Main content
The Inference Engine: A Grand Challenge to Address the Context Sensitivity Problem in Social Science Research
Date created: | Last Updated:
: DOI | ARK
Creating DOI. Please wait...
Category: Project
Description: Social science has a ‘context sensitivity’ problem: the people that we study, and the situations they engage in, are so complex and variable that predicting how they will think, feel, and behave in a given situation is very challenging. Even when we are able to make such predictions, it is often unclear how accurate they will be if some feature of the studied subjects and/or situation changes. This limits the utility of our research for application and policy, as the ‘contextual factors’ that might change our conclusions are often unknown. It is time to address this context sensitivity problem in social science research. While do not yet know how to solve it, we believe social scientists can make great progress by working together to build an inference engine.
Start managing your projects on the OSF today.
Free and easy to use, the Open Science Framework supports the entire research lifecycle: planning, execution, reporting, archiving, and discovery.