Civil Science

I quite enjoyed Robert Yin’s article on case studies. I found his analogy of the detective to be very instructive. This fits very nicely with my recurring theme of the obsession with making social science research appear “sciencey”. I very much appreciated his point about the importance of the investigator’s intuition, though I can see the sciencey people getting up in arms about that. However, I would like to extend the analogy even further. Within law there are two types of “truth”. In criminal court the standard of proof (truth) is “beyond a reasonable doubt”. This, if you will, is analogous to the hard sciences standard. Many in the social sciences seem to expect this level proof from their class of research. I would rather see the civil standard of “on a balance of probabilities” applied as the expected standard. The fact that it demands a “lower” level of certainty does not make this necessarily less useful at getting at the truth (See OJ Simpson). Given the complexity of many social science subjects, the need for intuitive input from the investigator, I think a balance of probabilities is the appropriate standard by which to judge most social science research.