Collaborative Research: Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS): Proposal for Renewed Support

2001年，在国家科学基金会的支持下，社会科学分时实验（TESS）成立。 TESS是一个基础设施项目，利用规模经济，使来自社会科学领域的学者能够在竞争的基础上，对具有广泛理论和实践重要性的问题进行开创性的研究。 自成立以来，TESS已使数量空前的研究人员能够收集原始的、高质量的、具有全国代表性的实验数据。TESS不断征求建议，以测试来自社会科学的方法和实质性假设，将其提交给严格的同行评审过程，然后在其基于互联网的数据收集平台上实施最具创新性和最有前途的实验。该平台利用国家概率样本的受访者，并提供了实施复杂的实验设计的能力。TESS的关键是来自不同学科的多项研究，共享一个共同的观察平台，所有这些研究都利用了实验设计和全国代表性样本的推理能力。通过将采样、数据收集和数据管理的成本分摊到大量研究中，TESS大大降低了每项研究的平均成本，并使研究人员可以在普通人群样本上进行实验，否则这些工作的障碍将是禁止的。因此，作为一项科学投资，TESS提供了广泛、直接和持久的好处。与此同时，它的许多成本都非常低。从整体上看，TESS通过遵循过去最好的科学实践而开辟了新天地。它利用尖端技术，并利用它来创造和传播有关关键社会和行为现象的新发现。事实上，尽管TESS在许多方面都进行了创新，但它的基本策略是遵循过去为科学服务的道路？让我们最优秀的科学家能够获得最好的技术。TESS的广泛影响是巨大的。 最明显的是，TESS增强了研究和教育的基础设施，为开展和分析一般人群实验提供了一个共同平台。 在这样做的过程中，TESS通过利用规模经济来推进发现和理解，使一般人群实验对各种各样的有才华的、创新的社会科学家变得可行，否则他们中的大多数人将无法进行这样的研究。 TESS还以多种方式促进本科和研究生阶段的教学，培训和学习。 例如，鼓励来自社会科学领域的研究生提交TESS提案，专家评审员提供详细的反馈。 研究生（甚至少数本科生）已经成为许多成功的TESS提案的PI或共同PI，并从运行自己的基于人口的实验的经验中受益。 此外，研究生和本科生受益于TESS数据纳入全国各地的研究方法和统计课程，为年轻学者提供可管理的实验数据集，以发展他们的分析技能。研究生和本科生将担任研究助理，在TESS的各个方面获得实践经验。 TESS还扩大了代表性不足的群体的参与，无论是作为调查人员还是研究参与者。 在TESS的核心？使命是使获得高质量的原始实验数据的权利民主化，将基于人口的实验的权力交给来自所有种族和民族背景、来自所有类型的学术机构和来自所有职业阶段的研究人员。 由于TESS数据收集平台涉及具有代表性的样本，TESS项目的结果反映了我们国家的广泛多样性。 此外，数据收集平台使调查人员能够从其他代表性不足的群体中过度抽样受访者，许多TESS项目已经这样做，以更好地了解这些群体中的心理，行为或经济过程。

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.