BEGINNING EXPLORATION IN SOCIAL SCEINCE

这个小企业创新研究第一阶段项目将开发一个设计和原型的创新光盘教育材料，题为开始探索社会科学（BESS），旨在介绍社会科学的贡献，基本统计和数据分析，高中三年级和四年级学生和大学新生。希望发展或重新发现基本数据分析和解释技能的成年人也将能够从使用这些材料中获益。过去十年来，社会科学数据集的规模、数量和质量呈指数级增长。然而，社会科学家对这些数据集的便捷访问已经大大落后，因此这些数据为科学、政策和实践提供信息的潜力还没有得到满足。Sociometrics Corporation率先通过在一些重要的健康和社会科学领域建立索引数据档案，使这些丰富的数据资源随时可用，易于使用和广泛传播。拟议的项目将补充这些正在进行的共同努力，开展新的工作，重点是扩大和培训这些数据的潜在用户基础，方法是将重要的研究成果与社会计量学档案中最先进的社会科学数据和最先进的多媒体计算机技术相结合。

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a design and prototype for innovative CD-ROM educational materials entitled Beginning Explorations in Social Science (BESS) aimed at introducing social science contributions, elementary statistics, and data analysis to high school juniors and seniors and to college freshman students. Adults who desire to develop or rediscover elementary data analysis and interpretation skills will likewise be able to profit from using the materials. Social science data sets have grown exponentially in size, number, and quality over the last ten years. However, easy access to these data sets by social scientists has lagged considerably, so that much of the data's potential for informing science, policy, and practice has not been met. Sociometrics Corporation has pioneered in making this wealth of data resources readily available, easy to use, and widely disseminated through the establishment of indexed data archives in a number of important health and social science areas. The proposed project will complement these ongoing corporate efforts with new work focused on enlarging and training the potential user base for such data by combining important research findings with state of-the-art social science data in the Sociometrics archives and state-of-the-art multimedia computer technology.