I agree with your assessment of the 'scientism' of social sciences, and the rather absurd uses of statistical methods (that should be inapplicable because of da

I agree with your assessment of the 'scientism' of social sciences, and the rather absurd uses of statistical methods (that should be inapplicable because of data collective and basic assumption issues). What I am to do is mostly descriptive statistics, but with a few simple tests (e.g. a test of variance with covariance). I've got three populations of civil war data and would like to compare features of those populations against each other (e.g. instance of civil war in period one vs. period two vs. period three). Controlling for # of states, or # of new states (say, within five years of their founding). Most of the complicated stuff really can't be applied to stuff like data on civil wars, since the data doesn't meet basic assumptions of the models, but I would like to be able to say something more than just 'the data from period one looks different than the data from the other two periods.'