Toward expediting the resolution of debates in the social sciences 1

Four reasons for the prevalent delays in resolving debates in the social sciences are discussed. These are the difficulty in clearly answering certain questions for investigation, the inadequacy of common research designs for establishing “firm inferences,”; the lack of methods for reviewing and synthesizing disparate results from different studies of the same topic, and the inappropriateness of present debate arenas for expediting resolution. Some characteristics of the arenas of social science debates are described, and several suggestions for improving these arenas are proposed.