Readers respond to an editorial on difficulties with replicability of results in social science research
Your editorial on social science research (15 April) highlights the poor replicability of results, and the misuse of this by some to dismiss all social science. As was indicated, in a field as complex as human behaviour, poor replicability can be due to many factors: methodology, misused statistics, variations in sample characteristics and so on.
There is one factor underlying much of this, not much discussed, which is a dearth of observation of human behaviour in everyday environments in the same manner as scientists would observe any other species in order to find out what the behaviour is and so what needs to be understood.
