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Integrating the humanities and the social sciences: six approaches and case studies

Authors: Brendan Case,Tyler J. VanderWeele
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Publish date: 2024-2-8
ISSN: 2662-9992 DOI: 10.1057/s41599-024-02684-4
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This paper makes an ambitious case for integrating the humanities and social sciences, but one can’t help noticing how casually it tosses around empirical claims, especially when discussing the effects of religion on well-being, without doing the necessary legwork to support them. The authors cite a flurry of statistics linking religious attendance to reduced depression, divorce, suicide, and so on, as if these effects are settled science. But they never stop to question whether those findings actually hold up under closer scrutiny. Where’s the discussion of confounding variables, reverse causality, or even the possibility that healthier, happier people might just be more likely to attend religious services in the first place? The selective presentation of only positive outcomes, without mentioning contradictory findings or the well-known limitations of observational data, feels more like advocacy than analysis. And that’s a problem in a paper that claims to be building bridges between disciplines. If the goal is to enrich our understanding with insights from both empirical and philosophical traditions, then cherry-picking agreeable data while ignoring its methodological messiness undermines the very interdisciplinary rigor the authors are calling for.

 

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