Migration, metascience, and development policy in island Polynesia

After exploring the general question of how contradictory research findings and policy recommendations are made possible by the very nature of social science knowledge and its mode of production, the author discusses the metascience of the social sciences in general and applied social science in particular. He then determines, in the particular case of these applied research studies on Polynesian migration, how contradictory conclusions were actually reached. (DÜI-Sen)