How Social Simulation Could Help Social Science Deal with Context

Much human cognition and behaviour is context-sensitive, but context (especially social context) has largely not been explicitly represented or included in theories of explanations of behaviour. Some of this is due to the fact that the word “context” is over-used and so has a variety of subtly different meanings but more to do with the perceived difficulties of dealing with context. Quantitative social science has tended to ignore context, treating contextual variation as “noise”. Qualitative social science has often almost deified context, resisting any attempts to generalise from specific contexts. This paper suggests that agent-based modelling could play a key role in dealing with context, representing it, understanding it and thus allowing the well-founded integration of qualitative and quantitative evidence