U.S.millennials are moving away from suburbia to return to the cities. This was the prevailing belief in 2019, when I began my role as the social sciences reporter. Science News. However, when I tried to find a story about the phenomenon, it was a confusing mess. Some research indicated that suburban areas were growing, while others suggested that they were shrinking. Others showed growth in both urban and suburban areas.
I was unable to comprehend the complex web of information and decided to abandon the idea of a story. A Harvard University whitepaper explaining where disagreements in the field originates was found, which I discovered several months later. competing definitionsWhat distinguishes a city and a suburb? Researchers define suburbs as those areas that are not within the city’s census-designated boundaries. The researchers also wrote that other indicators of suburbanism include a high number of single-family residences and car-based commutes.
I have encountered this type of fuzziness around definitions of all sorts of terms and concepts in the years I’ve covered the social sciences. Sometimes, researchers assume that the definition of a key term is correct. The definition. They may look briefly at the definitions and then choose the one they like best, with no explanation. Other times, researchers in one subfield choose one definition, and researchers in another subfield choose a different one — each without ever knowing of the other’s existence. It’s enough to drive any reporter to tear their hair out.
“If you look … you will find this morass of definitions and measurements” in the social sciences, says quantitative psychologist Jessica Flake of McGill University in Montreal. She assured me that it was common for others to have similar experiences.
In other scientific fields, definitional problems also exist. There are often disagreements between biologists about the best method. to define the word “species” (SN: 11/1/17). Squabble among Virologists over what counts as “alive” when it comes to viruses (SN: 11/1/21). And not all astronomers are happy with the decision to define the word “planet” in a way that left PlutoIt was a tiny dwarf planet, out in the frigid coldSN: 8/24/21).
Flake believes that social sciences present unique challenges. Social science is still a relatively young field compared to astronomy. Therefore, it has taken less time to establish its definitions. Social science concepts can be subjective. It is easier to describe abstract ideas, such as motivation, feelings, than it can be to describe, say, a meteorite.
It’s tempting to assume, as I did until I began researching this column, that a single, imperfect definition for individual concepts is preferable to this definitional cacophony. Some researchers even encourage this approach. “While no suburban definition will be perfect, standardization would increase understanding of how suburban studies relate to each other,” the Harvard researchers wrote in that suburbia paper.
Recent research on how the middle class is defined has shown me that alternative definitions of the term can help to shift our perspective.
While most researchers use income as a proxy for class, these researchers used people’s buying patterns. In July, the team reported that only a fraction of those who are considered middle-class in terms of income can afford basic necessities such as food and child care. Social Indicators Research. They are. As if they were working class.
What’s more, that vulnerable group skews Black and Hispanic, a disparity that arises, in part, because these families of color often lack the generational wealth of white families, says Melissa Haller, a geographer at Binghamton University in New York. Families without financial security can find it difficult to recover from disasters. This vulnerable group would be overlooked by a government or non-profit that focuses on income-based metrics and directs aid towards the most needy families.
“Depending on what definition you start with, you will see different facts,” says Anna Alexandrova, a philosopher of science at the University of Cambridge. One example is the standard definition of middle-class. This could mask some key facts.
In the social sciences, what’s needed instead of conceptual unity, Alexandrova says, is conceptual clarity.
Flake believes that even though social scientists may disagree on how to solve this problem of clarity Flake states that it is a serious threat to the field. Other crisesRocking the disciplineSN: 8/27/18). That’s because how a topic is defined determines the scales, surveys and other instruments used to study that concept. This in turn influences how researchers analyze numbers and come up with conclusions.
Defining one’s key terms and then selecting the right tool is somewhat straightforward when relying on large, external datasets. For instance, instead of using national income databases, as is common in the study of the middle class, Haller and her team turned to the federal government’s Consumer Expenditure Surveys to understand people’s daily and emergency purchases.
Social scientists, especially psychologists, often create their own scales or surveys to measure subjective concepts like self-esteem, mood, well-being, and other factors. Definitions of those terms — and the instruments used to study them — can take on a life of their own, Flake says.
She and her team showed this process in action recently at the May-June Symposium. American Psychologist. They looked through 100 studies and 100 replicates that were part of a large reproducibility project in psychology. The researchers zoomed in on 97 multi-item scales — measuring concepts such as gratitude, motivation and self-esteem — used in the original studies, and found that 54 of those scales had no citations to show where the scales originated. It suggests that the original creators of the idea created the measurement tool. FlyingFlake states that it is. Research teams then attempted to replicate 29 of those studies without digging into the scales’ sources, calling into question the meaning of their results.
Flake believes that conceptual clarity can be achieved by following a simple, but not impossible, path. Researchers should stop trying to generate new ideas or duplicate old ideas and instead look at the relics.
She points out one promising, though labor-intensive effort: The Psychological Science AcceleratorA collaboration of over 1,300 researchers from 84 nations. The project is designed to identify and combine big ideas in psychology like gender prejudice and face perception.
“Instead of running replications, why don’t we use [this] massive team of researchers who represent a lot of perspectives around the world and review concepts first,” Flake says. “We need to stop replicating garbage.”
I couldn’t agree more.
