Branch of science that studies society and its relationships
For the integrated field of study intended to promote civic competence, see Social studies. For the social-political-economic theory first pioneered by Karl Marx, see Scientific socialism.
empirically falsifiable theories, and thus treat science in its broader sense.[2] In modern academic practice, researchers are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies (for instance, by combining both quantitative and qualitative research).[3] The term social research has also acquired a degree of autonomy as practitioners from various disciplines share similar goals and methods.[4]
The beginnings of the social sciences in the 18th century are reflected in the grand encyclopedia of Diderot, with articles from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other pioneers. The growth of the social sciences is also reflected in other specialized encyclopedias. The term "social science" was coined in French by Mirabeau in 1767, before becoming a distinct conceptual field in the nineteenth century.[9] Social science was influenced by positivism,[6] focusing on knowledge based on actual positive sense experience and avoiding the negative; metaphysical speculation was avoided. Auguste Comte used the term science sociale to describe the field, taken from the ideas of Charles Fourier; Comte also referred to the field as social physics.[6][10]
Following this period, five paths of development sprang forth in the social sciences, influenced by Comte in other fields.
social values; the antipositivism and verstehen sociology of Max Weber firmly demanded this distinction. In this route, theory (description) and prescription were non-overlapping formal discussions of a subject.[12][13]
The foundation of social sciences in the West implies conditioned relationships between progressive and traditional spheres of knowledge. In some contexts, such as the Italian one, sociology slowly affirms itself and experiences the difficulty of affirming a strategic knowledge beyond philosophy and theology.[14]
Around the start of the 20th century,
sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative research and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of human action and its implications and consequences. In the first half of the 20th century, statistics became a free-standing discipline of applied mathematics.[16]
Statistical methods were used confidently.
In the contemporary period, Karl Popper and Talcott Parsons influenced the furtherance of the social sciences.[6] Researchers continue to search for a unified consensus on what methodology might have the power and refinement to connect a proposed "grand theory" with the various midrange theories that, with considerable success, continue to provide usable frameworks for massive, growing data banks; for more, see consilience. The social sciences will for the foreseeable future be composed of different zones in the research of, and sometimes distinct in approach toward, the field.[6]
The term "social science" may refer either to the specific sciences of society established by thinkers such as Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, or more generally to all disciplines outside of "noble science" and
Social science and humanities have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. […] The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.[18]
The social science disciplines are branches of knowledge taught and researched at the college or university level. Social science disciplines are defined and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned social science societies and academic departments or faculties to which their practitioners belong. Social science fields of study usually have several sub-disciplines or branches, and the distinguishing lines between these are often both arbitrary and ambiguous.[citation needed]
The following are problem areas, applied social sciences and discipline branches within the social sciences.[6]
Anthropology is the holistic "science of man", a science of the totality of human existence. The discipline deals with the integration of different aspects of the social sciences, humanities, and human biology. In the twentieth century, academic disciplines have often been institutionally divided into three broad domains. Firstly, the natural sciences seek to derive general laws through reproducible and verifiable experiments. Secondly, the humanities generally study local traditions, through their history, literature, music, and arts, with an emphasis on understanding particular individuals, events, or eras. Finally, the social sciences have generally attempted to develop scientific methods to understand social phenomena in a generalizable way, though usually with methods distinct from those of the natural sciences.[citation needed]
The anthropological social sciences often develop nuanced descriptions rather than the general laws derived in physics or chemistry, or they may explain individual cases through more general principles, as in many fields of psychology. Anthropology (like some fields of history) does not easily fit into one of these categories, and different branches of anthropology draw on one or more of these domains.
physical or biological anthropology, anthropological linguistics, and cultural anthropology. It is an area that is offered at most undergraduate institutions. The word anthropos (ἄνθρωπος) in Ancient Greek means "human being" or "person". Eric Wolf described sociocultural anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences".[citation needed
]
The goal of anthropology is to provide a
production, such as "pastoralist" or "forager" or "horticulturalist" to refer to humans living in non-industrial, non-Western cultures, such people or folk (ethnos) remaining of great interest within anthropology.[citation needed
]
The quest for holism leads most anthropologists to study a people in detail, using biogenetic, archaeological, and linguistic data alongside direct observation of contemporary customs.[21] In the 1990s and 2000s, calls for clarification of what constitutes a culture, of how an observer knows where his or her own culture ends and another begins, and other crucial topics in writing anthropology were heard. It is possible to view all human cultures as part of one large, evolving global culture. These dynamic relationships, between what can be observed on the ground, as opposed to what can be observed by compiling many local observations remain fundamental in any kind of anthropology, whether cultural, biological, linguistic or archaeological.[22]
Communication studies deals with processes of human
television broadcasting. Communication studies also examine 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, communication science, media studies, communication arts, mass communication, media ecology
, and communication and media science.
Communication studies integrate 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.[citation needed]
Economics is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth.[23] The word "economics" is from the Ancient Greekοἶκος (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 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 relationship between ends and scarce means which have 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 behavior".[citation needed]
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 Latineducare, or to facilitate the realization of an individual's potential and 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.[25]
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.[citation needed
]
Modern geography is an all-encompassing discipline, closely related to
History is the continuous, systematic narrative and research into past human events as interpreted through historiographical paradigms or theories. When used as the name of a
field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of humans, societies, institutions, and any topic that has changed over time.[citation needed
]
Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the
Linguistics investigates the cognitive and social aspects of human language. The field is divided into areas that focus on aspects of the linguistic signal, such as syntax (the study of the rules that govern the structure of sentences), semantics (the study of meaning), morphology (the study of the structure of words), 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.[citation needed]
The overwhelming majority of modern research in linguistics takes a predominantly
Ferdinand Saussure is considered the father of modern linguistics.[citation needed
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 focus on creating descriptive generalizations about the functioning of social groups or situation-specific human behaviour. 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 behaviour, 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.[44]
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:
BSc, and BA follow the same curriculum as outlined by The British Psychological Society and have the same options of specialism open to them regardless of whether they choose a balance, a heavy science basis, or heavy social science basis to their degree. If they applied to read the BA. for example, but specialized in heavily science-based modules, then they will still generally be awarded the BA.[citation needed
Sociology is the systematic study of society, individuals' relationship to their societies, the consequences of difference, and other aspects of human social action.[47] The meaning of the word comes from the suffix -logy, which means "study of", derived from Ancient Greek, and the stem soci-, which is from the Latin word socius, meaning "companion", or society in general.[citation needed]
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) coined the term sociology to describe a way to apply natural science principles and techniques to the social world in 1838.
Protestant populations, distinguished sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy.[50]
Sociology evolved as an academic response to the challenges of
subfields. One useful way to describe the discipline is as a cluster of sub-fields that examine different dimensions of society. For example, social stratification studies inequality and class structure; demography studies changes in population size or type; criminology examines criminal behaviour and deviance; and political sociology studies the interaction between society and state.[citation needed
]
Since its inception, sociological epistemologies, methods, and frames of enquiry, have significantly expanded and diverged.
In the early 1970s, women sociologists began to question sociological paradigms and the invisibility of women in sociological studies, analysis, and courses.[53] In 1969, feminist sociologists challenged the discipline's androcentrism at the American Sociological Association's annual conference.[54] This led to the founding of the organization Sociologists for Women in Society, and, eventually, a new sociology journal, Gender & Society. Today, the sociology of gender is considered to be one of the most prominent sub-fields in the discipline.[citation needed]
New sociological sub-fields continue to appear — such as
Additional applied or interdisciplinary fields related to the social sciences or are applied social sciences include:
Archaeology is the science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, analysis, and interpretation of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, features, biofacts, and landscapes.[56]
Area studies are interdisciplinary fields of research and scholarship pertaining to particular geographical, national/federal, or cultural regions.[57]
Behavioural science is a term that encompasses all the disciplines that explore the activities of and interactions among organisms in the natural world.[58]
Computational social science is an umbrella field encompassing computational approaches within the social sciences.[59]
Demography is the statistical study of all human populations.[60]
multidisciplinary branch of social science that addresses issues of concern to developing countries.[61]
transdisciplinary study of interrelations between humans and the natural environment.[62]
Environmental studies integrate social, humanistic, and natural science perspectives on the relation between humans and the natural environment.[63]
Information science is an interdisciplinary science primarily concerned with the collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information.[65]
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).[66]
Legal management is a social sciences discipline that is designed for students interested in the study of state and legal elements.[67]
Library science is 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.[68]
Management consists of various levels of leadership and administration of an organization in all business and human organizations. It is the effective execution of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives through adequate planning, executing and controlling activities.[69]
Marketing the identification of human needs and wants, defines and measures their magnitude for demand and understanding the process of consumer buying behaviour to formulate products and services, pricing, promotion and distribution to satisfy these needs and wants through exchange processes and building long-term relationships.[70]
Political economy is the study of production, buying and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government.[71]
Public administration is one of the main branches of political science, and can be broadly described as the development, implementation and study of branches of government policy. The pursuit of the public good by enhancing civil society and social justice is the ultimate goal of the field. Though public administration has been historically referred to as government management,[72] it increasingly encompasses non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that also operate with a similar, primary dedication to the betterment of humanity.
Religious studies and Western esoteric studies incorporate and inform social-scientific research on phenomena broadly deemed religious. Religious studies, Western esoteric studies, and the social sciences developed in dialogue with one another.[73]
In contemporary usage, "social research" is a relatively autonomous term, encompassing the work of practitioners from various disciplines that share in its aims and methods. Social scientists employ a range of methods in order to analyse 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 on contemporary streets, to the investigation of ancient historical documents. The methods originally rooted in classical sociology and statistical mathematics have formed the basis for research in other disciplines, such as political science, media studies, and marketing and market research.
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.
Social scientists will 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
These and other types of models can overlap, with a given model involving a variety of abstract structures. The system is a set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, forming an integrated whole. The concept of an integrated whole can also be stated in terms of a system embodying a set of relationships that are differentiated from relationships of the set to other elements, and from relationships between an element of the set and elements not a part of the relational regime. A
deterministic
: for a given time interval only one future state follows from the current state.
Social scientists often conduct program evaluation, which is a systematic method for collecting, analyzing, and using information to answer questions about projects, policies and programs,[78] particularly about their effectiveness and efficiency. In both the public and private sectors, stakeholders often want to know whether the programs they are funding, implementing, voting for, receiving or objecting to are producing the intended effect. While program evaluation first focuses around this definition, important considerations often include how much the program costs per participant, how the program could be improved, whether the program is worthwhile, whether there are better alternatives, if there are unintended outcomes, and whether the program goals are appropriate and useful.[79]
Some social theorists emphasize the subjective nature of research. These writers espouse social theory perspectives that include various types of the following:
Critical theory is the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across social sciences and humanities disciplines.
Dialectical materialism is the philosophy of Karl Marx, which he formulated by taking the dialectic of Hegel and joining it to the materialism of Feuerbach.
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse; it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality.
is a theory and methodology for doing social science focusing on ethics and political power, based on a contemporary interpretation of Aristotelian phronesis.
Post-colonial theory
is a reaction to the cultural legacy of colonialism.
Postmodernism refers to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, cinema, and design, as well as in marketing and business and in the interpretation of history, law, culture and religion in the late 20th century.
Rational choice theory is a framework for understanding and often formally modeling social and economic behaviour.
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 that addresses what social functions various elements of the social system perform in regard to the entire system.
Other fringe social theorists delve into the alternative nature of research. These writers share social theory perspectives that include various types of the following:
Anti-intellectualism describes a sentiment of critique towards, or evaluation of, intellectuals and intellectual pursuits.
Antiscience is a position critical of science and the scientific method.
Recursivity
Authors use the concept of recursivity to foreground the situation in which social scientists find themselves when producing knowledge about the world they are always already part of.[80][81] According to Audrey Alejandro, “as social scientists, the recursivity of our condition deals with the fact that we are both subjects (as discourses are the medium through which we analyse) and objects of the academic discourses we produce (as we are social agents belonging to the world we analyse).”[82] From this basis, she identifies in recursivity a fundamental challenge in the production of emancipatory knowledge which calls for the exercise of reflexive efforts:
we are socialised into discourses and dispositions produced by the socio-political order we aim to challenge, a socio-political order that we may, therefore, reproduce unconsciously while aiming to do the contrary. The recursivity of our situation as scholars – and, more precisely, the fact that the dispositional tools we use to produce knowledge about the world are themselves produced by this world – both evinces the vital necessity of implementing reflexivity in practice and poses the main challenge in doing so.[83]
Education and degrees
Most universities offer degrees in social science fields.[84] The Bachelor of Social Science is a degree targeted at the social sciences in particular, it is often more flexible and in-depth than other degrees that include social science subjects.[a]
In the United States, a university may offer a student who studies a social sciences field a
natural sciences). In addition, some institutions have degrees for a particular social science, such as the Bachelor of Economics
degree, though such specialized degrees are relatively rare in the United States.
Graduate students may receive a
PhD
).
Low priority of social science
Social sciences receive less funding than natural sciences. It has been estimated that only 0.12% of all funding for climate-related research is spent on the social science of climate change mitigation. Vastly more funding is spent on natural science studies of climate change and considerable sums are also spent on studies of the impact of and adaptation to climate change.[85] It has been argued that this is a misallocation of resources, as the most urgent puzzle at the current juncture is to work out how to change human behavior to mitigate climate change, whereas the natural science of climate change is already well established and there will be decades and centuries to handle adaptation.[85]
Nevertheless, funding and attention paid to the social sciences varies across countries. For instance, the development of a social scientific community can become a priority entangled with national politics.[86] In the case of Brazil, for example, the institutionalisation of social sciences took place in a political context where the state struggled to assert its territorial power, and the social scientific field was expected to produce investigation but also political inputs towards the construction of a new nation.[87][88] This need was accentuated after the 1932 revolution, in the wake of which the USP was founded and became the biggest university in South America. Subsequently, these developments led to the deployment of university programs and the institution of national associations in anthropology, sociology and political science.[86]
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