Claudia Zucca – Data analysis and the future of social sciences
Claudia Zucca @cla_zu, UK Data Service Data Impact Fellow and Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher working on the VOTEADVICE project, shares her journey about how, with data, it is possible to measure in an efficient and precise way the impact of a policy.
In 1803 Henry de Saint- Simone, introduced south africa rcs data the idea that social phenomena could have been studied by using the same theoretical instruments, the same methodologies, used by hard scientists. A little bit later Auguste Comte called it social physics.
I have always thought that this idea is incredibly intriguing and I never understood why we should believe that social phenomena cannot be observed and measured as much as physical phenomena. As a matter of fact, they are not really the same, and for this reason, the name social physics did not live through. There is, in fact, a very clear difference between physical phenomena and social phenomena. Social science phenomena are much harder to observe than physical phenomena. There is an objective physical truth out there that can be observed and measured, collecting as much data as needed. On the other hand, there are several, plenty, of “social truths” out there, each one different from the other according to the peculiar characteristics of the observed community of people. This makes the job of social scientists extremely hard and, probably, for this reason, incredibly fascinating as only challenging things can be.