The Behavioral and Social Sciences Achievements and Opportunities (1988) / Chapter Skim
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6. The Research Support System
6. The Research Support System
Pages 201-236
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6 The Research Support System
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Of particular concern here are large-scale data sets, including those that are part of the federal statistical system; specially collected research data; and research-relevant record systems kept by other 203
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For example, colleges and universities consider teaching a primary responsibility, but they also take responsibility for maintaining technological resources needed for research. Many academic institutions also maintain data archives, central computer facilities, or specialized research organizations, and many allocate funds to support faculty and student research.
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On university and college campuses, behavioral and social scientists comprise 22 percent of all the fulltime equivalent scientists and engineers, but only 8 percent of the 65,000 fulltime equivalent positions devoted to research and development. This last percentage is lower than it was a decade ago, in approximate proportion to a reduction in federal research support.
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The relative popularity of behavioral and social sciences undergraduate courses results in heavy teaching demands in these fields: more than one-fourth of doctoral psychologists and one-half of all other social scientists report that teaching, largely undergraduate instruction, · .
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This contrast at upper undergraduate levels between the bculty-intenshy and research orientation of natural science education and the broader intellectual net that ~ cast to serve the needs of less research-oriented undergraduate moon in the behavioral and social sciences may make the latter less attractive to many intellectually talented undergraduates. The Matures of the U.S.
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In other scientific fields, the comparable number increased by 15 percent. To support their graduate training, behavioral and social sciences graduate students now rely heavily on their own earnings, spouses' earnings, and loans (see Table 6-21.
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It is especially important that high-quality graduate fellowships, traineeships, and assistantships once again become readily available in conjunction with faculty research and advanced training. Only by paying serious attention to the financial requirements of graduate training will the behavioral and social sciences stop losing potential research talent to clinical, business, legal, and other kinds of career training.
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In 1986, for the 5,700 new life science PhDs, there were about 3,750 postdoctoral research positions (fellowships, associateships) and entry-level jobs primarily devoted to research and development, about 66 prime research openings per 100 doctorates For the 8,200 new physical and engineering sciences PhDs in 1986, there were about 4,850 postdoctoral research positions and research and development jobs, about S9 openings per 100 doctorates.
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Other sources of support for research are advanced workshops away from a person's home institution, regional and national research centers, and traditional postdoctoral fellowships. The central point is that new PhDs as well as those early in their careers need to have access to a range of postdoctoral research opportunities that are not necessarily tied to specific grants for fully described projects.
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New methods mere brought much more rapidly into use, new lines of research developed, important results mere published, and people who mere otherwise isolated Tom pars of their or or closely related research herds mere brought electively and efRciently up-to-date because of the close interaction that takes place in such a sewing. Most of these acidities mere discontinued, not because the need far them diminished but because of changes in the mode of Ending.
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Other mechanisms for interdisciplinary communication, advanced training, and collaboration, such as specialized institutes, conferences, and individual
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Altogether, only 2.7 percent of the total $655 million spent for research equipment on campuses in fiscal 198S was for psychology and the social sciences, down from 3.7 percent in 1981. There is a persisting view that behavioral and social sciences research can operate as a virtually equipment-free enterprise, a view that is completely out of date for research in many areas.
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Access to advanced computingiacilities by behavioral and social scientists should be improved. Behavioral and social scientists need to be involved directly in the planning, assessment, and development of new supercomputerfacilities.
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As these data collections continue to grow, the adequacy of current computer facilities will be still further strained. The development of supercomputers is a possible solution to meeting the requirements of users of the very largest data bases, but it is by no means certain.
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The solution to this problem is to revise computer user-cost systems that create inadvertent cross-subsidies. Visual perception research has an especially rich history of advances correlated with progress in computer graphic capabilities.
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DATA RESOURCES A number of large-scale funded data bases serve behavioral and social sciences research. Some of these data bases entail costs comparable to capital pieces of scientific equipment.
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The second concern is the maintenance and enhancement of research access to governmental microdata files and record systems. A final important set of data resources that need attention are the records of local governments and large corporations.
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that are difficult to find or confirm in short-term or cross-sectional studies. But longitudinal studies cannot be undertaken lightly; they require a long-term commitment, sometimes up to 30 years or more, to ensure that their advantages are fully exploited.
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Present archiving initiatives look toward providing effective remote access as well as automated indexing, cataloguing, and search capabilities to aid researchers in identifying data for specific research interests. These facilities also encourage behavioral and social scientists to combine data and conduct temporal and geographical comparisons that go beyond any one data collection.
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These evaluations should be published: they can serve as a basis not only for evaluating the projects themselves, but also for advances in knowledge about how to evaluate and improve all such largescale data collections. Research Access to Government Data We recommend that federal statistical agencies and programs work toward more access to federal data bases by behavioral and social sciences researchers.
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To help make national and inte~stionsl data more adequate sc~ntiRcaLy, the Nsdonsl Sconce Foundation and the [ensue Bureau are providing support to an American Stst~tical Association Ship progrsm aimed at Usher upgrading the study potent of current Census Bureau data products and making them more directly usable by the research community. Programs of on-she study at federal agencies of which the American Statistical Association research Allows program is s mode~rovide an opportunity far researchers to analyze cats that may be too expensive to prepare far public release.
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As government agencies and a variety of private companies (such as insurance clearinghouses, direct-mail advertisers, and credit bureaus) amass more extensive and detailed data files, the possibility increases that someone with a large-scale record system in which identities are known could use computer-matching software to identify individual respondents even in a set of anonymous microdata, that is, in files containing individual records from which all identifiers (such as names, addresses, and social security numbers)
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Despite such safeguards, there have recently been instances of denial of research access to federal statistics that were previously made available in sample form, for example, the Continuous Work History Sample from the Internal Revenue Service. Researchers are concerned that such denials do not become a trend.
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One deskstle easy to incresse the usefulness of data archives~ublic and privat~ould be to provide them with trained star or statistical analysis. Capacides far producing properly protected data tales, or periling stst~tical analyses when it is impossible or too costly to protect the ales adequately far release to researchers, Could improve the range of potential resources at relatively low COSL ~uldvariste analysis open requires little more than covarisnce matrices far a sample and far some important subpopuladons, a level of a~regadon that surely protects the privacy of individual records.
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The development of a complex data base or the creation of a research center may well constitute valuable enterprises that can contribute to the scientific work of many investigators; but when a large-scale project may command, say, an annual sum equal to one-third of the federal budget lines presently devoted to basic research in one of the core disciplines, a serious debate is joined. Modes of Support We recommend that the major mechanismfor supportingfundamental research in the behavioral and social sciences continue to be individual grants awarded under a scheme of competition among intellectually similar projects, with evaluation conducted by scientifically qualified and organizationally disinterested individuals.
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institution. In most agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Nshonsl Institutes of Health, sod the Alcohot Drug Abuse, and Dental Health Admin~t~tion, the technical evaluadon ~ conducted by an extemal scientific review panel supplemented by ad hoc consultants In other agencies, including the U.S.
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The size of the typical research grant in the behavioral and social sciences often precludes substantial use of modern equipment or hiring trained staff, including the technicians, predoctoral assistants, and support staff, needed to carry out highquality research. Because of year-by-year administrative decisions made by staff and review panels in key federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the trend of decreasing budgets experienced over the past decade has not led to appreciably fewer proposals being funded, but to reductions in the size of each grant in many research programs (see Appendix A)
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Stalking needs to be adequate to permit appropriate handling of interdisciplinary projects, which often require greater time and attention. Wefurther recommend that the National Institutes of Health and the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, andMental Health Administration reconsider the criteria they use to evaluate behavioral and social sciences research.
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Because research frontiers often involve problem definition, exploratory knowledge, development of new methods, or strong policy interest, creative scientists from various disciplines can often enter them relatively easily. Progress in such research usually accelerates when the problems are sufficiently defined to enable the application of the most advanced technical tools from one or more disciplines tools that are constantly being improved and refined.
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First, in recent years two major research support agencies in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health and the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, have increasingly stressed that behavioral and social research should directly address specific disease syndromes.
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It was transferred to the new Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering and reorganized as a Division of Information, Robotic, and Intelligent Systems. As a result of the move, the unit has ceased to fulfill its important role in supporting basic behavioral and social sciences research projects with strong information science components, to the detriment of both areas and especially of their interdisciplinary intersection.
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· Demographic behavior. There is substantial warrant for a new demographic research facility in the developing world, particularly in Africa, to engage in epidemiological, ethnographic, and demographic work similar to that now carried out by the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research in Bangladesh.
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There are similar or even more disproportionate relationships between biomedical and behavioral and social sciences research in every institute in the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration and National Institutes of Health.
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To deploy scarce resources wisely and effectively, there should be efforts to develop complementary (not, of course, monolithic) research and funding policy for the behavioral and social sciences across the federal government.
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