social science

Examples of social science in the following topics:

• Sociology and the Social Sciences

  • As a social science, sociology explores the application of scientific methods to the study of the human aspects of the world.
  • As a social science, sociology involves the application of scientific methods to the study of the human aspects of the world.
  • The social science disciplines also include psychology, political science, and economics, among other fields.
  • The use of scientific methods differentiates the social sciences from the humanities.
  • The social sciences occupy a middle position between the "hard" natural sciences and the interpretive bent of the humanities.

• Sociology and Other Social Sciences

  • The social sciences comprise the application of scientific methods to the study of the human aspects of the world.
  • Social sciences diverge from the humanities in that many in the social sciences emphasize the scientific method or other rigorous standards of evidence in the study of humanity.
  • Statistics and probability theory were sufficiently developed to be considered "scientific", resulting in the widespread use of statistics in the social sciences (they are also widely used in most other sciences as well, including biology).
  • Alongside these developments, Pragmatism facilitated the emergence of qualitative social science via the ethnographic and community-based endeavors of the Chicago School in the 1920's and 1930's.
  • The combination of these quantitative and qualitative advancements thus established social science as an empirical endeavor distinct from the humanities.

• After word

  • The basic methods of studying patterns of social relations that have been developed in the field of social network analysis provide ways of rigorously approaching many classic problems in the social sciences.
  • The application of existing methods to a wider range of social science problems, and the development of new methods to address additional issues in the social sciences are "cutting edges" in most social science disciplines.
  • Social network analysis is also increasingly connected to the broader field of network analysis.
  • Hopefully, the core ideas of social network analysis will enrich our understanding of fields outside the social sciences.
  • We've not provided a rigorous grounding of social network analysis in graph theory.

• Material Culture

  • In the social sciences, material culture is a term that refers to the relationship between artifacts and social relations.
  • In the social sciences, material culture refers to the relationship between artifacts and social relations.
  • These objects inevitably reflect the historical, geographic, and social conditions of their origin.
  • People's relationship to and perception of objects are socially and culturally dependent.
  • Accordingly, social and cultural attitudes can be discussed through the lens of a culture's relationship to materiality.

• Social Epidemiology and Health

  • Social epidemiology studies the social distribution and social determinants of health.
  • Epidemiology is the study (or the science of the study) of the patterns, causes, and effects of health and disease conditions in defined populations.
  • The book pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy.
  • Social epidemiology overlaps with fields in the social sciences, such as medical anthropology, medical sociology, and medical geography.
  • Durkheim formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.

• The Development of Social Science

  • This unity of science as descriptive remained, for example, in the time of Thomas Hobbes who argued that deductive reasoning from axioms created a scientific framework; his book, Leviathan, was a scientific description of a political commonwealth.
  • Within decades of Hobbes' work a revolution took place in what constituted science, particularly with the work of Isaac Newton in physics.
  • Such relationships, called Laws after the usage of the time (see philosophy of science) became the model that other disciplines would emulate.
  • In the early 20th century, a wave of change came to science that saw statistical study sufficiently mathematical to be science.
  • With the rise of the idea of quantitative measurement in the physical sciences (see, 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.

• Sociology and Science

  • As a result, many researchers argued that the methodology used in the natural sciences was perfectly suited for use in the social sciences.
  • This also resulted in sociology being recognized as an empirical science.
  • The goal of positivism, like the natural sciences, is prediction.
  • The inability of sociology and other social sciences to perfectly predict the behavior of humans or to fully comprehend a different culture has led to the social sciences being labeled "soft sciences. " While some might consider this label derogatory, in a sense it can be seen as an admission of the remarkable complexity of humans as social animals.
  • Humans, human society, and human culture are all constantly changing, which means the social sciences will constantly be works in progress.

• Studying Sociology

  • Sociology is the study of human social life.
  • Sociology is a branch of the social sciences that uses systematic methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity.
  • Macrosociology involves the study of widespread social processes.
  • The traditional focuses of sociology have included social relations, social stratification, social interaction, culture, and deviance, and the approaches of sociology have included both qualitative and quantitative research techniques.
  • The range of social scientific methods has also been broadly expanded.

• Spencer and Social Darwinism

  • Social Darwinism explains individuals' success by attributing it to their greater fitness.
  • Like Comte, Spencer saw in sociology the potential to unify the sciences, or to develop what he called a "synthetic philosophy. " He believed that the natural laws discovered by natural scientists were not limited to natural phenomena; these laws revealed an underlying order to the universe that could explain natural and social phenomena alike.
  • Though Spencer is rightly credited with making a significant contribution to early sociology, his attempt to introduce evolutionary ideas into the realm of social science was ultimately unsuccessful.
  • Critics of Spencer's positivist synthetic philosophy argued that the social sciences were essentially different from the natural sciences and that the methods of the natural sciences—the search for universal laws was inappropriate for the study of human society.
  • This is why Spencer's theories are often called "social Darwinism."

• The Nature of Groups

  • In the social sciences, a social group is two or more humans who interact with one another, share similar characteristics, and have a collective sense of unity.
  • Renowned social psychologist Muzafer Sherif formulated a technical definition of a social group.
  • Explicitly contrasted with a social cohesion-based definition for social groups is the social identity perspective, which draws on insights made in social identity theory.
  • A law enforcement official is a social category, not a group.
  • Contrast the social cohesion-based concept of a social group with the social identity concept