This project involves a workshop to be mounted in the spring of 2009 to address the shared infrastructure needs of the social and behavioral Sciences. The workshop addresses the fundamental question: What social and behavioral scientific questions of great import to human understanding cannot now be answered because researchers do not have the needed infrastructure to answer them? The infrastructure needs involve data needs and satisfactory methodological tools. The focus of the workshop centers on how human scientists can build the needed infrastructure.
Participants in this project are chosen to represent researchers at the cutting-edge of individual lines of inquiry. Viewpoints involve both new, bold initiatives, and key needed additions to well established thinking about current human science domains.
The product of this workshop is a listing of key questions that can be answered with new infrastructure, explicated in a language that can be understood across the SBE disciplines represented in the Directorate. The results are potentially transformative because the discussion has broad impact for researchers doing social and behavioral research across all subfields of the human sciences.
