America's private and public sectors work hard to improve national security, economic growth, and quality of life for people around the world. In an increasingly competitive global environment, American competitiveness often depends on analyzing the best available data and evidence in ways that are rigorous and actionable. Our military, our farms, our factories, our tech companies, and our governments benefit from analyses that document the effect of past and current programs and provide a credible basis for improving future effectiveness and efficiency. The EITM (Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models) program is designed to help young scholars develop research designs in ways that advance critical scientific knowledge and that make that knowledge more relevant and usable to the private and public sector. EITM pursues these goals by providing opportunities for scholars to better leverage possible intersections between theoretical modeling and empirical inference. For example, today sophisticated methods for examining qualitative data, text, "big data", networks and related phenomena are drawing scholars' attention. EITM his attention increases the opportunities for, and headwinds facing, theory-empirical integrations. A new approach to EITM can help scholars increase the credibility and value of the knowledge that they are now producing.
The EITM Summer Institutes offer younger scholars an opportunity to work with senior scholars who are leaders in advancing theoretical and empirical research. The content of Institute activities pertains to the development and expansion of best practices. The substantive focus is on areas where appreciable research integrating theory and methods already exists. Institute activities transcend passive receipt of lecture material. Each institute offers participants multiple dynamic opportunities to receive mentoring and feedback from a wide range of sources. Each institute combines a rigorous curriculum with a wide range of one-to-one mentoring opportunities with leading faculty from across the country. EITM is committed to making these opportunities available to people from all backgrounds. We have worked with other groups to deal with the fact that aspiring members of historically underrepresented populations often desire the benefits of an EITM experience, but lack confidence that their institutions have adequately prepared them. EITM's expanded Scholarship program gives us the ability to be proactive in building new opportunity pipelines for such individuals. In short, EITM emphasizes addressing important substantive and methodological problems with a combination of clearly-stated premises, logically coherent theory explaining relations among concepts named in the premises, and a logically coherent empirical work developed to evaluate the premises and/or the relations. Society benefits when its members can develop, articulate, and apply logically-coherent and empirically robust explanations of critical social phenomena. Dealing with such questions directly, as EITM does, is a means to new levels of accuracy and reliability for the growing range of private and public sector entities that use social science to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. Developing a generation of scholars who are up to helping the nation effectively confront its most significant challenges and to make the most of its evolving opportunities is the main goal of the EITM approach.
