Well, I hate to say this, but the social sciences are still in the "alchemy" stage. They're nowhere near the certainty of how fast a pebble will be going when it hits the ground, but they're trying, with results stated as probabilities, rather than certainties.
There are a lot of undefined variables in the social sciences by virtue of the fact that you don't have one pebble weighing thus and so falling X meters in a gravity field of 32 feet per second per second.
Except for identical twin studies (which have their own variables as well), any sociological "experiment" is rife with unassessed (and unaccessible) variables from the length of their noses to the acuity of their vision.
Soooo.... results have to be "statistical" in nature rather than precise, and I hate to say it, but most investigators do not have a real understanding of the statistical methods they use.
As an example, stating that there is no significant difference between two experimental groups does not mean there is no difference.
I corresponded with Linus Pauling back in the eighties with respect to the "Vitamin C Issue" and we agreed that the naysayers were wrong in their application of the "no difference" concept. I had taught inferential statistics twenty years before, and while statistical methods have advanced, unfortunately the users and interpreters thereof quite possibly have not.
Hence the discrepencies cited above in repetitions of the "experiments." You are not dropping that one pebble in that particular gravity field with thus-and-so air resistance.
You're "as it were" dropping a
sample of all the pebbles in the universe without realliy knowing each individual pebble's (as it were) air resistance and other possible variables and therefore have to use statistical methods to infer results for the whole population of pebbles in the universe.
Hence the deficiencies in this "alchemy" that is the social sciences. They are inherently dealing with the general pebble and not this particular pebble --
or even the pebbles in a different sample group.You are not dealing with the proverbial "round chickens in a vacuum."
Or "round pebbles in a 32ft/sec/sec gravity field."
Science is the acquisition of knowledge. Sometimes the acquisition is faulty.
Terry, 230RN
REF:
https://www.imdb.com › title › tt1127390 › trivia
"The Big Bang Theory" The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization (TV Episode ...
Leonard ( Johnny Galecki )'s spherical chicken joke (which Penny ( Kaley Cuoco) doesn't get): "There's this farmer, and he has these chickens, but they won't lay any eggs. So, he calls a physicist to help. The physicist then does some calculations, and he says, um, I have a solution, but it only works with spherical chickens in a vacuum."