Researchers Simon Chauchard and Sumitra Badrinathan explain how they are designing and testing one of the most ambitious media and science information literacy programs to date—with 14,000 students in Bihar, one of the lowest-income states in India.
March 14th, 2024 | 2:00 PM EDT
In this installment of our Research to Solve Problems lecture series, Cyrus Samii (New York University) will discuss how political science researchers can take a problem-solving approach to orienting their work toward social issues. Drawing on a recent book chapter, he’ll describe how empirical political scientists can look for and define problems, and a step-by-step process to help researchers pick the right methodological tools to go from descriptive to causal analysis and intervention testing to solutions.
Mercury Project directors Heather Lanthon and Rebecca Gluskin respond to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual letter laying out the foundation’s investment agenda. For successful programs to translate into meaningful change, philanthropies have to also invest in the social and behavioral science needed to scale those programs.
Frontiers in Social and Behavioral Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
February 29th, 2024 | 3:00 PM EST
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) have become an increasingly used tool for governments to evaluate whether a particular program or improvement to a program could work. But once a government has that evidence, what determines if they will use it? In this installment of our Research to Solve Problems lecture series, Stefano DellaVigna (UC Berkeley) will discuss ways researchers might address bottlenecks to evidence adoption in their research design.
For over 100 years, the Council has mobilized policy-relevant social and behavioral science aimed at finding actionable solutions to pressing societal challenges. But public policy is not always supported by rigorous research evidence, and professional training in the social and behavioral sciences does not generally prioritize the innovation, evaluation, and (importantly) implementation of scalable policy solutions. In this virtual lecture series, faculty from College and University Fund member institutions share their work to understand how to pursue research that solves problems.
The 2023 SSRC Centennial Lectures showcased a shared focus on not only describing problems, but also finding solutions to those problems. SSRC President Anna Harvey reflects on what it means to pursue research designed to solve problems, and how the SSRC can most effectively support problem-solving research.
Frontiers in Social and Behavioral Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
At the 100th anniversary of the Council’s founding, we are proud to honor its founders and to celebrate the achievements of policy-relevant and solutions-oriented social and behavioral science. Every month Frontiers features an article from the most recent issue of each founding association’s flagship journal. Across disciplines, the frontiers of social and behavioral science are rapidly advancing, and with them, our collective capacity to support global well-being. Explore the seven articles featured in the December research roundup here.
The Social Science Research Council welcomes the University of Pittsburgh to the ranks of the 49 North American institutions that comprise the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences.
