Institute For Quantitative Social Science - What Does Social Science Mean at IQSS?

What Does Social Science Mean At IQSS?

The IQSS uses the term social science to refer to areas of scholarship dedicated to understanding, or improving the well-being of, human populations. Social scientists typically conduct quantitative analysis using data observed at the level of the person or groups of persons, such as countries or areas. The term most commonly is applied to empirical and quantitative areas within academic disciplines in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard University, such as Sociology, Political Science (called Government at Harvard), Economics, Psychology, and Anthropology. The term also is used for quantitative analyses of public policy at the Kennedy School and educational research within the Graduate School of Education. What IQSS calls social science is called other things in other areas, but the category is much wider than the term. It includes what the law school faculty calls empirical research, and many aspects of research at the Medical and Business schools. What IQSS calls social science includes a large fraction of faculty from the School of Public Health, although they have different names for these activities, such as epidemiology, demography, and outcomes research. IQSS also has increasingly rich connections with the Initiative for Innovative Computing, the Harvard Initiative for Global Health, and the Broad Institute (along with many more substantively oriented centers), including joint grant proposals and collaborative research.