Can the social sciences ever regain their credibility?

[Sotiredofallthisnonsense]

Having recently been a sociology undergraduate I'm skeptical. What are the implications of this?

Furthermore, what areas around this do we need or want some serious research into? For me personally, I'm very curious to learn more about the impact on mental health on people, particularly women and girls due to the climate around gender extremism and gaslighting this involves.

They have to, we need them as a balance. I'm sorry I have to post and run, but for me our societies desparately need people studying ethics and writing papers on implications and applications of science for and on the populace.

I've wondered this. Once you have the majority of social scientists pushing an obviously false idea, how can anyone take them seriously? Psychology has already received a massive blow from the replicability crisis, which has shown that the majority of findings in psychology research cannot be replicated.

I agree Joody, we need them. However, I’m not just sceptical about social sciences now, but universities as a whole. Engineering scholarships offered on the basis of gender, corrupt data used in criminology (and no doubt elsewhere) with no challenge, GC students and staff facing bullying and isolation with no institutional support.
Not all, Reading seems to be providing some critical thinking, but so many (most?) don’t seem to be able to think through to the conclusion. This is terrible - universities are supposed to teach critical thinking and encourage their students to question and challenge. #nodebate is hardly a hallmark of academic rigour.

Was the psychology thing recently? I saw a snippet in an article talking about how replicability didn’t matter because obviously there is too much variability but without context it was just odd. If there is too much variability to replicate then the results are worthless.

It is not just gender than is an issue. The idolatry of ‘lived experience’ is also an issue. Experts are now considered oppressors and their knowledge to be dismissed due to lack of lived experience - or rather the right lived experience. If you look at the world of autism research you will see researchers called Nazis, their language policed, findings piled on. It is turning people away from this area of research. ‘Nothing about us without us’ is used to demand research follows the wants of select very vocal groups at the expense of others. It biases both the research and publication of results. Much the same as research into ‘transgender’ treatment.

Has sociology ever been credible?

It seems to me whole swathes of academic fields have made themselves useless, from questions about funding (both what and who by), ethics to the issues around peer review. It's a tragedy, I always put my faith in reason, debate and scrupulous research and it's gone.

University seems to have become a factory that kids need to pass through to stand any chance of employment and about sustaining each institution as a business - hence the pandering to fashionable ideology. It's no longer for people who genuinely want to learn, since critical thinking is actively discouraged.
I don't know how they come back from that now - they've essentially destroyed the very purpose of their existence.

There's a woman in the Mail today who has been outed by her own mother as lying about her ethnicity and advancing in a career she wouldn't otherwise have been employed in. How does this square with their defence of an ideology that says you are whatever you say you are. If you 'feel' it, it becomes truth?

I think academia needs a massive shake up, to put it mildly.

I think sociology certainly did have well earned credibility at one point. And as Joody said, we need it.

I don't know. I wonder if there doesn't need to be a deep look into the epistemic foundations of the sciences overall, and a rethinking of some aspects. But the social sciences in particular have lost credibility.

I tend to agree that universities are going to need some kind of reformation.

Interesting question.

My uni field, Classics, used to be rigorous but now it too has succumbed to fashionable ideologies.
Honestly I see this as the endpoint of the education revolution of the 1960s.
Ironically there is a return to Classical high schools where students are taught Latin, and core subjects, essay -writing, logic. The same will probably happen with the university level in time. But I think it will be new institutions.

Over thirty years ago the Social Sciences were begging hard science grads or anyone who studied Maths to enter their professions to give them some credibility.

Nothing has changed, other than they have plunged even further into justifying being referred to as soft sciences or quasi science.

I've always thought of them as quacks & nothing has happened in the past 30 years to change my mind.

They should be renamed because there is next to no science in them.

DH is an academic, he suspects it will be a long time.

He belongs to a philosophy group, the weeks they did Judith Butler were packed, other weeks not so much.

He also noted that as a middle-aged philosophy grad he was one of the few actually able to do proper criticism of the work rather than just saying 'isn't she fabulous'.

I don't think he was even that TERFy at the time, it might have been that which pushed him over the edge.

After the sterling work by James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose exposing their bias and gullibility, I'm going to say no.

eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2018/10/10/grievance-studies-academia-fake-feminist-hypatia-mein-kampf-racism-column/1575219002/

Interesting @Brokendaughter DH is a Social Scientist but he does the maths and computer modelling.

He's not interested in remembering pronouns or working on his non-binary style. Just happy playing with spreadsheets.

The corporate model of the university drives some of the deterioration we are seeing. The customer is always right, so the customer's (student's) critical faculties and beliefs can't be challenged as this would be unsafe.

Over time this will affect those who stay to become researchers and the topics they research.

As an aside, social science research is extremely demanding in some ways as laboratory experiments are mostly impossible, so most studies must use data from people's actual lives, and there the fact that an enormous number of different variables influence outcomes at the same time makes quantitative research more demanding both to perform and to interpret.

Add to that the huge number of social science variables which are really not measurable at all or poorly measurable.

That's funny, I was a customer too - nobody batted an eyelid if I felt unsafe.

Yeah, I think the unsafe thing is down to different cultural trends.

Liability culture in general, a kind of victim culture, the whole idea that kids need careful building up of self-esteem with no stress.

As an undergrad in the late '70s I remember going into the London University Senate House lavatories (in the basement) and seeing "sociology degree- please take one" written on each toilet roll holder. Sociology has always had a varied reputation, but despite that has generated some interesting ideas. And some very silly ones.

This popped up and seems relevant.

I didn't do a degree in it but I did do an A Level (nearly 30 years ago). I think much of it was credible because it was a solid introduction to class politics as well as the theory side - Marx, Engels etc. I don't think I would have gained this knowledge anywhere else as a teenager quite so comprehensively.

We covered things like the miners strikes and police brutality. The Poll Tax riots and the welfare state. Prisons, the Justice system and racism inc the numerous riots and protests that were recent history at the time. I also remember a bit about gay rights, the HIV/AIDs epidemic and feminism/women's suffrage.

Teaching then wasn't delivered how it seems to be now. We had to do a lot of our own reading and there was lively class debate. Our teacher had a strong left wing bias of course (do right wing sociologists exist?) but people were expected to debate and disagree with each other including him. We all did - quite strongly sometimes, but nobody was cancelled or chucked off the course and everyone went to the pub as friends afterwards.