Data Banks and Depositories
Concept and History of Data-Banks
The tradition of thought that gave rise to the social sciences was based on the quest to understand the laws or regularities governing the emerging industrial societies with democratic political regimes. The political and economic revolutions that were shaking the world substituted the relative predictability of the traditional ways of handling power and production with the disconcerting uncertainties of political consensus and the new market of commodities.
Finding such laws was not easy. The model for scientific inquiry established by the successful endeavors in the various fields of physical and natural sciences was not applicable to social science research. For a period social scientists believed that the complexity of the social object and the immaturity of the field were responsible for the failure of the natural science model. Social scientists gradually became aware, however, that the epistemological foundations of the social sciences were different: in practical terms, because creating an experimental situation in social matters is extremely difficult; and in theoretical terms, because society is a moving target, readily reacting to changes in circumstances. In the end, mainstream social scientists learned to live with these difficulties.
The Newtonian challenge of formulating hypotheses, collecting the relevant data, and accepting only those hypotheses that fit observational data, has been in one way or another the stimulus and the standard of advances in knowledge in the many fields that later composed the social sciences.
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