The difficulty with this is also convincing people that the research is valid and itself not politically motivated/without rational thought. As much as I would like research on what benefits societies in general (sociology?) to feed into how social policies are generated, I feel that there is also significant questioning on the validity of the research and how such research is conducted. Given that there are no real ways to fully account for all variables in the scope of this study, there may always be the argument that such research is shoddy and can't be replicated.

(I'm not actually arguing that such science is shoddy, only that the perception that they are shoddy and invalid is a strong disincentive to listen to any research on this matter. It's actually really disheartening to me that this is the case.)