social-science research

In the weekly Astronomical Data Group meeting, some of the questions that came up were about social-science research: Can we bring our knowledge of data and statistics—knowledge gained while working on astronomical problems—to bear on important social-science results on race, policing, hiring, and so on. We discussed some specific results in social-science research, and we discussed differences between the kinds of questions asked in social sciences and those asked in the natural sciences. There are lots of commonalities, of course! But two important differences between social-science researcch and much of the current work in the Group right now are: Social scientists are much more interested in establishing causal relationships between factors, and less about measuring parameters. And many studies are exploratory. The investigators have an interesting survey and are looking for good results within it.

These two properties (exploratory and causal) are shared with many studies in particular astronomy areas, such as galaxy evolution (does a change of environment cause a galaxy to quench its star formation, say?) and exoplanet abundances (do stars with higher metallicity form more planets, say?). Because there are sub-areas of astronomy that look a lot like social-science in their research style, I came away from these discussions thinking that interactions between astronomers and social scientists could be very valuable for the astronomers, at least. (And I have had some valuable interactions in the past.)