Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

4 Building on Social Science: Theoretic Foundations for Modelers

Benjamin Nyblade¹, Angela O'Mahony² and Katharine Sieck³

¹ Empirical Research Group, University of California Los Angeles School of Law, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

² RAND Corporation and Pardee RAND Graduate School, Santa Monica, CA, 90401, USA

³ Business Intelligence and Market Analysis, Pardee RAND Graduate School, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 90407, USA

Background

The social sciences encompass a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical approaches. While researchers in these fields may not always be conscious of the philosophy of science underpinnings of their work, the vast bulk of social and behavioral researchers are drawn to a middle ground when it comes to beliefs about the generalizability and universality of social and behavioral theories. Most researchers reject both the claim that generalizable social scientific theories are impossible or unhelpful and the claim that theories must be grounded in a universal covering law model of the scientific enterprise. Social and behavioral researchers tend to work with theories that they do not claim to be universal, but that they instead suggest should be generalizable to those contexts or situations in which the researchers expect the causal mechanism to operate similarly.

The fact that social and behavioral researchers are thus working with contextual mid‐level theories makes reviewing the state of the social science theories challenging, ...