DeansTalk - business management education: "Scientific ...

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What is different now, said Mitchell Hoffman, an economist and postdoctoral researcher at the Yale School of Management, is the amount and detail of worker data being collected. In the past, he said, studies of worker behavior typically might have involved observing a few hundred people at most ? the traditional approach in sociology or personnel economics.

But a new working paper, written by Mr. Hoffman and three other researchers, mines data from companies in three industries ? telephone call centers, trucking and software ?- on a total of more than one million job applicants and more than 70,000 workers over several years.

The measurements can be quite detailed including call ?handle? times and customer satisfaction surveys (call centers), miles driven per week and accidents (trucking), and patent applications and lines of code written (software).

Their subject is worker referrals, and the paper is titled,??The Value of Hiring Through Referrals.?

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Mr. Cowgill, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley..

The data in work force science is observational data rather than data from experiments, which is the gold standard in science. What much of Big Data research lacks, Mr. Cowgill said, is the equivalent rigor of randomized clinical trials in drug-testing. That is, controlled experiments. (Blogmaster tip: Cukier's book Big Data says why worry about randomized sampling (bias, error, etc...) when you "can have it all, n (sample size)=all" + correlations vs. causation)

Observing how large numbers of people behave, Mr. Cowgill noted, can be extremely valuable, pointing to powerful correlations . But without controlled experiments, he added, you often do not get to the deeper understanding of the causes of observed behavior ? understanding causation rather than merely identifying correlation.

..."I wouldn?t sell short being able to see the correlations??said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at M.I.T.?s Sloan School of Management...

Update:

Source: http://www.deanstalk.net/deanstalk/2013/04/scientific-management-redux-the-difference-is-in-the-data-nyt-bits-correlations-vs-causation.html

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