Scope Statements in Empirical Social Research: A User’s Guide

Most empirical results in the social sciences are context-bound rather than universal. However, social researchers rarely formulate explicit scope statements for their findings, which can hinder scientific progress. We argue that both quantitative and qualitative empirical social research should formulate scope statements. Scope statements serve to specify the extent to which empirical results can “travel”, and connect them with the existing body of conceptual and theoretical knowledge. We introduce and define the closely interrelated notions of empirical context, conceptual and theoretical scope. We present a general user guide for quantitative and qualitative researchers to specify scope statements for their findings, involving three analytic steps. First, researchers identify the potentially relevant empirical context, conceptual, and theoretical scope for their populations or cases. Second, they should then use counterfactual reasoning to successively assess and, where suitable, expand scope statements. The final steps involves evaluating the goodness of the counterfactual scope statements.