Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) is designed to accomplish six goals: 1. to provide numerous social scientists with new opportunities for original data collection: 2. to promote innovative experiments; 3. to increase the precision with which fundamental social, political and economic dynamics are measured and understood: 4. to increase the speed and efficiency with which advances in social scientific theory and analyses can be applied to critical social problems: 5. to maximize financial efficiency by combining otherwise separate studies, thereby radically reducing the average and marginal costs of each study: 6. to create an Internet portal for people who want to learn about social science experimentation -- a place where teachers and students at many levels can easily benefit from these collective accomplishments.
TESS will accomplish these goals using two large-scale, cooperative data collection instruments. Both the internet-based and telephone-based instruments will allow researchers to run novel experiments on a national random sample of American households for the purpose of examining substantive or methodological hypotheses. Scholars across the social sciences will compete for time on one or both instruments. A comprehensive review process will screen proposals for the importance of their contribution to science. The co-PIs. assisted by leading researchers from Economics, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology. Communication, Cognitive Science and related disciplines, will oversee the review process, drawing on reviews solicited from within each proposer's discipline. Because the data collection instruments will be in the field on a continuous basis, accepted experiments can be conducted quickly.
Technologically, TESS combines the proven power of computer-assisted telephone interviewing with the new possibilities of computer-assisted Internet interviewing. Each approach allows researchers to capture the internal validity of traditional experiments while realizing the benefits of contact with large. diverse subject populations. Researchers can also use TESS to conduct experiments across interviewing modes. Such studies will reveal the extent to which phone and laboratory-based experimental findings are robust to interview contexts that can be created on home computers across the country. Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences provides new opportunities, both methodological and substantive, to a wide range of researchers.
During the grant period TESS will open new research opportunities for over 150 individual researchers or research teams. By capitalizing on numerous economies of scale and having multiple experiments share time on each data collection instrument, TESS will allow numerous researchers to collect data tailored to their own hypotheses at an extraordinarily low cost per study. As a consequence, TESS will provide many social scientists with increased incentives to design innovative experiments. Moreover, by providing data collection instruments that are in the field on an ongoing basis, TESS will accelerate the pace at which research can be done and allow researchers to design studies that respond to current events.
Education and training are integral parts of TESS. The website for this project, ExperimentCentral.org, is the core of an educational strategy. In addition to coordinating the submission and review process for TESS proposals. ExperimentCentral.org will allow students and teachers at many levels to learn about the many benefits of past and present social science experimentation. The site, in addition to providing quick and easy access to TESS data and analyses, will make it easier for many internet users to find experimental websites from the social sciences. The educational strategy also includes substantial graduate student training throughout the five-year project.
In sum, Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences offers new opportunities for both substantive and methodological advances. The key to TESS is multiple studies from different disciplines sharing common observational platforms, all exploiting the inferential power and measurement efficiencies of experimental designs. This time-sharing on data collection platforms is also the key to economic efficiencies of TESS. By distributing the costs of sampling, interviewing, and instrument collection over a large number of studies, the marginal cost of each study can be reduced by orders of magnitude, indeed, often to a tenth or less of what each would cost if done on its own.
