I would like to thank Corinna
Elsenbroich and team for organising the 18th Social Simulation Conference, which
was hosted by the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit University
of Glasgow, 4-8th September 2023. Thanks also for inviting me to be one of the
keynote speakers. Also, thanks to the audience for the great dialogue and
engagement. The conference is one of the key activities of the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) to promote social simulation and computational social science in Europe and elsewhere.
Here
is the title and abstract of my talk:
How
to escape the dilemmas of complex systems modelling in public health:
A
users guide and map
The current literature is clear: there is an urgent
need to apply a complex systems modelling approach to public health. What is
less clear is how to do this effectively. Research and practice have shown
mixed results, due to a series of dilemmas. A short list includes: a strong
tendency to model public health issues instead of interrogating the
development, implementation and evaluation of systems-level interventions; public
health practitioners and funding organisations being biased toward simple,
individual-level, short-term solutions based on clinical trials; modellers
being tone deaf about the roadblocks to applying simulations to public health;
the need to focus on stakeholder engagement; and an overemphasis on
computational models over qualitative methods. Fortunately, a small but growing
global network of scholars are charting new territory. They are part of a fresh
turn in complexity and modelling, the social science turn, which fosters a
transdisciplinary, social complexity imagination that, in one way or another,
addresses the field’s current dilemmas to create new areas of disruptive and
highly innovative social inquiry. The Atlas of social complexity – written with
Lasse Gerrits, forthcoming 2024 Edward Elgar – charts this new territory,
seeking to map its present future; which we do by outlining a set of ‘best
practices’ (with examples of scholars doing this work) for applying social
complexity to public health modelling. These include: (1) challenging social
physics and reductionism, (2) rethinking complex causality and system dynamics,
(3) emphasising co-creation and context, (4) understanding real-world policy
making, (5) modelling at multiple levels and with multiple models, (6)
developing interdisciplinary methods and using qualitative data, (7) grounding
models in rigorous social science, and (8) accepting the limits of what
modelling can do.
CLICK HERE for a link to the PDF of my presentation
CLICK HERE for a link to COMPLEX-IT
CLICK HERE for a link to the Map of the Complexity Sciences
