ILIS, set up within the Department of Human Sciences, Philosophy and Education, is proposed as an interdisciplinary study and research laboratory on issues of social interest. The main objective is to stimulate theoretical and methodological reflection as well as the empirical study on the new scenarios of social research: from theoretical challenges facing new problems and dilemmas to new methodological horizons for understanding them.

The mission of ILIS is to promote theoretical, epistemological and methodological advances in the field of social sciences through constant dialogue with expert scholars both nationally and internationally.

The field of action of ILIS focuses on social processes ranging from the analysis of educational, migratory, identity and cultural processes, to gender and generational perspectives, to health with attention to methodology and techniques for social research. The ultimate goal is to offer an integrated research and knowledge system capable of orienting scientific actions towards an innovative theoretical and empirical knowledge of the transformation processes of our societies through innovative research theories and practices.

From a scientific point of view, ILIS aims to combine the understanding of contemporary social processes with recent developments in the methodology and techniques of social research that have revolutionized some traditional approaches and introduced alternative practices of collecting, analyzing and representing information ( as in the case of online research approaches and big data analysis).

The ILIS also acts as a methodological service tool for the scientific research of the entire University and as a support to the research design, to the preparation of information collection tools and related pre-testing, to sampling, to the collection of information, to the creation of the dataset and data analysis.