Reading Analysis - "What Social Science Does And Doesn't Know"

A.) I thought the specific example about the domestic violence repeat calls was a very good representation of experimenation in social science and why it's so hard. One early experiement showed that when given three options (mandatory arrest, provide advice, or send the assailant away for eight hours), the cops who used the first method when handling domestic violence issues saw the biggest decline in repeat calls. This would make sense because the strongest punishment would intuitively seem to yield the strongest reinforcement. However, unlike science, the problem is not solved... Six more of these same RFTs were conducted in cities across the country: three of the experiements showed similar results to the first experiment but three showed the opposite was true. The repeat call rate was higher when officers institued the mandatory-arrest option. The reason for this had to do with the communities that the perpetrators lived in: communities who were stable and had higher incomes had people who were shamed by the arrest and thus were not likely to reoffend. But in less stable communities, perpetrators cared less about their reputation and instead just got angry. So all these extra issues that the experiment failed to control ended up producing completely different results than expected. In Social Science this is often the case and it is called causal density when numerous other factors that can't be controlled for skew the experimental results. Social Science is a lot different than natural science in that it's a lot harder to conduct experiments. However, researchers are starting to get a grasp on ways to overcome this (see business method).

B.) What about nuisance abatement made it so that results from different experiemtns were remarkably consistent every time?

Would it be possible to get consistent results for almost any issue if a representative sample was used every time?

How do quicker, cheaper experiments get around the causal density issue?

C.) This reading was assigned to demonstrate that social science is very different from natural science because of experimentation and the experimental method. Social science deals with unforeseeable human nuances that can't possibly be controlled for and thus providing governing rules for social science is very difficult. But, going along the theme that the world is improving, people are beginning to discover alternative methods (see Capital One example) to achieve good results and they seem to be working...