Agenda

Matthew Salganik - Princeton University

The digital age has transformed the ways that researchers are able to study social behavior. These new opportunities mean that the future of social research will involve blending together insights from social science and data science. In this talk, I will describe several themes of this hybrid approach.  Further, I will illustrate many of these themes by describing the Fragile Families Challenge, a scientific mass collaboration designed to assess the limits of predictability of life outcomes and improve our understanding of these limits. Using data from the Fragile Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality, birth cohort study that has followed about 5,000 mainly disadvantaged families for the past 15 years, 459 researchers built predictive models of six life outcomes, such as a child’s grades in school or whether the family would be evicted from their home.  Research participants in the Challenge could use any theoretical, statistical, or machine learning approach they wished and could draw on the more than 12,000 variables that had been measured about the child, parents, and family since the birth of the child. Our empirical results have implications for social science theory, data, and methods and for algorithmic decision-making in high-stakes settings.