Social Science Research Council

The Social Science Research Council, a nonpartisan nonprofit founded in 1923 by seven professional associations in the social and behavioral sciences, mobilizes policy-relevant social and behavioral science for the public good.

In December 1921 the American Political Science Association appointed a committee chaired by Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago to consider the state of policy-relevant social and behavioral science. The committee’s first report identified a number of challenges to producing credible and reliable social and behavioral science that could guide public policy:
“Lack of comprehensive collections of data”
“Tendency toward race, class, nationalistic bias in the interpretation of data available”
“Lack of sufficiently precise standards of measurement”
“The difficulty of isolating…phenomena sufficiently to determine precisely the causal relations between them”
The absence of what in natural science is called the controlled experiment”

To tackle these challenges, the committee recommended the formation of a “Social Science Research Council” consisting of representatives from multiple disciplinary associations. The Council would advance “the development of scientific methods in the social sciences” by mobilizing social and behavioral scientists to search for solutions to important societal problems.