ASSIGNMENT
Social science
Social science is a major category of academic disciplines, concerned with society and the relationships among individuals within a society . It in turn has many branches, each of which is considered a "social science". The main social sciences include economics, political science, human geography, demography, and sociology. In a wider sense, social science also includes some fields in the humanities such as anthropology, archaeology, jurisprudence, history, and linguistics. The term is also sometimes used to refer specifically to the field of sociology, the original 'science of society', established in the 19th century. A more detailed list of sub-disciplines within the social sciences can be found at Outline of social science.Positivist social scientists use methods resembling those of the natural sciences as tools for understanding society, and so define science in its stricter modern sense. Interpretivist social scientists, by contrast, may use social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than constructing empirically falsifiable theories, and thus treat science in its broader sense. In modern academic practice, researchers are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies (for instance, by combining the quantitative and qualitative researchs). The term social research has also acquired a degree of autonomy as practitioners from various disciplines share in its aims and methods.
Histor
The history of the social sciences begins in
the Age of Enlightenment after 1650, which saw a revolution
within natural philosophy, changing the basic
framework by which individuals understood what was "scientific".
Social sciences came forth from the moral
philosophy of the time
and were influenced by the Age of
Revolutions, such as the Industrial Revolution and the French
Revolution The social
sciences developed from the sciences (experimental and applied),
or the systematic knowledge-bases or prescriptive practices, relating to the social improvement of a group of
interacting entities.
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
modern period saw "social science" first used as a distinct
conceptual field. Social science was influenced by positivism, 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.
Following
this period, there were five paths of development that sprang forth in the
social sciences, influenced by Comte on other fields.[2] One route that was taken was the rise
of social
research. Large statistical surveys were undertaken in various parts of
the United States and Europe. Another route undertaken was initiated by Émile
Durkheim, studying "social facts", and Vilfredo
Pareto, opening metatheoretical ideas and individual theories. A
third means developed, arising from the methodological dichotomy present, in
which social
phenomena were
identified with and understood; this was championed by figures such as Max Weber.
The fourth route taken, based in economics, was developed and furthered
economic knowledge as a hard science.
The last path was the correlation of knowledge and 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.
Around
the start of the 20th century, Enlightenment philosophy was challenged in various quarters.
After the use of classical theories since the end of the scientific revolution,
various fields substituted mathematics studies for experimental studies and
examining equations to build a theoretical structure. The development of social
science subfields became very quantitative in methodology.
The interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of
scientific inquiry into human behaviour, social and environmental factors
affecting it, made many of the natural sciences interested in some aspects of
social science methodology.[7] Examples of boundary blurring include
emerging disciplines like social research of medicine, sociobiology, neuropsychology, bioeconomics and the history and 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. Statistical methods were used confidently.
In
the contemporary period, Karl Popper and Talcott
Parsons influenced the
furtherance of the social sciences. 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 sometime distinct in approach toward, the field.
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 arts. By the late 19th
century, the academic social sciences were constituted of five fields: jurisprudence and amendment of the law, education, health, economy and trade, and art
Around
the start of the 21st century, the expanding domain of economics in the social sciences has been
described as economic imperialism.
Branches
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Civics
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History
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Law
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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.
Anthropology
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. The natural
sciences seek to derive
general laws through reproducible and verifiable experiments. The humanities generally study local traditions,
through their history, literature, music, and arts, with an emphasis on
understanding particular individuals, events, or eras. 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.
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.[9] Within the United States, anthropology
is divided into four sub-fields: archaeology, physical or biological anthropology, anthropological linguistics, and cultural anthropology. 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."
The
goal of anthropology is to provide a holistic account of humans and human nature.
This means that, though anthropologists generally specialize in only one
sub-field, they always keep in mind the biological, linguistic, historic and
cultural aspects of any problem. Since anthropology arose as a science in
Western societies that were complex and industrial, a major trend within
anthropology has been a methodological drive to study peoples in societies with
more simple social organization, sometimes called "primitive" in
anthropological literature, but without any connotation of "inferior."[10] Today, anthropologists use terms such
as "less complex" societies or refer to specific modes of subsistence or 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.
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. 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.
Communication studies
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",
"communication 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
conomics 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 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 behavior."
Economics
has two broad branches: microeconomics,
where the unit of analysis is the individual agent, such as a household or 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 other social situations 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 heterodox schools
of thought, such as institutional economics, green
economics, Marxist
economics, and economic sociology, make other grounding
assumptions. For example, Marxist economics assumes that economics primarily
deals with the investigation of exchange
value, of which human labour is the source.
The
expanding domain of economics in the social sciences has been described as economic imperialism.
Education
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 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.
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[
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. This may involve cultural geography, transportation, health, military operations, and cities.
The latter examines the natural environment and how the climate, vegetation and life, soil, oceans, water and landforms are produced and interact.[16] Physical geography examines phenomena related to the measurement
of earth. 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.[17] Other branches of
geography include social
geography, regional geography, and geomatics.
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, closely related to GISc, that seeks to
understand humanity and its natural environment. The fields of urban
planning, regional
science, and planetology are closely related to geography.
Practitioners of geography use many technologies and methods to collect data
such as GIS, remote
sensing, aerial photography, statistics,
and global positioning systems (GPS).
History
story is the continuous, systematic narrative and research into
past human events as interpreted through historiographical paradigms or
theories.
ory
has a base in both the social sciences and the humanities. In the United States the National Endowment for the Humanities includes history in its definition of humanities (as it does for applied linguistics) However, the National Research Council classifies history as a social science The historical
method comprises the
techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary
sources and other
evidence to research and then to write history.
The Social Science History Association,
formed in 1976, brings together scholars from numerous disciplines interested
in social
history.
Law[
The social science of law, jurisprudence, in common parlance, means a
rule that (unlike a rule of ethics) is capable of enforcement through institutions.[21] However,
many laws are based on norms accepted
by a community and thus have an ethical foundation. 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
science and the humanities. 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, labour law, company law and many more can have long-lasting
effects on the distribution of wealth. The noun law derives from the late Old English lagu, meaning something laid
down or fixed and the adjective legal comes from the Latin word lex.
Linguistics
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.
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
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
behaviour. Fields and subfields of political science include political
economy, 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
behaviour, public law, judicial behaviour, and public policy.
Political science also studies power in international relations and the theory of great powers and superpowers.
Political
science is methodologically diverse, although recent years have witnessed an
upsurge in the use of the scientific method,[29][page needed] that is, the proliferation of
formal-deductive model building and quantitative hypothesis testing. Approaches
to the discipline include rational
choice, classical political philosophy, interpretivism, structuralism,
and behaviouralism, 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, interviews, and official records, as well as secondary
sources such as scholarly
articles are used in
building and testing theories. Empirical methods include survey research, statistical analysis or
econometrics, case studies, experiments,
and model building. Herbert Baxter Adams is credited with coining the phrase
"political science" while teaching history at Johns Hopkins University.
Psychology[
Psychology is an academic and applied field
involving the study of behaviour 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. The word psychology comes from the ancient Greek ψυχή, psyche ("soul", "mind")
and logy ("study").
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. 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, educational psychology,
industrial-organizational psychology, mathematical
psychology, neuropsychology, and quantitative analysis of behaviour.
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. This is not
always necessarily the case however, and in many UK institutions students
studying the B.Psy, B.Sc, and B.A. 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 B.A.
for example, but specialized in heavily science-based modules, then they will
still generally be awarded the B.A.
Sociology
is the systematic study of society and
human social action. The meaning of the word comes
from the suffix "-ology", which means "study of", derived
from Greek, and the stem "soci-", which is from the Latin word
socius, meaning "companion", or society in general.
Sociology
was originally established by Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in 1838. Comte endeavoured to unify history,
psychology and economics through the descriptive understanding of the social
realm. He proposed that social ills could be remedied through sociological positivism,
an epistemological approach outlined in The Course in Positive Philosophy [1830–1842] and A General View of Positivism (1844). Though Comte is generally
regarded as the "Father of Sociology", the discipline was formally
established by another French thinker, Émile
Durkheim (1858–1917),
who developed positivism as a foundation to practical social
research. Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology
at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method.
In 1896, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal
monograph, Suicide (1897), a case study of suicide rates
among Catholic and Protestant populations, distinguished
sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy.[31]
Karl Marx rejected Comte's positivism but
nevertheless aimed to establish a science of society based on historical materialism, becoming
recognized as a founding figure of sociology posthumously as the term gained
broader meaning. Around the start of the 20th century, the first wave of German
sociologists, including Max Weber and Georg Simmel,
developed sociological antipositivism.
The field may be broadly recognized as an amalgam of three modes of social
thought in particular: Durkheimian positivism and structural functionalism; Marxist historical materialism and conflict
theory; and Weberian antipositivism and verstehen analysis. American sociology broadly
arose on a separate trajectory, with little Marxist influence, an emphasis on
rigorous experimental methodology, and a closer association with pragmatism and social
psychology. In the 1920s, the Chicago school developed symbolic interactionism. Meanwhile, in the
1930s, the Frankfurt
School pioneered the
idea of critical
theory, an interdisciplinary form of Marxist
sociology drawing upon
thinkers as diverse as Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. Critical theory would take
on something of a life of its own after World War II,
influencing literary criticism and the Birmingham School establishment of cultural
studies.
Sociology
evolved as an academic response to the challenges of modernity,
such as industrialization, urbanization, secularization,
and a perceived process of enveloping rationalization.[32] Because sociology is such a broad
discipline, it can be difficult to define, even for professional sociologists.
The field generally concerns 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. 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. In the terms of sociologists Peter L.
Berger and Thomas
Luckmann, social scientists seek an understanding of the Social Construction of Reality.
Most sociologists work in one or more 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 a population size
or type; criminology examines criminal behaviour and
deviance; and political sociology studies the interaction between
society and state.
ince
its inception, sociological epistemologies, methods, and frames of enquiry,
have significantly expanded and diverged.[33] Sociologists use a diversity of
research methods, drawing upon either empirical techniques or critical
theory. Common modern methods include case studies, historical
research, interviewing, participant observation, social network analysis, survey research, statistical analysis, and model building,
among other approaches. Since the late 1970s, many sociologists have tried to
make the discipline useful for non-academic purposes. The results of
sociological research aid educators, lawmakers, administrators, developers, and
others interested in resolving social problems and formulating public policy,
through subdisciplinary areas such as evaluation research, methodological assessment,
and public
sociology.
New
sociological sub-fields continue to appear — such as community
studies, computational sociology, environmental sociology, network analysis, actor-network theory and a growing list, many of which are cross-disciplinary in nature.
