1 – What is Social Science?
Why Should I Care?
Without science, your beliefs are based on your elders experience, on superstition, on faith and religious dogma, and personal assumptions. You might be right about many things. But you also might be wrong about a lot of things.
Elements of this page
- Definitions
- What Do Scientists Do?
- About Bias
- What are the Social Sciences?
- What is Casual Research?
Definitions
Culture
Everything produced by humans to enhance the experience of living, including economic production, language, laws and rules of conduct, religious institutions, literature, and art.
Common Sense
A traditional method for building knowledge, based on the experiences of elders, traditions, and beliefs.
Science
A rational method for building knowledge. Based on fact-checking, and logic.
Technology
Applications of traditional and scientific knowledge.
Examples of traditional technology: meal recipes, snowshoes, knowledge of medicinal plants.
Examples of academic technological fields: engineering, medicine, marketing, finance, accounting, language, math.
Natural Science
The study of the natural world with or without humans. Includes biology, chemistry, and physics.
Humanities
Academic disciplines which are not solely governed, or concerned, by the scientific method. Branches of knowledge devoted to studying human culture using analytical methods, often rooted in reason. Examples: Philosophy, Art History, Media Studies, Gender studies, English Literature, Classics.
Liberal Professions
Professional occupations whose title is protected in law, who must abide by codes of conduct, and who are governed by a professional association (order or bar). Many such professions are technological in nature, such as medical doctors, nurses, veterinarians, dentists, engineers, and architects. Others are born out of the social sciences and humanities, such as accountants, lawyers, clinical psychologists, insurance agents, and financial planners.
Critical Thought
This is a complex idea with many definitions. Here are a few ways of approaching this idea.
- The ability to determine if a conclusion is sufficiently supported by the underlying premise, and set of logical deductions (reason, deductive logic).
- The ability to use knowledge to sort between valid and invalid information.
- The ability to acknowledge lack of knowledge, and to arbitrage risk and reward in the case of trusting someone else's explanation.
- The ability to identify gaps in knowledge. The ability to discern between beliefs, traditional views, and areas requiring inquiry.
- The ability to identify possible bias, either monetary, ideological, cultural, or other, which may invalidate the statement.
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“The ability to deconstruct a statement and determine its possible bias” Zohra Bouzitoune Class of 2015 |
What do scientists do?
Essentially, scientists follow a protocol that ensures the validity of their conclusions. If you do the following things, your research findings will be valid and recognized as scientific.
- Be neutral
- Do not accept money from interested parties
- Identify your cultural / personal bias
- Identify the bias of others
- Do not accept money from interested parties
- Review the literature
- Identify what is already known
- Identify what is not yet known
- Use logic
- Establish a logical explanation to the phenomenon
- Write a hypothesis: a relationship between variables
- If it is complicated, build a model with all the variables and their relationships
- Operationalize
- Find a proper method and tool to observe, and measure your variables
- Use a random sample of the population, preferably large.
- Listen to the data
- Let the data do the talking.
- Organize the observations, look for patterns
- Compare the empirical evidence with contradictory beliefs, prior knowledge
- Don’t modify the numbers if they don’t fit your hypothesis or preferred outcome
- Communicate the findings and your methodology.
- Be transparent about your method
- Be honest about your data's shortcomings
- List the authors of previous research and how their work contributes to your own
- Share your dataset with anyone who wants to double-check your analysis
- Allow blind reviewers to criticize your work
- Publish your knowledge in a non-profit academic journal
- Be transparent about your method
About Bias
Bias is a tendency to prefer one idea over others. This could be due to many factors.
The first and most obvious bias in research is to be affected by a conflict of interest. There are basically two kinds of conflicts, the first is money. Private interests can be tempted to pay a researcher to modify their study in any way to provide a result that aligns with the interests of the group. This can be the case of a corporation, or an association representing an industry. It can also be the case of a political lobby, social interest group, or religious organization. In any event, scientists should be disinterested, i.e. they should be shielded from financial pressures when designing, conducting, and communicating research.
The second type of conflict is that of appartenance. Belonging to a social group that would benefit from the publication of research results, may have consequences on the scientist's neutrality. This issue needs some nuance. In many cases, appartenance may be a benefit because phenomena may be overlooked by researchers who are not aware of the existence of differences associated to those groups. For example, a scientist belonging to a linguistic group may be better suited to study that group. One way to avoid the appearance of bias is to work in teams of researchers, where each scientist is associated to different groups.
Bias can also arise from the formation of a priori beliefs and preconceptions. This may be due to principles, dogma, and beliefs arising from religion, personal experience, education, and propaganda from advertizing and government publications.
Unfortunately, bias is a very natural phenomenon, because of the decreasing plasticity in the brain as people age. As you can see in the following video, the brain is meant to help you react to your environment and execute complex operations. Eventually, your brain does get “set in its ways.” Adopting new views, and capabilities, can be more difficult with age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0
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Are YOU biased about stuff? Language holds bias You can choose different words, for political reasons. But words may also have different meanings…
English French State État Nation Nation Country Pays Province Province (latin; pro victis: in favor of the victorious) Race Race Distinct Society Société distincte Canadian Canadien Quebecker Québécois People Peuple Society Société (projet de société) |
What are the Social sciences?
IS THE STUDY OF
- Psychology how people feel and behave individually
- Sociology how people act and think as groups
- Political Science how people govern themselves
- History how people acted in the past
- Geography how people act and think over space
- Economics how people produce goods and services
- Anthropology how people exist as cultures and societies
Why are social sciences useful?
The goal of science is to build knowledge which helps to understand the world, but also to help solve real-life problems.
Without a scientific approach to answering questions about why and how humans do things, we are left with casual research, journalism, religious beliefs and superstition. The problems with these are that we are often led to believe falsehoods. This leads to poor understanding of how the world works, and poor problem-solving skills.
Science must lead to truthful answers, and hopefully also to useful applications. Same goes for social science.
What is Casual Research?
Using anecdotal evidence from daily observations to shape beliefs. This often is in line with what our parents, media and churches tell us about life.
This is not science.