Social scientific studies of this type can often be useful for diagnosing the existence of problems, mapping trends, and deciding whether some seemingly smart practice is worth trying to replicate.
Third, policy analysis, as we have seen, uses multiple models. Most social science, in imitation of the hard sciences, looks for “the best” model (and, for some practitioners, “the true” model). Because all models abstract from reality, however, even the best models are never complete. While such abstraction can advance the progress of science, in the world of policy, where real consequences of policy choices are to be experienced by the real