Moving from Offline to Online: How COVID-19 Affected Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have faced a lot of challenges related to their daily work. This article introduces a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, which particularly focuses on methodological challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a brief review of the literature as well as the studies in this issue, we argue that the pandemic has sparked significant methodological innovations with respect to design, data collection, study documentation, and scholarly collaboration. We distinguish two types of innovations, both conceptualized as the outcome of an unprecedented external shock. First, “methodological compromises” that enabled data collection during the pandemic, but are inferior to established approaches. These methodological compromises, therefore, may be abandoned in post-pandemic times. Second, there are also “methodological game changers” that are superior to classic approaches and thus may prevail in the long run. Regardless of the type, we call scholars in the social and behavioral sciences to systematically test, compare, and evaluate the methodological innovations brought to us as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.