Behavioral Science vs.
Social Science Databases
Social scientists were building and using databases decades before psychologists even started to think about using them. In fact, scientists in some social science fields have long sacrificed funds for individual research so that the funds could be pooled to support common data collection efforts. Understandably, the social science databases are more developed than are the behavioral science databases. Psychologists, however, are unlikely any time soon to sacrifice funds for individual experiments in favor of collective efforts.
There is another difference between the two kinds of databases that makes it hard to simply borrow the accumulated knowledge of social scientists in this area. Social science data are largely survey based and descriptive, and there is widespread agreement among users about the protocols under which the data are collected and made available. A substantial portion of psychological data comes from surveys, and it is worth noting that data of this sort have been the first to go into publicly accessible behavioral science databases. But the bulk of psychological data are experimental. Agreements about protocols from one experiment to another are, at best, loose. So there are questions that behavioral scientists face in putting together their databases that are directly related to the nature of the data to be archived and that differ from the questions social scientists need to ask to achieve orderliness in their archives.
