The Building Partnerships Program at the University of Queensland, Australia seeks to address the dual challenge of preparing doctors who are responsive to the community while providing a meaningful context for social sciences learning. Through partnerships with a diverse range of community agencies, the program offers students opportunities to gain non-clinical perspectives on health and illne...

This paper was prepared within a Special Support Action " Research Collaboration in the Social and Human Sciences between Europe, Russia,other CIS countries and China " – Global SSH. The Action is supported by the European Community under the Sixth Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration (FP6) Thematic Area 'Citizens and governance in a Knowledge-based soci...

We take advantage of the challenging comments to the modeling approach we proposed in [35] to look ahead at a number of applications of the methods to the alternative questions these comments raise. In turn, our effort results in a number of interesting and valuable research perspectives. The presentation goes along three main lines. In the first line, we summarize briefly the aims and results ...

The term big data is currently a buzzword in social science, however its precise meaning is ambiguous. In this paper we focus on administrative data which is a distinctive form of big data. Exciting new opportunities for social science research will be afforded by new administrative data resources, but these are currently under appreciated by the research community. The central aim of this pape...

Traditionally in the social sciences, causal mediation analysis has been formulated, understood, and implemented within the framework of linear structural equation models. We argue and demonstrate that this is problematic for 3 reasons: the lack of a general definition of causal mediation effects independent of a particular statistical model, the inability to specify the key identification assu...

A paper in this issue analyzing the impact of Stand-Your-Ground laws revealed a disturbing pattern of racial bias. Individuals (i.e., defendants) in Florida were more likely to avoid charges if the victim was Black or Latino but not if the victim was white. Indeed, individuals are nearly two timesmore likely to be convicted in a case that involves White victims compared to those involving Black...

MoSeS (Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science) is a research node of the National Centre for e-Social Science. MoSeS uses e-Science techniques to execute an events-driven model that simulates discrete demographic processes; this allows us to project the UK population 25 years into the future. This paper describes the architecture, simulation methodology and latest results obtained by MoSeS.

This commentary will extend the territory claimed in the target article by identifying several other areas in the social sciences where findings from the WEIRD population have been over-generalized. An argument is made that the root problem is the ethnocentrism of scholars, textbook authors, and social commentators, which leads them to take their own cultural values as the norm.

Policies are often developed without taking into account social science research findings and recommendations, despite the plethora of such research studies. This is largely because researchers and policy makers often work in isolation, yet if they worked synergistically they could have a significant impact on implementing interventions known to work to improve the lives of populations. Several...