Research

Collaboration between researchers, funding agencies, policy makers, and affected parties from society can have a significant impact on the evidence generation process in social sciences, according to researcher Neil Lewis Jr. Despite having decades of research, social scientists still face difficulties understanding the nature of behaviors well enough to make good predictions about how to change them. Lewis Jr. argues that collaboration can help to address these issues by broadening the scope of research, providing diverse perspectives, and ensuring that research is relevant and useful to society. The Social Science Research Council’s Mercury Project’s team’s approach to research, which focuses on collaboration to address pressing issues, is a potential solution to improving the evidence generation process.