Being in the social science field for any amount of time is the fastest way to learn the lesson that progress is literally halted by politics.

You can't even begin to do real research because you won't get a grant unless it serves some political or corporate purpose, and the people funding those have a hard Left, consoom bias.

And on the off chance you can, it won't get peer reviewed due to the aforementioned biases, which means it won't get published anywhere due to the same biases, and therefore will languish in obscurity and treated as "bad science" because it wasn't peer reviewed or published.

That's why you can't ever trust "studies." If they said anything important, they wouldn't have made it out into the world.