重构社会科学：基于哈佛定量社会科学研究院的反思

Restructuring the Social Sciences: Reflections from Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science

社会科学正在经历一个巨大的转型:从研究问题转向解决问题;从用少量的数据集辅助研究,转向对数量不断扩大的各种高信息含量数据进行研究;从学者各自为政,转向更大规模的、合作的、跨学科的、具有实验风格的研究团队;以及从单纯学术追求为内在导向,转向影响公共政策、商业和工业、其他学术领域和一些涉及个体与社会的重大问题。在这种欣欣向荣又混乱的状态之中,我们创建了哈佛定量社会科学研究院(Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard),这是一个新型研究中心,致力于帮助促进更大范围的研究转型与发展,并对这些发展作出回应。鉴于越来越多的大学建立了类似机构,文章将基于我们的经验,对此提出建议,并讨论我们将如何共同努力以推动社会科学普及。

The social sciences are undergoing a dramatic transformation from studying problems to solving them; from making do with a small number of sparse data sets to analyzing increasing quantities of diverse, highly informative data; from isolated scholars toiling away on their own to larger scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, lab - style research teams ; and from a purely academic pursuit focused inward to having a major impact on public policy, commerce and industry, other academic fields, and some of the major problems that affect individuals and societies. In the midst of all this productive chaos, we have been building the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, a new type of center intended to help foster and respond to these broader developments. We offer here some suggestions from our experiences for the increasing number of other universities that have begun to build similar institutions and for how we might work together to advance social science more generally.