Methods of Study in the Social Sciences

The notoriously messy toolkit used to study human behavior, which refuses to sit still for clean measurement like chemicals or cells. These methods include surveys (asking people what they do, getting what they say they do), interviews (asking deeply, getting complicated stories), ethnography (living with people until they forget you're watching), statistical analysis (finding patterns in chaos), and case studies (going deep on one thing, sacrificing breadth). Unlike physics, social science methods must grapple with reflexive subjects who change when studied, cultural contexts that shift meaning, and the small problem that the researchers are also humans with biases. It's science, but science with feelings.

"I tried to apply the Methods of Study in the Social Sciences to my family Thanksgiving. Let's just say participant observation gets awkward when your participants know you're observing and demand to know what you're writing."

by Dumu The Void February 23, 2026

Spectral Variables (Scientific Studies)

The specific, often invisible factors that influence the results of published research but rarely appear in the final paper. These include the graduate student who actually ran the experiment (and their level of sleep deprivation), the one outlier the researchers quietly dropped, the subjective judgment calls in data coding, the peer reviewers' ideological commitments, and the pressure to produce statistically significant results. Spectral variables explain the replication crisis: studies that seemed solid were haunted by ghosts that only appeared when someone else tried to run the same experiment in a different lab with different hauntings.

Spectral Variables (Scientific Studies) "That famous psychology study from the 90s? It's haunted by Spectral Variables we can never recover: the specific way the research assistant smiled at participants, the cultural moment just before things changed, the grad student who fudged ten data points. The finding might be real, but the ghosts make us guess."

by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal February 23, 2026