Social Science Space

Biplav Srivastava, professor of computer science at the University of South Carolina, and his team have developed a data-driven tool that helps demonstrate the effect of wearing masks on COVID-19 cases and deaths. His model utilizes a variety of data sources to create alternate scenarios that can tell us “What could have happened?” if a county in the U.S. had a higher or lower rate of mask adherence.

Humanity has a long history of dealing with things like pandemics. What history shows us is that the only practicable interventions are social and behavioral. How can we slow the movement of the new infection through the population while medical science catches up with treatments or vaccines?

This guide of freely accessible research compiled from SAGE’s Coronavirus Research collection provides insight on what COVID-19 has revealed these past months and how we can utilize these lessons moving forward.  

Robert Dingwall cites a short story from 1957 which highlights why the development of a vaccine needs to always keep an eye on its safety, no matter what the pressures are for its immediate release.

This panel, “How Can Social Statistics Help Us Fight COVID-19,” organized by the Campaign for Social Science and SAGE Publishing and held on September 21, 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.

or 30 years, social scientists have been trying to educate scientific elites in the value of taking ordinary people with them rather than dismissing skepticism about science-based actions. This work has just gone out the window, argues Robert Dingwall.

As COVID-19 forces the world in into a predominately digital state, censorship and the spread of misinformation have not been far behind. Our experiences […]

Evidence reviewed by a National Association of Public Administration working group finds that voting by mail is rarely subject to fraud, does not give an advantage to one political party over another and can in fact inspire public confidence in the voting process, if done properly.

The author of a new book on the response to the coronavirus tries first to understand how apparently sane people could think it made sense to implement damaging policies, and secondly asks how the public might ensure that such a disastrous episode can never happen again.

On October 9, a free online symposium will bring together social and behavioral science researchers in the United States whose work can inform public policies related to the pandemic with policymakers and public servants who are crafting and enacting legislation and other responses to COVID-19.

From the budding sense of a tight-knit community of fellow students and faculty, to radio silence, for a lot of students the rapid coronavirus-driven shift to a digital university experience doesn’t feel like enough. I am one of those students — a current graduate student who recently moved back home to America to finish up the last year of a dual-degree program.

As the toll from the COVID-19 pandemic increased, polling suggests counter-intuitively that resistance to a future vaccine has also risen. Anthropologist Heidi J. Larson identified several likely drivers of this, including scientists themselves.