I just finished a press briefing with a bunch of very sharp journalists. I love this part of my job, though I’m inevitably way more confident in the research than I am in my ability to convey it to others. Today it was the release of a Sentencing Project report, coauthored with Sarah Shannon and Jeff Manza, where we offer some new numbers on the people affected by U.S. felon voting restrictions.

Academics often feel tension between their research and public outreach activities, but the two can work hand in hand. A few suggestions when writing a report such as this one:

• Embrace description. To a much greater extent than academic audiences, journalists and their readers value our ability as social scientists to provide basic social facts about the world. We can still sneak in a little theory and analysis, of course, since it provides much-needed context for the data we present.
• Vet your methods. If your report is not peer-reviewed, it is critical to point to your peer-reviewed articles applying the same methods to the same data that you will be presenting publicly. Good journalists care about the academic integrity of the work they write about (and, these days, some will dig deep into the methods sections of those articles). At the outset, we could easily identify some particularly surprising and, hence, controversial numbers (sorry, Florida) and we did all we could to double- and triple-check them.
• Insist on caveats — but you don’t need to lead with them. Responsible social scientists are transparent about potential problems with their data or analysis, but a high “caveat to content ratio” will kill a press release. Editing this report we ultimately moved some caveats from the first page to the last — but we would not have cut them.
• Choose partners who respect research. Marc Mauer and the Sentencing Project have earned a great reputation for their non-partisan reform work. While some organizations are more oriented to deadlines or to spin than to research integrity, Marc and his colleagues were remarkably patient and understanding about our need to get it right before going public.
• Teach! Whenever I’m in doubt about how to present something to journalists or policy folks, I try to think about how I’d teach it. For example, Sarah, Jeff, and I realized that the felon voting story was increasingly “spatial as well as racial.” So, we made some cartograms like the one above to visually represent the concentration of disenfranchisement in the Southeast (arguing at length about whether it was appropriate to refer to certain states as “engorged”). We still present plain vanilla charts, of course, but the cartograms and our slider maps tested especially well in my lectures this spring, with students quickly picking up the story behind the numbers.
• Tough it out. Backlash is always a possibility, with people sending nasty comments or emails about everything from your research to your haircut — and they aren’t always as polite as our academic critics. Sometimes this is because the reporter got something wrong or because you didn’t express things precisely, but mostly it is because they simply disagree with the implications of your work. That’s just part of the deal, I think. If you’ve done the work in good faith and to the best of your ability, your career and your ego will survive the criticism.
• Don’t worry about cite count. To the extent that stories are written, some mention names and others won’t make any attribution. Either way is just fine with me. We pick up certain research projects because we’d like to encourage a public conversation about them — not to see our names in the paper. Often, I’ll only know they’re using my work because I recognize a number or two that came out of our shop.

Scott Jurek is a badass distance runner, but he’s also one silver-tongued persuader. The ultramarathoner’s Eat and Run lays out such a compelling case for a plant-based diet that this old-school marathoner suddenly found himself devouring baked tofu in lieu of his post-run steak n’ eggs. Countless others had suggested I work in a salad from time to time. Why would I ignore years of advice from my doctor but take dietary cues from a self-described Minnesota redneck?

Well, I guess Mr. Jurek just spoke my language. He begins his story as a “serious carnivore,” who grew up yanking walleye from Lake Mille Lacs. A skinny kid, he learned to run and ski cross-country, faring pretty well against the “cake eaters” on Duluth’s east side. He was introduced to “‘hippie food” by coaches and a college girlfriend, discovering that he felt stronger and performed better when he ate “plant-based” food (his diet is clearly vegan, but the “plant-based” label seems to come with less baggage). Oh, and I almost forgot: he regularly runs distances of 100 miles or more faster than anybody on the planet.  His recipes are thus interwoven with ripping yarns from some of the world’s toughest races.

Scott Jurek’s crossover success as a food writer might offer a few lessons for social scientists aiming to get people thinking in new ways. As academics, we’re often presenting our research in hopes of changing the hearts and minds (and votes) of politicians, publics, or policy makers. But we forget that it takes a lot to actually change somebody’s mind. In my career, it only seems to happen when folks (a) agree that my evidence is really powerful; and (b) somehow identify with me as a credible expert who knows and appreciates their own worldview. Mr. Jurek nailed me on both counts, overcoming my prejudices with evidence and answering my knee-jerk objections in precisely my own language.

Before I give public talks, I ask what sorts of evidence might change my mind about issues on which I’ve developed firm opinions (e.g., gun control, progressive taxation, public education). That’s a pretty high bar for most of us, right? I certainly wouldn’t be talked off my opinion by some dork from the university half-assedly opining on his “reading of the literature.” To get my attention (let alone change my mind), I’d want a supertight smoking-gun study along with some sort of richly textured first-hand testimony from people I trusted. So when I’m testifying, I never expect folks to accept my ideas uncritically. I might have real authority and legitimacy on the subject of crime, for example, but so too does the state legislator who served ten years as a district attorney. I’m not going to talk her off her position unless I’ve got something really convincing to say — and I can say it in ways that resonate with her own experiences.

Scott Jurek and his editors understand all this implicitly. While it is certainly easier to preach to the converted, overcoming disbelievers can be a rich and satisfying experience. Sort of like that post-race lentil-mushroom burger …

photo by Pete Aylward

And now, an analogy.

A little over a week ago, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne was in town touting his new book Our Divided Heart: The Battle for the American Ideal in an Age of Discontent. He gave an interesting little promo about how the tension between our desire for individual liberty and freedom has constantly butted up against the quest for community throughout the history of American politics. But what was really memorable for me—what I have found myself thinking about mowing the lawn and driving to pick up my kids over the past few days—was the story he shared when I was introduced to him as a fellow sociologist. (Dionne has his doctorate in sociology from Oxford.)

The gist of the story was how an economist he knew once told him that sociology was “the dentistry of the social sciences.” This economist apparently meant the phrase as something of an insult. Dionne, however, took it as a compliment. Turns out, his father was a dentist, and Dionne is convinced of the nobility of the profession. Almost instantly, one of the other folks at the table quickly chimed in to quip that recent research has revealed the under-appreciated importance of oral health and hygiene to all manner of health and wellness (particularly in terms of heart health).

I don’t remember exactly where the conversation went from there, but I can say that that idea that sociology is to the social body as dentistry is to the physical body is a great image and metaphor. The parallels, moreover, are rich—poor public reputation, second-class professional status, working behind the scenes sweating the small stuff, trying to convince folks to pay attention to things they’d rather ignore, etc. I should also note that I went ahead and scheduled some long-overdue appointments in the big chair for my son and myself. You can never underestimate the power of regular flossing.

The U.S. Senate is now deliberating a bill that will fund the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its research programs for 2013. Reports indicate that the Senate will finish its work by the end of June. What makes this legislative process of particular  import is that last month the House of Representatives passed a version of the bill that would eliminate funding for political science research. (The provision was offered by Representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ) who said the provision was “oriented toward ensuring, at the least, that the NSF does not waste taxpayer dollars on a meritless program.”) And, just last week Washington Post columnist Charles Lane called for the elimination of all NSF funding for social science research.

We don’t want to be alarmist, but this situation seems pretty serious and is beginning to be something of a pattern. Recall that last year we saw similar threats to defund the entire Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) at NSF.

The American Sociological Association is urging its members to write their  senators in support of social science research funded by NSF. (Click here for more information or see the text of sample letter below.) We usually try to keep politics and advocacy to a minimum here at TSP, but the one thing we are unabashedly advocates of is the value and social necessity of social science. No matter what you do or don’t do, and whether you are a professional social scientist, this is one issue to stay tuned to.

The ASA’s Sample Letter

As a sociologist and member of the American Sociological Association, I am deeply concerned about the National Science Foundation’s FY 2013 funding level and the implicit attack on scientific peer review. I urge you to provide robust funding for the Foundation and protect the integrity of the scientific enterprise that has benefited this country for so long.

Research funded by the National Science Foundation is a critical part of the research infrastructure in the United States, providing approximately 20% of all federally supported fundamental research conducted in America’s colleges and universities. NSF is the only federal agency whose mission includes support for all fields of fundamental science and engineering—including sociology, political science, and economics. The agency identifies the most promising ideas for advancing science through a rigorous and objective merit review process that uses independent scientific review panels.

The U.S. House recently voted to eliminate funding for all fundamental research in political science. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), “NSF political science research grants have contributed to important research on democratization, radicalization and terrorism, disaster response, and voting behavior.”

I urge you to oppose any efforts to eliminate funding for particular areas of science NSF’s when the appropriations bill reaches the Senate floor. In addition, I urge you to encourage your colleagues to restore funding to political science programs when NSF’s appropriations bill moves to conference committee.

NSF-funded research advances the frontiers of knowledge that keep the United States safe and competitive. In addition its research provides our nation with an understanding of humans and human behavior, which is used as a foundation for all successful technologies.

Please vote to protect the integrity of the scientific process by ensuring that NSF’s independent expert panels determine the best scientific ideas. I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Over the course of the past year, Theda Skocpol, Harvard social scientist and a great friend of TSP, has been working to create a network of publicly minded social scientists to help bring scholarly research and expertise to bear on issues of public importance and political significance. She calls it the Scholars Strategy Network, or SSN for short. Given our commitment to public engagement and with a regional branch here in the Twin Cities, we’ve been following this initiative closely and indeed trying to contribute in our own small ways. Not even a year old, the SSN now boasts over 100 members and has eight regional chapters. And perhaps most notable of all (at least from our web-centric view), this week marks the launch of the Network’s new website: http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org.

Over the next few days, Skocpol and other members of the network will be in Washington, introducing the site and a few of the research briefs that are its most useful and impressive feature to representatives of the 100 or so organizations that attend the weekly Common Purpose meetings. They also plan to make an appearance at Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro’s supper seminar for House members and staffers, and present to the White House Outreach Office.  “So,” as Skocpol puts it, “the word will be getting around fast.  People will be looking at our site, downloading our briefs, and getting a sense of who and what we have to offer.”

We invite you to take a quick sneak peak for yourselves. You’ll see that more than a few friends of and contributors to TSP are involved, including Minnesota’s own Larry Jacobs, one of the four featured scholars for the inaugural month of June. You should also be able to scroll through SSN’s brand new collection of original research briefs. These short, accessibly written briefs summarize key research findings, present basic facts on timely topics, and spell out policy options on issues of immediate public and political concern. Written by a stellar cast of leading scholars, these are really great and useful pieces. There are almost 90 available on topics ranging from jobs creation and economic growth to health and education reform, to immigration policy, elections, and the environment.

To help promote and disseminate this work, our plan here at TSP is to use our “Reading List” feature to highlight some of the best and most relevant of these briefs over the summer months. We hope you find these pieces as interesting, informative, and accessible as we do. You can also check the Network out on Twitter: @SSNScholars.

We talk a lot about the public value of social scientific research, but sometimes it seems we’re either preaching to the choir or our sermons are falling on deaf ears. Perhaps what we really need is ongoing dialog and debate between the true believers and the skeptics. For a piece that could help push toward that kind of exchange, check out this recent New York Times “Opinionator” piece from Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame.

As the title suggests, Gutting’s piece poses the question of how reliable social scientific research is when it comes to informing real-world, public policy. Not as much as we might think or wish. Part of the problem is that we often fail to distinguish between early, preliminary tests and more definitive studies. Far more problematic is that fact that the knowledge and information in the social sciences is not as reliable as we might hope. Worse, prediction is where the social sciences really struggle. At the root of our inability to guide and predict from our research, according to Gutting, is the fact that the social world is so complex it doesn’t lend itself to the kind of randomized, controlled experimentation that is the hallmark of so much of the best research in the natural and physical sciences.

These ideas are inspired and informed by a new book called Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society by Jim Manzi. While I haven’t read the book yet (and am a bit skeptical about trying to imitate the natural science model), I’m especially interested to see what my editorial partner Chris Uggen thinks. Chris is, after all, constantly pushing the value of controlled and/or randomized experiments in our field.

Anyway, since that is to come, I’ll give the last word for the moment, to Gutting, in the hope that it will be the first step to further reflection and exchange:

My conclusion is not that our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research. We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions. But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results. Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.

While I’ve written and done research on atheism and black America, I’ve never put the two together. This Gawker post by Cord Jefferson (editor of Good Magazine), brought to my attention by the fabulous Letta Page, does.

I haven’t had a chance to think it all through yet, but am curious what others think, both about the basic phenomenon as well as about its broader social and theoretical implications.

And on that score, check out this Huffington Post piece on religion, in-group trust, and out-group distrust. It is by Scott Atran, who is, as my colleague and collaborator Penny Edgell says, “one of the most thoughtful scholars working at the intersection of religion and evolutionary theory.”

Has there ever been a culture as obsessed with competitions and awards as ours? And what better way is there to get someone’s time and attention than by giving them an award—especially if that someone is in a resource-poor, status-driven field like academia?

The obvious answers to questions like these are, at least in part, why we started our monthly TSP media awards for excellence in reporting of social scientific research and insight. We were also inspired and informed by a great friend of TSP (and recent contributor) Joel Best’s recent book Everyone’s a Winner: Life in our Congratulatory Culture (University of California Press, 2011). Well, it turns out Professor Best has just been honored with an award himself. Today he’s taking  the opportunity to provide The Society Pages with an  insider’s, reflexive account of the experience winning. In honor of his honor, please enjoy “Status Affluence Strikes Home” by our award-winning guest contributor, Joel Best:

A few weeks ago, I learned that I’d won a prize—a pretty big prize, actually. Each year, my university singles out one professor for his or her scholarly accomplishments, so it’s a real honor to be chosen as this year’s recipient. It’s also a bit ironic: in 2011, I published Everyone’s a Winner: Life in our Congratulatory Culture, a book about prize proliferation and status affluence. Now winning an award has taught me a bit more about prize processes.

To begin, I was struck that getting the word out is a very important part of the awarding a prize. While intelligence services may award medals in secret, at least until their spies come in from the cold, most prizes are heavily publicized. I gave an interview for the university’s website; the resulting story will be reprinted in the alumni magazine. I was asked to attend a meeting of our board of trustees, where the provost listed dozens of faculty who received honors—being chosen as fellows of learned societies, all-campus awards for outstanding teaching and advising, and so on.  After he finished, the winners were asked to stand and we received a nice round of applause. My dean also asked me to participate in an all-college awards ceremony (our college has its own awards for faculty who excel in research, teaching, advising, or service). As the word got out, I received lots of congratulatory emails.

Obviously, this recognition was personally gratifying, but I wasn’t the only beneficiary. Publicizing professors who receive awards serves the campus, the college, even their departments; awards confirm that all of these entities are centers of meritorious accomplishments. Award ceremonies are moments of Durkheimian social solidarity, a reaffirmation of shared values and a claim that those values are embodied in those being recognized. Universities award and publicize lots of prizes, not just because the winners deserve recognition, but as a way of convincing everyone associated with the institution (and that certainly includes alumni who might be moved to further contribute to their alma mater) that it is worthy of their support.

When you think about it for a moment, you realize that our culture awards a colossal number of prizes. Think about all the Boy Scout merit badges, the employee-of-the-month plaques, and such; Americans must receive millions of awards each year. And, at least some of the time, there’s grumbling, such as when people don’t agree that this year’s winner should have received the Academy Award for Best Picture. When I left that board of trustees meeting, some people were muttering that the great majority of the faculty recognized—probably at least three-quarters—came from engineering or the natural sciences, while faculty in the humanities were barely mentioned.

The fact the people care about these matters, that news of prizes can make them grumpy, reminds us how little attention contemporary sociologists pay to status. Look at the index to any introductory textbook, and count the number of entries for race, class, gender, and power.  Now look up status. Status has become the Cinderella of sociological concepts, ignored, dismissed, taken for granted. Now examine your college’s website, probably filled with news of the respect, honor, and other sign of status the students and faculty have received. Isn’t it at least possible that, when we ignore status, we’re missing something important?

I want to mention one other topic related to the organization of prizes. An individual has to be nominated to receive the prize I was awarded. I have a colleague who tells me that, not all that long ago, someone could submit a single letter extolling a colleague plus the individual’s vita, and that could be enough to lead to the award being given. No more. Today there is a call for nominations that includes a list of rules and deadlines.  My chair and that same colleague made heroic efforts to contact all sorts of people to request supporting letters, then assembled a thick packet of these materials (I haven’t seen it, but if anyone reading this sent a letter in my behalf, thanks so much). Obviously, there can’t be a single standard of merit that ranks people who have made very different contributions; this means that a highly organized effort in a nominee’s behalf improves that person’s chances of being chosen. This also helps explain why engineers and natural scientists seem to receive so many awards; their professional associations seem to offer more opportunities to receive high-status honors, including medals, being named a fellow in a professional organization, and such. (Compare the highly selective Sociological Research Association, which carefully draws next to no attention to itself, presumably as a means of avoiding controversy in a discipline where many members are anti-elitist). The distribution of awards reflects the organization and cultures of myriad social worlds, where members may choose to celebrate one another’s accomplishments.

Obviously, I was very pleased to receive my prize. But, if the sociological lens is a useful tool for viewing the world, we shouldn’t be afraid to direct it toward ourselves, to recognize the social forces and social patterns that shape our own lives.

Joel Best is a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. He’s the author of, among many others, Everyone’s a Winner, The Stupidity Epidemic, and Damned Lies and Statistics. Best was recently interviewed about the new edition of Social Problems on TSP’s Office Hours podcast.

Today’s New York Times has a story in the Arts section about how scholars across the American academy are engaging the Occupy Movement in their teaching, publishing, and research. Not surprisingly, sociologists—among them, Alex Vitale (Brooklyn College), Theda Skocpol (Harvard), Todd Gitlin (Columbia), Hector Cordero-Guzman (Baruch College), and Ruth Milkman (CUNY)—figure prominently in the story, which is largely about the different social scientific data and methods by which these movements and their participants are understood. Missing from this discussion, however, were the global dimensions and forces of these movements. Fortunately, TSP’s “Knights of the Roundtable” team, led by Sinan Erensu, recently interviewed a number of expert sociologists specifically with this focus. You can check it out here.

Here in Minneapolis, Earth Day and the Invisible Children campaign to “Cover the Night” clashed just a bit, as we found our own Walker Art Center’s sculpture garden damaged in the name of raising awareness about Joseph Kony and the ongoing atrocities in Uganda. For a lot of people here and elsewhere, the name Kony has certainly become more “famous” with Invisible Children’s recent efforts, but the context has been lacking. Beyond a flashy video and exhortations to do something now—even if it’s causing a lot of expensive damage to public art—many are left without any real idea of what’s happening in Uganda, how Ugandans themselves are working to solve the crisis, and how effective campaigns like Invisible Children and even the individual efforts of well-meaning Americans can really be. Our own Shannon Golden recently interviewed the U of M’s Amy Finnegan, who wrote her dissertation on Invisible Children, about these vexing questions, and now Finnegan has launched a website with other scholars in order to help give a broader view and perspective on Kony, Uganda, and activism. Dr. Finnegan writes:

In response to Kony2012, Making Sense of Kony has some excellent information to contextualize and begin further dialogue on the LRA, northern Uganda and the surrounding region, militarization in Africa, and the role of advocacy. Please check it out and pass it on!

Thanks to Dr. Finnegan for continuing the role of public sociology by taking on such a big, tangled issue and working to help us all understand it better. For those of you who are academics, you’ll also find helpful teaching resources on the new site.