Almost every subject can relate to the social or cultural aspects of human activity and behavior. For example, imagine there is a protest in your community. If you are a language scholar, you might study how verbal cues from the speakers incite responses from the audience. If you are a scientist interested in social physics, you might apply mathematical and physics concepts to understand how people move through the crowd. As a social scientist, you might wonder about the origins of the political beliefs uniting the protesters or focus on how the media will describe the event to their audiences. The key thing to remember is that social science is defined less by your research topic and more by the type of data you collect and the theories you use to make sense of that data.
The academic disciplines that regularly use social science research methods to link theory and data are: anthropology, economics, geography, political science, psychology, and sociology.
| Discipline | Objective (adapted from International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences) |
|---|---|
| Anthropology | The study of human beings in aspects ranging from their biology and evolutionary history to society and culture |
| Economics | The study to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth |
| Geography | The study of the diverse environments, places, and spaces of Earth’s surface and their interactions |
| Political Science | The study of governance by the application of empirical and generally scientific methods of analysis |
| Psychology | The study of mental states, processes and behavior in humans and other animals |
| Sociology | The study of human societies, their interactions, and the processes that preserve and change them |
Social science vs other disciplines
Social science research shares some common elements with research in the natural sciences and the humanities. There are also important differences across these types of research.
The natural sciences study the physical world in which we live. Researchers in the natural sciences use the scientific method and often design experiments to answer their research questions. They often work in closed systems where variables can be controlled and the experimental conditions are fixed. Social science researchers design projects and analyze data using the scientific method as well, but they often collect data in different ways. For example, experiments are less common in the social sciences and historical, case, comparative, and cross-cultural methods are more common. Social science researchers also may find it challenging to replicate previous findings exactly, particularly from qualitative studies. Social scientists may draw on their own interpretations of data more than natural scientists do. As a result, multiple social science researchers may analyze the same materials and come to different conclusions (Freese and Peterson, 2017).
The humanities include the disciplines of history, religion, philosophy, languages and literatures, and the arts. Humanities methods are primarily critical and analytical while social science methods adopt a more scientific approach that is similar to the natural sciences (Gale, 2021). The humanities tend to be more subjective than the social sciences. A researcher in the humanities may identify a topic of interest, explore related textual and cultural artifacts, and then use those examples to develop an argument. One social science approach would use existing theories to propose an expectation about what their analyses might find, gather data related to that expectation, and then evaluate whether or not the evidence supports their original expectation.
This summary of the difference between historical sociology and history reflects the broader differences between social sciences and humanities:
…[S]ociologists approach history through a theoretical lens, using historical cases to formulate and test theories. They develop general concepts, such as ‘scandal’ and ‘collective memory,’ that provide links across historical events and contemporary societies. In contrast, historians tend to study history more for its intrinsic merit and to ensure the accuracy of the historical record. A historian’s main goal is to understand the particular details of a sequence of events. Neither a sociological nor a historical approach is better than the other; they have different goals, and they are not interchangeable. (Carr et al 2018: 399)
Now that you know what social science research is, let’s explore the stages of the research process.
