Social sciences

The social sciences are a group of academic disciplines that study human aspects of the world, in particular those involving social behavior and society. These disciplines, focusing on the study of human social behavior, are clearly distinct from the physical sciences, that study non-living systems, by virtue of their subject matter. The subject matter of the life sciences, which is the nature of life in all its myriad forms, has some connection to the social sciences in its study of those species where social behavior is notable, but the study of human social behavior is uniquely complex and of a higher order—and this is the purview of the social sciences. The social sciences differ from the humanities not so much in the content of the subject matter but more in that they emphasize the use of the scientific method in the study of humanity.

While there is some fluidity over which areas of study are included within social sciences, anthropology, economics, linguistics, psychology, and sociology are foundational; communication, education, law, political science, and social work may be included; and certain sub-fields of other disciplines, such as human geography, are included. Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the humanities, alongside subjects such as literature, but increasingly it is being classified as a social science.

The term "social science" did not appear until the nineteenth century when the social sciences began to be recognized as distinct disciplines. However, the origins of their ideas and goals are located much further back in time.

The social sciences, in studying subjective, inter-subjective and objective or structural aspects of society, are traditionally referred to as soft sciences. This is in contrast to hard sciences, such as the natural sciences, which may focus exclusively on objective aspects of nature. Nowadays, however, according to proponents of this view, the distinction between the hard sciences and many of the so-called soft sciences is blurred. Currently, it is a matter of fact that some social science subfields have become very quantitative in methodology. Conversely, the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human behavior and social and environmental factors affecting it have made many of the so-called hard sciences interested on some aspects of social science methodology. Examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social studies of medicine, sociobiology, neuropsychology, bioeconomics and the history and sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of human action and its implications and consequences.

History of the social sciences

The word "science" is older than its modern use, which is as a short-form for "natural science." Under the influence of positivism, the word has become a short-form for "natural science." It is a recent development that society has become the object of an organized body of knowledge which can be standardized and taught objectively, while following its own rules and methodology.

Ancient Greece

In ancient philosophy, there was no difference between mathematics and the study of history, poetry, or politics. Only with the development of mathematical proof did there gradually arise a perceived difference between "scientific" disciplines and others, the "humanities" or the liberal arts. Thus, Aristotle studied planetary motion and poetry with the same methods, and Plato mixed geometrical proofs with his demonstration on the state of intrinsic knowledge.

Augustine

Augustine of Hippo wrote the City of God in the fifth century. Bruce Haddock, in 'The Political Classics: Essential Texts from Plato to Rousseau' (OUP 1992), describes the work as a veritable encyclopedia of late Roman culture... [a] penetrating account of human motivation.

Islamic civilization

Significant contributions to the social sciences were made by Muslim scientists in the Islamic civilization. Al-Biruni (973–1048) has been called "the first anthropologist". He wrote detailed comparative studies on the anthropology of peoples, religions, and cultures in the Middle East, Mediterranean, and South Asia. Al-Biruni's anthropology of religion was only possible for a scholar deeply immersed in the lore of other nations.

Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), best known for his Muqaddimah (Prolegomenon in Greek), is regarded as the father of demography, historiography, the philosophy of history, sociology, and is viewed as one of the forerunners of modern economics.

European enlightenment

During the European Age of Enlightenment, this unity of science as descriptive remains, for example, in the time of Thomas Hobbes who argued that deductive reasoning from axioms created a scientific framework, and hence his Leviathan was a scientific description of a political commonwealth. What would happen within decades of his work was a revolution in what constituted "science," particularly the work of Isaac Newton in physics. Newton, by revolutionizing what was then called "natural philosophy," changed the basic framework by which individuals understood what was "scientific."

While he was merely the archetype of an accelerating trend, the important distinction is that for Newton, the mathematical flowed from a presumed reality independent of the observer, and working by its own rules. For philosophers of the same period, mathematical expression of philosophical ideals was taken to be symbolic of natural human relationships as well: the same laws moved physical and spiritual realities. For examples see Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Leibniz, and Johannes Kepler, each of whom took mathematical examples as models for human behavior directly. In Pascal's case, the famous wager; for Leibniz, the invention of binary computation; and for Kepler, the intervention of angels to guide the planets.

In the realm of other disciplines, this created a pressure to express ideas in the form of mathematical relationships. Such relationships, called "Laws" after the usage of the time (see philosophy of science) became the model which other disciplines would emulate.

Nineteenth century

The term "social science" first appeared in the 1824 book An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth by William Thompson (1775–1833). Auguste Comte (1797–1857) argued that ideas pass through three rising stages, theological, philosophical and scientific. He defined the difference as the first being rooted in assumption, the second in critical thinking, and the third in positive observation. This framework, still rejected by many, has nonetheless been used to develop disciplines within the social sciences. For example, it encapsulates the thinking which was to push economic study from being a descriptive to a mathematically based discipline. Karl Marx was one of the first writers to claim that his methods of research represented a scientific view of history in this model.

With the late nineteenth century, attempts to apply equations to statements about human behavior became increasingly common. Among the first were the "Laws" of philology, which attempted to map the change over time of sounds in a language.

It was with the work of Charles Darwin that the descriptive version of social theory received another shock. Biology had, seemingly, resisted mathematical study, and yet the theory of natural selection and the implied idea of genetic inheritance, later found to have been enunciated by Gregor Mendel, seemed to point in the direction of a scientific biology based, like physics and chemistry, on mathematical relationships.

Twentieth century

In the first half of the twentieth century, statistics became a free-standing discipline of applied mathematics. Statistical methods were used confidently, for example in an increasingly statistical view of biology.

The first thinkers to attempt to combine inquiry of the type they saw in Darwin with exploration of human relationships, which, evolutionary theory implied, would be based on selective forces, were Sigmund Freud in Austria and William James in the United States. Freud's theory of the functioning of the mind, and James' work on experimental psychology would have enormous impact on those that followed. Freud, in particular, created a framework which would appeal not only to those studying psychology, but artists and writers as well.

One of the most persuasive advocates for the view of scientific treatment of philosophy was John Dewey (1859–1952). He began, as Marx did, in an attempt to weld Hegelian idealism and logic to experimental science, for example in his Psychology of 1887. However, he abandoned Hegelian constructs. Influenced by both Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, he joined the movement in America called pragmatism. He then formulated his basic doctrine, enunciated in essays such as "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy" (1910).

This idea, based on his theory of how organisms respond, states that there are three phases to the process of inquiry:

1. Problematic situation, where the typical response is inadequate.
2. Isolation of data or subject matter.
3. Reflective phase, which leads to empirical testing.

With the rise of the idea of quantitative measurement in the physical sciences, for example Lord Rutherford's famous maxim that any knowledge that one cannot measure numerically "is a poor sort of knowledge," the stage was set for the conception of the humanities as being precursors to "social science." This change was not, and is not, without its detractors, both inside of academia and outside.

Some social science subfields have become very quantitative in methodology. Conversely, the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human behavior and social and environmental factors affecting it have made many of the natural sciences interested on some aspects of social science methodology. Examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social studies of medicine, sociobiology, neuropsychology, bioeconomics and the history and sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of human action and its implications and consequences.

In 1924, prominent social scientists established the Pi Gamma Mu honor society for the social sciences. Among its key objectives were to promote interdisciplinary cooperation and develop an integrated theory of human personality and organization. Toward these ends, a journal for interdisciplinary scholarship in the various social sciences and lectureship grants were established.

Rise

Theodore Porter argued in The Rise of Statistical Thinking that the effort to provide a synthetic social science is a matter of both administration and discovery combined, and that the rise of social science was, therefore, marked by both pragmatic needs as much as by theoretical purity. An example of this is the rise of the concept of Intelligence quotient, or IQ. It is unclear precisely what is being measured, but the measurement is useful in that it predicts success in various endeavors.

The rise of industrialism had created a series of social, economic, and political problems, particularly in managing supply and demand in their political economy, the management of resources for military and developmental use, the creation of mass education systems to train individuals in symbolic reasoning and problems in managing the effects of industrialization itself. The perceived senselessness of the "Great War" of 1914-1918, now called World War I, based in what were perceived to be "emotional" and "irrational" decisions, provided an immediate impetus for a form of decision making that was more "scientific" and easier to manage. Simply put, to manage the new multi-national enterprises, private and governmental, required more data. More data required a means of reducing it to information upon which to make decisions. Numbers and charts could be interpreted more quickly and moved more efficiently than long texts. Conversely, the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human behavior and social and environmental factors affecting it have made many of the so-called hard sciences dependent on social science methodology. Examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social studies of medicine, neuropsychology, bioeconomics and the history and sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of human action and its implications and consequences.

In the 1930s this new model of managing decision making became cemented with the New Deal in the US, and in Europe with the increasing need to manage industrial production and governmental affairs. Institutions such as The New School for Social Research, International Institute of Social History, and departments of "social research" at prestigious universities were meant to fill the growing demand for individuals who could quantify human interactions and produce models for decision making on this basis.

Coupled with this pragmatic need was the belief that the clarity and simplicity of mathematical expression avoided systematic errors of holistic thinking and logic rooted in traditional argument. This trend, part of the larger movement known as modernism provided the rhetorical edge for the expansion of social sciences.

Present state

There continues to be little movement toward consensus on what methodology might have the power and refinement to connect a proposed "grand theory" with the various midrange theories which, with considerable success, continue to provide usable frameworks for massive, growing data banks.

Social science disciplines

Anthropology

Anthropology is the holistic discipline that deals with the integration of different aspects of the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Human Biology. It includes Archaeology, Prehistory and Paleontology, Physical or Biological Anthropology, Anthropological Linguistics, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology and Ethnography. It is an area that is offered at most undergraduate institutions. The word anthropos (άνθρωπος) is from the Greek for "human being" or "person." Eric Wolf described sociocultural anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences."

Communication

Communication studies deals with processes of human communication, commonly defined as the sharing of symbols to create meaning. The discipline encompasses a range of topics, from face-to-face conversation to mass media outlets such as television broadcasting. Communication studies also examines how messages are interpreted through the political, cultural, economic, and social dimensions of their contexts. Communication is institutionalized under many different names at different universities, including "communication", "communication studies", "speech communication", "rhetorical studies", "communications science", "media studies", "communication arts", "mass communication", "media ecology," and "communication and media science."

Communication studies integrates aspects of both social sciences and the humanities. As a social science, the discipline often overlaps with sociology, psychology, anthropology, biology, political science, economics, and public policy, among others. From a humanities perspective, communication is concerned with rhetoric and persuasion (traditional graduate programs in communication studies trace their history to the rhetoricians of Ancient Greece). The field applies to outside disciplines as well, including engineering, architecture, mathematics, and information science.

Economics

Buyers bargain for good prices while sellers put forth their best front in Chichicastenango Market, Guatemala.

Economics is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. The word "economics" is from the Greek οἶκος [oikos], "family, household, estate," and νόμος [nomos], "custom, law," and hence means "household management" or "management of the state." An economist is a person using economic concepts and data in the course of employment, or someone who has earned a university degree in the subject. The classic brief definition of economics, set out by Lionel Robbins in 1932, is "the science which studies human behavior as a relation between scarce means having alternative uses." Without scarcity and alternative uses, there is no economic problem. Briefer yet is "the study of how people seek to satisfy needs and wants" and "the study of the financial aspects of human behaviour."

Economics has two broad branches: microeconomics, where the unit of analysis is the individual agent, such as a household, firm and macroeconomics, where the unit of analysis is an economy as a whole. Another division of the subject distinguishes positive economics, which seeks to predict and explain economic phenomena, from normative economics, which orders choices and actions by some criterion; such orderings necessarily involve subjective value judgments. Since the early part of the 20th century, economics has focused largely on measurable quantities, employing both theoretical models and empirical analysis. Quantitative models, however, can be traced as far back as the physiocratic school. Economic reasoning has been increasingly applied in recent decades to social situations where there is no monetary consideration, such as politics, law, psychology, history, religion, marriage and family life, and other social interactions.

This paradigm crucially assumes (1) that resources are scarce because they are not sufficient to satisfy all wants, and (2) that "economic value" is willingness to pay as revealed for instance by market (arms' length) transactions. Rival schools of thought, such as heterodox economics, institutional economics, Marxist economics, socialism, green economics, and economic sociology, make other grounding assumptions, such as that economics primarily deals with the exchange of value, and that labor (human effort) is the source of all value.

Education

A depiction of Europe's oldest university, the University of Bologna, Italy

Education encompasses teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, positive judgement and well-developed wisdom. Education has as one of its fundamental aspects the imparting of culture from generation to generation (see socialization). To educate means 'to draw out', from the Latin educare, or to facilitate the realization of an individual's self-potential and latent talents. It is an application of pedagogy, a body of theoretical and applied research relating to teaching and learning and draws on many disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, sociology and anthropology.

The education of an individual human begins at birth and continues throughout life. (Some believe that education begins even before birth, as evidenced by some parents' playing music or reading to the baby in the womb in the hope it will influence the child's development.) For some, the struggles and triumphs of daily life provide far more instruction than does formal schooling (thus Mark Twain's admonition to "never let school interfere with your education"). Family members may have a profound educational effect — often more profound than they realize — though family teaching may function very informally.

Geography

Map of the Earth

Geography as a discipline can be split broadly into two main sub fields: human geography and physical geography. The former focuses largely on the built environment and how space is created, viewed and managed by humans as well as the influence humans have on the space they occupy. The latter examines the natural environment and how the climate, vegetation & life, soil, water and landforms are produced and interact. As a result of the two subfields using different approaches a third field has emerged, which is environmental geography. Environmental geography combines physical and human geography and looks at the interactions between the environment and humans.

Geographers attempt to understand the earth in terms of physical and spatial relationships. The first geographers focused on the science of mapmaking and finding ways to precisely project the surface of the earth. In this sense, geography bridges some gaps between the natural sciences and social sciences. Historical geography is often taught in a college in a unified Department of Geography.

Modern geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks to understand how the world has changed in terms of human settlement and natural patterns. The fields of Urban Planning, Regional Science, and Planetology are closely related to geography. Practicioners of geography use many technologies and methods to collect data such as remote sensing, aerial photography, statistics, and global positioning systems (GPS).

The field of geography is generally split into two distinct branches: physical and human. Physical geography examines phenomena related to climate, oceans, soils, and the measurement of earth. Human geography focuses on fields as diverse as Cultural geography, transportation, health, military operations, and cities. Other branches of geography include Social geography, regional geography, geomantics, and environmental geography.

History

History is the continuous, systematic narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the study of all events in time, in relation to humanity. There is much debate over history's classification of academe, for instance in the United States the National Endowment for the Humanities includes history in its definition of a Humanities (as it does for applied Linguistics). However the National Research Council classifies History as a Social science. History can be seen as the sum total of many things taken together and the spectrum of events occurring in action following in order leading from the past to the present and into the future. The historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write history.

Law

A trial at a criminal court, the Old Bailey in London

Law in common parlance, means a rule which (unlike a rule of ethics) is capable of enforcement through institutions. The study of law crosses the boundaries between the social sciences and humanities, depending on one's view of research into its objectives and effects. Law is not always enforceable, especially in the international relations context. It has been defined as a "system of rules", as an "interpretive concept" to achieve justice, as an "authority" to mediate people's interests, and even as "the command of a sovereign, backed by the threat of a sanction". However one likes to think of law, it is a completely central social institution. Legal policy incorporates the practical manifestation of thinking from almost every social sciences and humanity. Laws are politics, because politicians create them. Law is philosophy, because moral and ethical persuasions shape their ideas. Law tells many of history's stories, because statutes, case law and codifications build up over time. And law is economics, because any rule about contract, tort, property law, labor law, company law and many more can have long lasting effects on the distribution of wealth.

Linguistics

Ferdinand de Saussure, recognized as the father of modern linguistics

Linguistics is a discipline that looks at the cognitive and social aspects of human language. The field is traditionally divided into areas that focus on particular aspects of the linguistic signal, such as syntax (the study of the rules that govern the structure of sentences), semantics (the study of meaning), phonetics (the study of speech sounds) and phonology (the study of the abstract sound system of a particular language); however, work in areas like evolutionary linguistics (the study of the origins and evolution of language) and psycholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in human language) cut across these divisions.

The overwhelming majority of modern research in linguistics takes a predominantly synchronic perspective (focusing on language at a particular point in time), and a great deal of it—partly owing to the influence of Noam Chomsky—aims at formulating theories of the cognitive processing of language. However, language does not exist in a vacuum, or only in the brain, and approaches like contact linguistics, creole studies, discourse analysis, social interactional linguistics, and sociolinguistics explore language in its social context. Sociolinguistics often makes use of traditional quantitative analysis and statistics in investigating the frequency of features, while some disciplines, like contact linguistics, focus on qualitative analysis. While certain areas of linguistics can thus be understood as clearly falling within the social sciences, other areas, like acoustic phonetics and neurolinguistics, draw on the natural sciences. Linguistics draws only secondarily on the humanities, which played a rather greater role in linguistic inquiry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ferdinand Saussure is considered the father of modern linguistics.

Political science

Aristotle asserted that man is a political animal in his book Politics

Political science is an academic and research discipline that deals with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. Fields and subfields of political science include political theory and philosophy, civics and comparative politics, theory of direct democracy, apolitical governance, participatory direct democracy, national systems, cross-national political analysis, political development, international relations, foreign policy, international law, politics, public administration, administrative behavior, public law, judicial behavior, and public policy. Political science also studies power in international relations and the theory of Great powers and Superpowers.

Political science is methodologically diverse. Approaches to the discipline include classical political philosophy, interpretivism, structuralism, and behavioralism, realism, pluralism, and institutionalism. Political science, as one of the social sciences, uses methods and techniques that relate to the kinds of inquiries sought: primary sources such as historical documents and official records, secondary sources such as scholarly journal articles, survey research, statistical analysis, case studies, and model building. Herbert Baxter Adams is credited with coining the phrase "political science" while teaching history at Johns Hopkins University.

Psychology

Wilhelm Wundt was the founder experimental psychology

Psychology is an academic and applied field involving the study of behavior and mental processes. Psychology also refers to the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including problems of individuals' daily lives and the treatment of mental illness.

Psychology differs from anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology in seeking to capture explanatory generalizations about the mental function and overt behaviour of individuals, while the other disciplines rely more heavily on field studies and historical methods for extracting descriptive generalizations. In practice, however, there is quite a lot of cross-fertilization that takes place among the various fields. Psychology differs from biology and neuroscience in that it is primarily concerned with the interaction of mental processes and behavior, and of the overall processes of a system, and not simply the biological or neural processes themselves, though the subfield of neuropsychology combines the study of the actual neural processes with the study of the mental effects they have subjectively produced. Many people associate Psychology with Clinical Psychology which focuses on assessment and treatment of problems in living and psychopathology. In reality, Psychology has myriad specialties including: Social Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Mathematical psychology, Neuropsychology, and Quantitative Analysis of Behaviour to name only a few. The word psychology comes from the ancient Greek ψυχή, psyche ("soul," "mind") and logy, study).

Psychology is a very broad science that is rarely tackled as a whole, major block. Although some subfields encompass a natural science base and a social science application, others can be clearly distinguished as having little to do with the social sciences or having a lot to do with the social sciences. For example, biological psychology is considered a natural science with a social scientific application (as is clinical medicine), social and occupational psychology are, generally speaking, purely social sciences, whereas neuropsychology is a natural science that lacks application out of the scientific tradition entirely. In British universities, emphasis on what tenet of psychology a student has studied and/or concentrated is communicated through the degree conferred: B.Psy. indicates a balance between natural and social sciences, B.Sc. indicates a strong (or entire) scientific concentration, whereas a B.A. underlines a majority of social science credits.

Social Work

Social Work is concerned with social problems, their causes, their solutions and their human impacts. Social workers work with individuals, families, groups, organizations and communities. Social Work is the profession committed to the pursuit of social justice, to the enhancement of the quality of life, and to the development of the full potential of each individual, group and community in society. Social refers to human society or its organization. stem "soci-" which is from the Latin word socius, meaning member, friend, or ally, thus referring to people in general. It is a social science involving the application of social theory and research methods to the study and improve the lives of people, groups, and societies. Social work is unique in that it seeks to simultaneously navigate across and within micro , mezzo, and macro systems -in order to sufficiently address and resolve social issues at every level. Social work incorporates and utilizes all of the social sciences as a means to improve the human condition.

Social work bases its methodology on a systematic body of evidence-based knowledge derived from research and practice evaluation, including local and indigenous knowledge specific to its context. It recognizes the complexity of interactions between human beings and their environment, and the capacity of people both to be affected by and to alter the multiple influences upon them including bio-psychosocial factors. The social work profession draws on theories of human development and behaviour and social systems to analyse complex situations and to facilitate individual, organizational, social and cultural changes. (International Federation of Social Workers).

In social work research there is a great deal of traditional research, both qualitative and quantitative being carried out, primarily by university-based researchers, but also in different fields, by researchers based in institutes, foundations, or social service agencies. Meanwhile, the majority of social work practitioners continue to look elsewhere for knowledge. This is a state of affairs that has persisted since the outset of the profession in the first decade of the twentieth century. One reason for the practice-research gap is that practitioners deal with situations that are unique and idiosyncratic, while research deals with regularities and aggregates. The translation between the two is often imperfect. A hopeful development for bridging this gap is the compilation in many practice fields of collections of "best practices," largely taken from research findings, but also distilled from the experience of respected practitioners.

One of the most prominent organizations promoting social work research science is The Society for Social Work and Research (http://www.sswr.org/) which is a non-profit professional society incorporated in the State of New York in 1993. The Society is devoted to the involvement of social workers, other social work faculty, and social work students in research and to promotion of human welfare through research and research applications.

Sociology

Max Weber was a leading German sociologist

Sociology comes from Latin: Socius, "companion," thus referring to people in general; and the suffix -ology, "the study of," from Greek λόγος, lógos, "knowledge." It is a social science involving the application of social theory and research methods to the study of the social lives of people, groups, and societies, sometimes defined as the study of social interactions.

Sociology generally concerns itself with the social rules and processes that bind and separate people not only as individuals, but as members of associations, groups, communities and institutions, and includes the examination of the organization and development of human social life. Sociology offers insights about the social world that extend beyond explanations that rely on individual personalities and behavior. The sociological field of interest ranges from the analysis of short contacts between anonymous individuals on the street to the study of global social processes.

Sociology comprises a cluster of sub-disciplines that examine different dimensions of society. These include demography, which studies changes in a population size or type; criminology, which studies criminal behavior and deviance; social stratification, which studies inequality and class structure; political sociology which studies government and laws; sociology of race and sociology of gender, which examine the social construction of race and gender as well as race and gender inequality. New sociological fields and sub-fields—such as network analysis and environmental sociology—continue to evolve; many of them are very cross-disciplinary in nature.

Sociologists use a diversity of research methods, including case studies, historical research, interviewing, participant observation, social network analysis, survey research, statistical analysis, and model building, among other approaches. The results of sociological research aid educators, lawmakers, administrators, developers, and others interested in resolving social problems and formulating public policy.

Further fields

Additional Social Science disciplines and fields of study include, but are not limited to:

• Development studies - a multidisciplinary branch of social science which addresses issues of concern to developing countries.
• International studies - covers both International relations (the study of foreign affairs and global issues among states within the international system) and International education (the comprehensive approach that intentionally prepares people to be active and engaged participants in an interconnected world).
• Journalism - the craft of conveying news, descriptive material and comment via a widening spectrum of media.
• Management - in business and human organization, the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively.
• Marketing - the identification of human needs and wants, defines and measures their magnitude for demand and understanding the process of consumer buying behavior to formulate products and services, pricing, promotion and distribution to satisfy these needs and wants through exchange processes and building long term relationships.

Social science is also heavily involved in many interdisciplinary areas, such as:

• Area studies - interdisciplinary fields of research and scholarship pertaining to particular geographical, national/federal, or cultural regions.
• Behavioral science - a term that encompasses all the disciplines that explore the activities of and interactions among organisms in the natural world.
• Cognitive science - the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes, especially focusing on how information is represented, processed, and transformed within living nervous systems and machines (such as computers)
• Cultural studies - an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand how meaning is generated, disseminated, and produced from the social, political, and economic spheres within each culture.
• Environmental social science - the broad, transdisciplinary study of interrelations between humans and the natural environment.
• Environmental studies - an area that integrates social, humanistic, and natural science perspectives on the relation between humans and the natural environment.
• Gender studies - an interdisciplinary field that studies gender and sexuality in a broad range of areas.
• Information science - an interdisciplinary science primarily concerned with the collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information.
• Library science - an interdisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools of management, information technology, education, and other areas to libraries; the collection, organization, preservation and dissemination of information resources; and the political economy of information.

Social theory and research methods

The social sciences share many social theory perspectives and research methods. Theory perspectives include critical theory, feminist theory, assorted branches of Marxist theory, social constructionism, and structuralism, among others. Research methods shared include a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative methods.

Theory

Social theories are frameworks used to study and interpret social phenomena. Their formulation has given rise to historical debates over the most valid and reliable methodologies (for example, positivism and antipositivism), as well as the primacy of either structure or agency. Certain social theories attempt to remain strictly scientific, descriptive, and objective. Others, by contrast, present ostensibly normative positions, and often critique the ideological aspects inherent in conventional, traditional thought.

The selection of an appropriate theoretical orientation within which to develop a potentially helpful theory is the bedrock of social science. A theoretical orientation (or paradigm) is a worldview, the lens through which one organizes experience (such as thinking of human interaction in terms of power or exchange); a theory is an attempt to explain and predict behavior in particular contexts. A theoretical orientation cannot be proven or disproven; a theory can. Having a theoretical orientation that sees the world in terms of power and control, one could create a theory about violent human behavior which includes specific causal statements (for example, being the victim of physical abuse leads to psychological problems). This could lead to an hypothesis (prediction) about what one would expect to see in a particular sample, such as “a battered child will grow up to be shy or violent.” The hypothesis can then be tested by looking to see if it is consistent with data in the real world. This could be done by reviewing hospital records to find children who were abused, and then administering a personality test to them to see if they showed signs of being violent or shy.

Social theories include various perspectives, including the following:

• Critical theory is the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across social sciences and humanities disciplines.
• Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse; it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality.
• Marxist theories, such as class theory, are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory.
• Phronetic social science is a theory and methodology for doing social science focusing on ethics and political power, based on a contemporary interpretation of Aristotelian phronesis.
• Rational choice theory is a framework for understanding social and economic behavior based on the idea that patterns of behavior in societies reflect the choices made by individuals as they try to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs.
• Social constructionism considers how social phenomena develop in social contexts.
• Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field (for instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts.
• Structural functionalism is a sociological paradigm which addresses what social functions various elements of the social system perform in regard to the entire system.

Social research

Social scientists employ a wide range of methods in order to analyze a vast breadth of social phenomena; from census survey data derived from millions of individuals, to the in-depth analysis of a single agent's social experiences; from monitoring what is happening in the world today, to the investigation of ancient historical documents. The methods originally rooted in classical sociology and statistics form the basis for research in the broad range of social science disciplines.

Social research methods may be divided into two broad schools:

• Quantitative designs approach social phenomena through quantifiable evidence, and often rely on statistical analysis of many cases (or across intentionally designed treatments in an experiment) to create valid and reliable general claims.

• Qualitative designs emphasize understanding of social phenomena through direct observation, communication with participants, or analysis of texts, and may stress contextual and subjective accuracy over generality.

However, social scientists commonly combine quantitative and qualitative approaches as part of a multi-strategy design. Questionnaires, field-based data collection, archival database information, and laboratory-based data collections are some of the measurement techniques used. It is noted the importance of measurement and analysis, focusing on the (difficult to achieve) goal of objective research or statistical hypothesis testing.

In many cases a mathematical model is developed to describe a social system, a set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, forming an integrated whole. A mathematical model is "a representation of the essential aspects of an existing system (or a system to be constructed) which presents knowledge of that system in usable form." Mathematical models can take many forms, including but not limited to dynamical systems, statistical models, differential equations, or game theoretic models.

Ethics in human research

Research was conducted that raised serious ethical questions regarding the use of human subjects in experimental situations. For example, a famous experiment by psychologist Stanley Milgram measured the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.

Efforts have since been made to protect participants and subjects from abuses in clinical trials and research studies. In the United States, these were formalized in the Belmont report (1979) followed by the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (1991), informally known as the “Common Rule,” Various disciplines within social sciences have formalized their own ethical code, such as the Ethical Principles of Psychologists.

Generally the principles of ethical research with human subjects include the following:

Respect for Persons' Rights and Dignity

The principle of respect values the dignity and worth of all people, and the rights of individuals to privacy, confidentiality, and self-determination. A cornerstone of this principle is the use of informed consent. This holds that (a) individuals should be respected as autonomous agents capable of making their own decisions, and that (b) subjects with diminished autonomy deserve special considerations.

Beneficence and Nonmaleficence

The principle of beneficence holds that (a) the subjects of research should be protected from harm, and (b) the research should bring tangible benefits to society. By this definition, research with no scientific merit is automatically considered unethical.

Justice

The principle of justice states the benefits of research should be distributed fairly. The definition of fairness used is case-dependent, varying between "(1) to each person an equal share, (2) to each person according to individual need, (3) to each person according to individual effort, (4) to each person according to societal contribution, and (5) to each person according to merit."

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Eykhoff, Pieter. System Identification: Parameter and State Estimation. New York, NY: Wiley & Sons, 1974. ISBN 978-0471249801
• Flyvbjerg, B. Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0521772686
• Kuper, Adam and Jessica Kuper (eds.). The Social Science Encyclopedia. New York, NY: Routledge, 2005. ISBN 978-0415476355
• Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1983. ISBN 978-0061319839
• Singleton, Royce A., and Bruce C. Straits. Approaches to Social Research. Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0195147940

• Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 1934.
• Sills, David L., and Robert K. Merton (eds.). International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences . 1968.
• Smelser, Neil J., and Paul B. Baltes (eds.). International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001.

External links

• Social Science Virtual Library
• Social Science Research Society
• UC Berkeley Experimental Social Science Laboratory
• Intute: Social Sciences (UK)
• Social Science History: Time line for the history of science and social science
• Rothbard, Murray, 1973 Praxeology as the Method of the Social Sciences
• Anthropology, Psychology, and Sociology The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.

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