Ben Baumberg and Jonathan Bradshaw debate 'What's the point of Social Science?' at the University of York. The last in the series of Queen's Anniversary Prize Lectures for SPRU, Social Policy Research Unit. "Why do we do social science? This is a question that is almost never asked directly, despite the continual debates about 'impact' -- but for all of us who work in social science or use it heavily, it should underpin everything that we do. In this talk, I therefore firstly describe and justify a model of what social science should be, focusing on whether we can still talk about 'truth', and using examples taken from both my own career and from well-known social scientists. I argue that social science should be both an institution for generating a truthful picture of the world, and an institution to help society critically reflect on itself. In the second part of the talk, however, I compare current practices in Britain to this ideal. I argue that social science is failing on both counts: it is insufficiently truthful yet simultaneously insufficiently critical, due partly to the attitudes of social scientists, and partly to the framework surrounding them. I conclude with suggestions for how social science should change -- and how those of us who want to change it for ourselves can set about doing so." Ben Baumberg is a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Kent, and Joint Coordinator of the University of Kent Q-Step Centre. He is a mixed-methods researcher whose current work focuses on the drivers of perceptions of 'benefit scroungers', and the link between disability, disadvantage and employment. He has engaged in policy debates in multiple ways: writing reports for the EU and World Health Organization; speaking regularly to politicians, think-tankers and charities; blogging for the Guardian and setting up the collaborative blog 'Inequalities'; and working directly with disability charities and activists. Jonathan Bradshaw will respond to Ben's position: Jonathan Bradshaw has been a leading social policy scholar for over 40 years. He made seminal contributions to the comparative study of child well-being, poverty and the adequacy of benefits. He founded the Social Policy Research Unit at the University of York, contributed to numerous landmark studies of poverty and minimum income standards in Britain for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and issued a wake-up call to policy makers worldwide by producing the first international "league table" of child well-being. He has just published his 'Selected Writings 1972-2011' which contains his seminal works and is freely available to download.

• published: 24 Feb 2014
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