationships between vari...