Confronting counsels of despair for the behavioral sciences

In recent decades, influential counsels of despair have asserted that the behavioral sciences, including much educational re-search, have failed to produce long-lasting generalizations. The failure, they say, is due to cultural and historical relativism and interaction effects. But those counsels rest more on logical possi-bilities than on empirical actualities. They depend on question-able assumptions about the spread and influence of knowledge, they involve contradictions, and they overemphasize the impor-tance of interaction effects. In the last 20 years, moreover, meta-analysis has yielded knowledge concerning the impressive magnitude, consistency, and validity across contexts of many generalizations in the behavioral sciences and promising meth-ods for quantifying and analyzing the generahzability of research results. These arguments, findings, and methods justify mitigat-ing the despair and continuing the effort to build sciences of behavior. Educational Researcher, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 5-15, 22 After Comte, the social sciences tried to achieve victo-ries comparable to those of the natural sciences. Social scientists had optimistic aspirations that so-cial science would yield scientific understanding of soci-ety's processes and the individual's actions; understanding that would often make possible prediction and improve-ment. The social and psychological equivalents of the applications of science in engineering and medicine would flow from the pursuit of social science, they said. These aspirations persisted, only occasionally challenged, well into the second half of the 20th century. In recent decades, however, a sizable literature has ques-tioned such goals. Thus, writers in volumes edited b