Social Science and Its Methods PDF

## Social Science and its Methods - **Social Science** deals with literature, music, art, and philosophy. - **Humanities** are closely related to social science, but they are most concerned with the basic elements of culture that determine the general patterns of human behavior. - **Humanities** de...

## Social Science and its Methods - **Social Science** deals with literature, music, art, and philosophy. - **Humanities** are closely related to social science, but they are most concerned with the basic elements of culture that determine the general patterns of human behavior. - **Humanities** deal with special esthetic values and to discover the meaning of life. - **Social science** attempts to express spiritual and esthetic values and to discover the meaning of life. - **Humanities** focus on the emotions and feelings themselves than on the system to sharpen that focus. - **Social science** goes far beyond the specific social sciences. - **Social science** thinking underlies much of the law, as well as our understanding of international relations and government. - **Social science** fields are the natural byproducts of social scientific inquiry. - **Social science** is necessary for anyone trying to understand current world events. - **No field of study is more important to human beings than the social sciences.** ### Why social sciences are important? - To understand society is to learn not only the conditions that limit our lives but also the opportunities open to us for improving the human condition. - Albert Einstein summed it up: "Politics is more difficult than physics and the world is more likely to die from bad politics than from bad physics." - Because all expressions of human culture are related and interdependent, to gain a real understanding of human society we must have some knowledge of all its major aspects. ### Social science disciplines: - Anthropology - Sociology - History - Geography - Economics - Political science - Psychology ### The Evolving Social Sciences: - Even when they are broken up into separate disciplines, the list of social science disciplines is both too broad and too narrow. - Parts of history, geography, and psychology should not be included as social sciences. - Parts of history and geography belong in the humanities and parts of psychology in the natural sciences. - The list is too narrow because new social sciences are emerging, such as cognitive science and sociobiology, that incorporate new findings and new ways of looking at reality. - All knowledge is interrelated making it difficult to know where one social science ends and another begins. - The individual social sciences are interrelated, as well as the social sciences as a whole body to the natural sciences and the humanities. ### Social science as a system of rules: - The amount of knowledge is increasing faster than ever. - The answer is found in abstraction and the ability to discover rules or relationships. - The importance of knowing about the rules is shown in the process of addition. - Instead of memorizing every possible outcome, we learned an algorithm (a formal name for a rule), about adding. - This allowed us to memorize only a few relationships, by changing the number system from a base ten system to a binary system (0 and 1 are the only numbers). - This saved us from enormous amounts of memorization and gave us access to a larger amount of information. - Another way to look at this is to think of a library. - If you have a small library, you can know everything in it. - But once the library gets larger, you will quickly find that having more books makes it harder to know what's in there. - Library of Congress system and the Dewey decimal system allow us to access books through a filing system. - The rules of the filing system give us the key to great amounts of information, just as the rules of addition, subtraction, or algebra do. - General rules, once learned, can be applied to large numbers of particulars. - The higher you go (rules about rules about rules), the more you can know with less memorization. ### Social science and the 2050 dateline: - If social science is to be a unified social science theory, it will be because some student started thinking about rules and how they can apply them to a variety of circumstances. - The future "unified social scientists" will not necessarily know all the facts of a particular social science. - They will likely become even more specialized. - The specialization will necessitate new specialization that concentrates on tying together the various components of social science. - New unified social scientists will know the general rules of the individual social sciences and the rules of how one social science interacts with another, but they will not know all the specific facts of any one of them. ## Sociology - Sociology is the systematic study of relationships among people. - Sociologists assume that behavior is influenced by people's social, political, occupational, and intellectual groupings, as well as the particular settings in which they find themselves at any one time or another. - Sociologists differ in their approach, using 3 major choices: - Functionalism - Conflict - Interactionism - Sociology's vast subject matter can be considered as a study of people: - Where they collect - How they socialize and organize - Whom they include in and exclude from their groups - What they do to their environment - When they confront formulas for control such as politics, law, finance, religion, education, and social pressures. ## The scientific method and its application - The scientific method is a set of rules about how to establish rules. - It is perhaps the most important tool you can have in studying social science. - It enables you not only to learn the lessons of the individual social sciences, but also to go beyond and strive for an understanding of their synthesis. ## Geography - Geography is the study of the natural environment and how it influences social and cultural development. - Some of the concerns of geography are: - Ecology - Climate - Resources - Accessibility - Demography ## Conditions Favorable to Scientific Inquiry - Scientific inquiry is possible only in a society in which certain attitudes are developed or tolerated. - Successful scientific investigation requires from the investigator, not only intelligence but certain mental attitudes as well. - Curiosity is one of those attitudes. - It makes people ask two questions: Why? and How? - Another attitude is skepticism that makes people reexamine past explanations and reevaluate past evidence. - Objectivity is necessary to reexamine and reevaluate, allowing investigators to seek impartially for the truth. - Every effort should be made not to allow personal preconceptions, prejudices, or desires to color the observed facts or influence the interpretation of those facts. - In preliterate tribal societies, the obstacles to the development of scientific methods of inquiry are very great. - These societies are much more bound by custom and tradition than are modern societies. - The traditional way of doing things is regarded as the only right way. - Any serious deviation from established procedures is likely to be regarded as a danger to the group. ## History - History is a social science. - It systematically attempts to explain past events and relate them to the present. - Every event has a context within which we commonly say the event is situated. - The subject matter of history is what has already happened and the study of: - History - Variety - Prediction - Understanding ## Nature of the Scientific Method - Scientific method is based on the assumption that this universe, ruled by the law of cause and effect, given a set of circumstances always produces the same result. - If seemingly identical situations produce different results, they were not really identical, and a significant difference existed and was not noticed. Further investigation should disclose what the difference was. - Science offers no final explanation of the universe and its phenomena - Time, space, even existence itself, are mysteries the ultimate nature of which are probably forever beyond the grasp of the human search. - But an adequate scientific theory may be regarded as an explanation, up to a certain point, of a scientific law. - Scientific investigation is seldom simple. - Investigators must always adjust their methods to the peculiarities of the situation they are dealing with. - Every field of knowledge has its special problems requiring different methods of investigation. - The experimental method is of great importance in some fields in these fields, but it is limited. ### The Experimental Method and its Limitations - The experimental method is a method for "variant or causal factors." - It consists of running an experiment many times and seeing if the results of the experiments are different. - If so, the variant is most likely the cause. - In chemistry, physics, and biology, controlled experiments can be created to create a situation in which all the significant factors that bear upon the problem are controlled. - But there are limits to the use of the experimental method when a scientist cannot control the situations that are significant for the solution of problems. - In the social sciences, very little use can be made of the method of controlled experiment except in dealing with certain relationships that involve rather small groups. - The investigator cannot control the situations. - For example, one way to test the proposition that high tariffs bring prosperity would be to apply very heavy duties to all goods entering the United States for a considerable period of time, while holding constant all other factors affecting business activity. - If a sustained increase in business activity resulted, the investigator might conclude that the high tariff would make it impossible to separate out the effects of the high tariff from the effects of all these other events. - Most problems of interest to social scientists involve very large groups of people, often society as a whole. - Controlled experiments cannot be used to solve such problems. - When, however, social scientists can solve a problem by working with small groups, they may be able to make a limited use of the experimental method if the people involved will cooperate. - They can study natural experiments that can occur when two similar areas or entities choose different policies and the effects of the different policies can be systematically studied. - With natural experiments, researchers do not get perfect control but they get some. - In the future, with further advances in computer technology, social scientists will study policy issues using virtual social systems in which a computer model of numerous interacting individuals creates a virtual system that can analogue what occurs in the real world. - Social experiments are sometimes called experiments but unless they have controls that followed a different path and hence can be studied as a natural experiment they aren't what we mean by experiments. - A social experiment is simply the introduction of a new social policy change in the financing of healthcare, insurance, or Florida's experiment with vouchers for financing education, might be called social experiments. The distinction involves the ability to have a control and the ability to replicate the experiment. - The less the control, and the less the ability to repeat the experiment, the less sure we are of the results. ## Economics - Economics is the study of the ways in which men and women make a living, the most pressing problem most human beings face. - It considers the social organization through which people satisfy their wants for scarce goods and services. - Its subject matter is often summarized as: - Production - Distribution - Consumption - Some of the topics it includes: - Supply and demand - Monetary and fiscal policy - Unemployment - Economics seeks to explain, guide, and predict social arrangements by which we satisfy economic wants. ## Political Science - Political science is the study of social arrangements to maintain peace and order within a given society. - It deals with governments and its interest are: - Laws - Administration - Theory of the nature and functions of the state - International relations - It has both a philosophical and a practical base. - It examines the theory of systems of government, but it also studies actual practices by which government: - Taxes - Prohibits - Regulates - Protects - Provides services. - The evidence in favor of a new theory is so great that suddenly scientists shift their thinking. - The process can be likened to the way a drop of water forms on a faucet. - It grows larger and larger until it falls. - A good example in the sciences is Einstein’s relativity theory in physics, which was initially scoffed at but was later adopted because it was consistent with a wider range of physical phenomena than was the earlier gravitational theory of Sir Isaac Newton. - Social scientists have discussed at great length whether Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift is appropriate for the social sciences. - If it is, it gives legitimacy to competing theories. - If it is not, then the generally accepted theory can be considered the best. - The issue has never been resolved, but our understanding of the relevance of theories has advanced. - Imre Lakatos, another famous philosopher of science, has extended Kuhn’s arguments by saying that in social science there are generally more competing research programs, or groups of scientists working on a particular problem. - For example, in psychology there are the behaviorists and the Freudians. - In sociology, there are functionalists, conflict theorists, and interactionists. - We could cite different theories within each social science. - Advocates of each of the paradigms compete for researchers. - The group of researchers most successful in competing for followers is the one most likely to grow.