I think these studies are useful, first of all to test whether it's actually true because sometimes "well du'h" turns out to be wrong, but also to quantify the exact effects. Is it a large effect or a small effect? How large exactly? Which factors exactly contribute to this effect? What exactly is the breakdown of the effects? It might be possible that 20% of the people are effected by it and 80% of people are not; or perhaps everyone is effected by it.
There's often all sorts of non-obvious nuance that's possible, which can be very significant.
The importance of these studies are often not the expected results, but the average magnitude of the effect, and the parsing out of confounders.
Do chronic minor negative interactions have more of an effect on feelings of belonging than a single major negative interaction? This has policy implications.
What are the effects of negative interactions on highly social versus highly non-social individuals? What sorts of coping mechanisms do these two very disparate groups use to deal with negative community interactions?
I can think of a bunch more questions answerable by this type of research that don't have obvious answers. The importance of these questions depend on the magnitude and confounders of the original question.
> I think we just need to stop calling sociology papers "scientific". Fundamentally, they are not
They are, or are capable of being, as scientific as Darwin's crude observations of finch phenotypes.
And your comments on policy implications are precisely what I am saying we should avoid - Why would we set policy based on studies which 1) are not scientifically rigorous (based on self reporting, surveys, small population, low ability to control confounding variables, etc) 2) do not actually suggest that policy would be effective in rectifying the problems identified in the study and 3) do not necessarily identify problems (e.g. is it really the business of the government to set policy with the aim of optimizing some self reported individual metric, such as feelings of belonging?)
We shouldn't. If self-reports are ever used to set policy (and they should be) this should be on an individualized, ad hoc basis.
If a squeaky wheel comes to you, oil it. Maybe ask around if there are other squeaky wheels that no one in power is paying attention to. Oil them too. But don't go around oiling every wheel as a matter of policy, as you will end up with a bunch of overly oiled wheels having problems from over oiling.
Plenty of sociological studies (such as education interventions) aren't based on self-reports, but tested results.
> is it really the business of the government to set policy with the aim of optimizing some self reported individual metric, such as feelings of belonging?
The general governmental purpose here wouldn't be to make everyone feel like they belong, but to decrease as much as possible mass shooters, abusers, and the like. And to make it easy for people to report problems they are having, or for outsiders to discover problems. The Turpin case could have been nipped in the bud if the adults and children who noticed how unkempt and smelly the oldest daughter was when she was briefly publicly schooled had intervened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpin_case ).
Voting blocks have what they see as problems they want to change. If you come at them with sufficient evidence for a plan that may work to change the problem, there is a good bet they'll vote for it. If you decide science is too hard and that we shouldn't do that silly science stuff, they will line up right behind the next authoritarian that says 'make america simple again' and enact devastating plans that they believe will solve the problem.
I mean, you can get in front of the voting block and tell them that status quo is just fine if you like, but expect it to be hard work and don't expect much success.
STEM people like to dismiss it because it doesn't produce the same kind of rigid results and is therefore useless. But sociology is nonetheless important. Like it or not, we have to make decisions about how the world will run, and the fact that we don't have perfect information doesn't let us opt out of that.
Combine that with all of the usual human failings -- pettiness, meanness, closed-mindedness, greed, etc -- it sounds impossible. But it does, slowly, gather data and formulate theories.
This isn't made better by the fact that most STEM people imagine they can read primary source material and understand it -- a mistake they wouldn't make for a "hard science" in a different discipline. Like every field, the frontiers are based on huge amounts of background material, which is even more vast for a field that's more complicated than the nice, neat laws of physics or chemistry.
None of that excuses those human failings of sociologists. They need to do better, and hold each other to account (and not just to foment their own failings in their place). But we do need to recognize that this work is important. The world is complex and difficult and we'll make better choices if we try to understand, rather than dismiss it as unknowable.