The Workshop on Robust Social Science took place in St. Petersburg, Florida, from June 4 to 7, 2018.
Goals and procedure
The workshop focused on modern research methods — recent developments in methodology and statistics, and new techniques made possible by modern technology — that are more conducive to reproducibility. In particular, panelists discussed how such methods can and cannot be applied in behavioral and cognitive science and how their use could be facilitated or encouraged.
The workshop was attended by experts in research methodology and statistics (to discuss the methods) as well as domain experts in a variety of disciplines in psychology and cognitive science (to discuss their feasibility).
During the workshop, the assembled participants were involved in a full-time collaborative project with two related goals. The first goal was to produce a small number of video lectures on the topics of robust design, emerging technologies, and model-based inference (forthcoming). All panelists contributed to the production of one or more these video lectures. The second goal was to produce a “road map” document that outlines what we think are roadblocks to the widespread implementation of these modern research methods, and what (if anything) methodology researchers can do to make their methods more accessible (forthcoming). All panelists contributed to the writing of this document.
The workshop was funded by grant #1754205 from the National Science Foundation’s Perception, Action, and Cognition panel.