Collaborative Research: Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS): Proposal for renewed support

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In 2001, Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) was established with the support of the National Science Foundation. TESS is an infrastructure project that capitalizes on economies of scale to enable scholars from across the social sciences, on a competitive basis, to conduct ground-breaking research on issues of broad theoretical and practical importance. Since its inception, TESS has enabled an unprecedented number of researchers to collect original, high quality nationally-representative experimental data. On a continuous basis, TESS solicits proposals to test methodological and substantive hypotheses from across the social sciences, submits them to a rigorous peer review process, and then implements the most innovative and promising experiments on its Internet-based data collection platform. This platform draws on national probability samples of respondents and offers the capability for implementing complex experimental designs. The key to TESS is multiple studies, from different disciplines, sharing a common observational platform, all exploiting the inferential power of experimental designs and nationally representative samples. By distributing the costs of sampling, data collection, and data management over a large number of studies, TESS dramatically reduces the average cost of each study and makes experimentation on general-population samples available to researchers for whom the obstacles to such work would be otherwise prohibitive. As a scientific investment, therefore, TESS offers broad, immediate, and long-lasting benefits. At the same time, many of its costs are remarkably low. Viewed as a whole, TESS breaks new ground by following the best scientific practice of the past ? it harnesses cutting edge technology and uses it to create and disseminate new discoveries about critical social and behavioral phenomena. Indeed, while TESS has innovated in many ways, its basic strategy is to follow a path that has served science well in the past ? make the best technology available to our best scientific minds.The broader impacts of TESS are substantial. Most obviously, TESS enhances the infrastructure for research and education, providing a common platform for the conduct and analysis of general population experiments. In so doing, TESS advances discovery and understanding by capitalizing on economies of scale to make general population experiments feasible to a diverse array of talented, innovative social scientists, most of whom would otherwise be unable to conduct such research. TESS also promotes teaching, training, and learning at the undergraduate and graduate levels in a number of ways. For example, graduate students from across the social sciences are encouraged to submit TESS proposals, and expert reviewers provide detailed feedback. Graduate students (and even a handful of undergraduates) have been PIs or co-PIs on a number of successful TESS proposals, and have benefited from the experience of running their own population-based experiment. In addition, graduate students and undergraduates have benefited from the incorporation of TESS data into courses on research methods and statistics across the country, providing young scholars with manageable experimental data sets on which to develop their analytic skills. And graduate and undergraduate students will serve as Research Assistants, gaining hands-on experience in all aspects of TESS . TESS also broadens the participation of underrepresented groups, both as investigators and research participants. At the heart of TESS? mission is the democratization of access to high quality, original experimental data, putting the power of population-based experiments in the hands of researchers from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, from all types of academic institutions, and from all stages of career. And because the TESS data collection platform involves a representative sample, the results of TESS projects reflect the broad diversity of our nation. Further, the data collection platform enables investigators to oversample respondents from otherwise underrepresented groups, and a number of TESS projects have done so for the express purpose of better understanding psychological, behavioral, or economic processes within these groups.