What does the Facebook emotional contagion study really tells us about research ethics? Perhaps, argues Robert Dingwall, that its time to deregulate public social science.
Robert Dingwall argues that numeracy and and a grasp of quantitative method of course have a place in the education of a social scientist, but they shouldn’t be the only skills in the graduate’s quiver. How about he ability to walk around, for one?
Many social scientists find themselves members of a cult of quantification, argues Robert Dingwall, in love with numbers for their own sake even when those numbers produce no useful knowledge.
No one expected Tamiflu to be a wonder drug, but indications are that it’s moderately useful in fighting a serious public health threat. But that message was lost last week in an ill-starred rush to beat up on ‘wicked’ Big Pharma, argues Robert Dingwall.
Applying ethics to social science research can raise as many issues as it answers. A new set of guidelines on which Robert DIngwall consulted gives clarity in some cases like manipulation of images and duplicate publication but leaves some other controversies unsettled.
Feel-good interventions that don’t provide a practical good, or at least one not supported by evidence, generate questions that hinge specifically on future responses to climate change and more broadly on government decision-making in general.
Back in the summer, John Holmwood, the current BSA President, sent me an email about impact and research ethics. Various […]
Not many social scientists introduce a phrase into the English language and its subsequent history is instructive about the ways in which the impact of successful sociology becomes invisible. It is also a nice example of how ideas become assimilated into a societal environment that finds it hard to accept the sociologist’s focus on systems and organizations.
A recent Ipsos-Mori survey reveals the crucial role that social science has to play in modern democracy, a role which is frequently sabotaged.
There is broad agreement is the desirability of wider access by readers to scholarly journal articles. There is less agreement on who these imagined readers might be.
I was still wearing my belt and triggered the detection gate. What followed was the most intrusive search that I have experienced at any UK or US airport.
The controversy over BBC journalists’ use of a student tour group linked to the London School of Economics should not be allowed to go away quietly.
