Social science

The social sciences are a set of academic disciplines that study the behavior of humans as members of societies, as well as the nature and dynamics of social interactions and social relationships between individuals, groups, and institutions that comprise society. The social sciences consist of a very broad and diverse collection of academic fields, including sociology, archaeology and anthropology, history, psychology, economics, business administration, political science, geography, women’s studies, and ethnic studies.

Each of these academic disciplines is highly diverse and specialized in their own right, with scholars often devoting their specific attention and expertise to one or two very specific areas. For example, within sociology, some scholars focus primarily on crime and deviance, while others devote their attention to family life, the educational system, or racial and ethnic relations. Historically, the boundaries between the various social science disciplines was fairly rigid, but in recent decades, these boundaries have blurred considerably in favor of a more interdisciplinary approach in academia that emphasizes collaboration and greater understanding between scholars of different disciplinary training and academic backgrounds.

This is particularly true in the United States, where, for example, several colleges and universities have merged their undergraduate sociology and anthropology or history and archaeology programs into a single, overarching department.

The social sciences are also known as social studies, and they are also sometimes described as the "soft sciences." This label refers to the methods of research and data collection that scholars in the social sciences use (typically conducting interviews with informants or compiling statistical data through surveys). This allegedly soft form of data collection is perceived as contrasting sharply with "hard" data compiled by researchers in the natural and life sciences (biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, and earth sciences), which is rigorously based on the scientific method—observing a phenomenon, formulating a hypothesis, conducting an experiment to accept or reject a hypothesis, and modifying one’s hypothesis as new information is obtained. Scholars in the social sciences often disapprove of their disciplines being referred to as soft sciences, however, as this label is sometimes interpreted as implying a sense of inferiority or lesser importance. Additionally, scholars of human behavior point out that unlike the natural phenomena studied by the hard sciences, formulating universal laws regarding human thought processes and behaviors is an extremely difficult—if not impossible—endeavor, due to the fact that humans have individual agency, people’s cultural backgrounds are not identical, and culture itself is highly fluid and dynamic (meaning that culture is not static).

Background

To be sure, the study of human social and cultural life that is today associated with the social sciences has been examined throughout much of human history, although not nearly in as meticulous a manner as it is investigated today. For example, whenever representatives of various colonial empires (such as the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, or Romans) ventured to new territories and encountered peoples culturally, religiously, and linguistically different from themselves, written descriptions of these foreign ways of life—representing an early form of anthropology—were created and brought back to their homes. Similarly, the preservation of historical knowledge is an old tradition that dates to antiquity, and the documentation of events for future recollection probably emerged shortly after the invention of writing (and oral traditions recorded history before writing). The social sciences, as the formal academic subjects we know them today, began to take root in the time period between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries—spanning from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution, Victorian Era, and the Gilded Age.

The origins of sociology date to the early nineteenth century amid efforts among elites to understand the causes of the French Revolution and the willingness of the masses to rise up against established authority. Modern scholars often regard Auguste Comte as the first unofficial sociologist, given his desire to create a "science of mankind" that was modeled on the natural and life sciences. Harriet Martineau is often considered the first woman sociologist. In addition to translating Comte's most well-known work into English, Martineau published several major works of her own focused on symbolic interactions and advancing methodologies for studying social life. Another early figure central to the development of sociology is Karl Marx, a German-born social philosopher whose literary works analyzed the effects of industrial-based capitalism on the lives of workers, elites, and overall society in Western Europe during the mid-nineteenth century. Marx’s writings inspired the concept of conflict theory, which is still one of the predominant theories in twenty-first-century sociological thought, and many political science courses still use Marx’s most famous writing, The Communist Manifesto, as a required introductory-level reading.

Sir Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan are considered the founders of cultural anthropology in Britain and the United States, respectively, during the late nineteenth century. Tylor’s works focused heavily on the study of religion as an important dimension of human culture, while Morgan’s extensive research on kinship among the Iroquois is still considered impressive. During the early years of the twentieth century, Franz Boas became the leading US anthropologist and established anthropology as a distinct academic discipline consisting of four interrelated fields (archaeology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, and physical anthropology). Boas also promoted cultural relativism, the idea that each culture is its own unique entity that has emerged within its own distinct historical context and therefore must be studied and properly understood on its own terms and not through the standards or framework of another. Margaret Mead was a prominent American anthropologist in the twentieth century. She published nearly two dozen books based on her observations of South Seas populations, including the classic text Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928, and worked for over fifty years at the American Museum of Natural History where she became outspoken on a number of controversial issues. The first psychology laboratory opened at the University of Leipzig in Germany in 1879, while the first US laboratory of psychology opened at Johns Hopkins University four years later. Johns Hopkins also awarded the first PhD degree in psychology in 1886. Sigmund Freud became a prominent figure within the field around the time that Boas was emerging as a renowned anthropologist. Freud published his first of twenty-four books, The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1899. Freud’s approach to psychology emphasized a psychoanalytical approach (examining how childhood experiences affect an individual’s long-term personality development). Freud's daughter, Anna Freud, also made significant impacts in the field of psychology. Her focus was on children who had been affected by poverty, neglect, and other traumas, and she developed new methods for therapists to approach separation anxiety in children.

As these and other social science disciplines became established in European, Canadian, and American universities, professional associations and organizations dedicated to these fields began to emerge. For example, the American Historical Association (AHA) began in 1884, making it one of the earliest professional academic organizations in the United States. The American Psychological Association (APA) began in 1892 and was founded by G. Stanley Hall, who also established the first psychology program in the United States at Johns Hopkins University in 1883. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) was founded in 1902 and to this day remains the largest professional association of anthropologists in the world. Three years later, the American Sociological Association (ASA) was established. Each of these organizations host annual conferences where professional scholars present research findings; the organizations also publish journals containing research and information pertaining to job opportunities and funding for research projects.

Impact Today

The social sciences constitute some of the most popular bachelor’s degrees earned by undergraduate college and university students throughout the United States. According to data compiled from the National Center for Education Statistics, of the total number of bachelor’s degrees awarded by major among all higher education institutions nationally between 2018–9, business administration ranked first, social sciences and history ranked third, and psychology ranked sixth.

Research within the social sciences is typically obtained through two major methodological approaches, quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative research is statistically based (sometimes nicknamed "number crunching" among scholars) and is often acquired through the use of surveys among a large number of informants. On the other hand, qualitative research entails conducting in-depth interviews with informants (known as "ethnographic interviews" among cultural anthropologists). Participant observation is another major type of qualitative research methodology, in which the researcher lives among the group being studied for an extensive period of time, interacts with those under study, and attempts to emulate the ways of the group or society being studied in order to gain a deeper, firsthand understanding of the way of life. Quantitative and qualitative research methods each have their respective strengths and weaknesses. While a quantitative approach enables a researcher to acquire data from a large number of informants in a relatively short period of time, this statistical data is usually very general and often does not provide much depth (this is particularly true when researchers use closed surveys in which respondents are required to choose answers from a predetermined set of responses). A limitation of surveys is that they are unable to provide context for informants’ responses. On the other hand, while qualitative data may provide greater depth than surveys and questionnaires, the much smaller numbers of informants used in qualitative studies (also called case studies) generates criticism as to how applicable the results and data from a qualitative study is to the society as a whole.

In recent years, the social sciences have become a source of controversy and criticism within higher education and broader American society. This criticism centers around two concerns: alleged political biases within social science disciplines and questions regarding the applicability of social science degrees to the contemporary job market. Conservative students, politicians, and media pundits typically present the first criticism, that which accuses the social sciences of harboring political biases. Specifically, those who make this claim assert that professors of psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and political science overwhelmingly hold extremely left-wing, liberal views on a variety of controversial social and political issues (such as poverty and social inequality, gender relations and feminism, US foreign policy, racial and ethnic relations, and a host of other topics). Conservatives argue that the degree of social and political liberalism exhibited by faculty within the social sciences greatly exceeds that of the US population as a whole, and that social sciences professors allegedly bias their courses in favor of promoting liberal viewpoints and agendas that unfairly silence, humiliate, or penalize (in the form of assigning lower or failing grades) to students with conservative views.

In the early 2000s, David Horowitz (a former liberal turned conservative activist) attempted to counter the alleged liberal biases of faculty in the social sciences and humanities by engaging in a nationwide campaign to promote an "Academic Bill of Rights" that aimed to limit professors’ academic freedom in espousing liberal political positions without also presenting conservative counterarguments and to protect conservative students from being academically penalized by professors in their coursework. Horowitz’s movement largely subsided by the late 2000s, but in 2005, Pennsylvania did conduct a series of investigative hearings into alleged political biases of courses at its state-owned and state-related universities. Scholars within the social sciences and humanities tend to dismiss these accusations, however, and often point out that one gains a much deeper and more robust insight into the dynamics of social inequalities when they examine such topics from a critical framework—and that these deeper understandings frequently challenge the popular conservative rhetoric, rooted in political ideology, that often frames topics of inequality in American society. Nevertheless, conservatives point out that the professorate has become significantly more liberal in recent decades, as 60 percent of college professors self-identified as "liberal" or "far left" in 2017, compared to only 42 percent who identified as such in 1990.

Other politicians and pundits have questioned the usefulness and practicality of a degree in the social sciences in the US economy of the twenty-first century. Specifically, some observers have argued that in today’s economy, a degree in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field is much more likely to land a college graduate a high-paying career shortly after graduation than is a degree in a social sciences or humanities field. Those who advance this argument claim that STEM fields provide students with job-ready skills in high-demand fields, while social science fields increase students’ social knowledge and theoretical awareness in a purely abstract, academic sense. For example, in October 2011, Florida’s Republican governor Rick Scott suggested that his state reduce funding for anthropology majors, given their degree’s presumed insignificance to Florida’s economy. Social science scholars and even some sectors of the business community, who do find important career-related value in social science degrees, have fiercely resisted such assertions. As one such example, the US Department of Labor predicted a 13-percent growth in jobs for economists between 2020 and 2030—a figure that was actually above the rate of growth for most jobs.

Bibliography

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Harper, Janice. "Why Florida Gov. Rick Scott Was Right to Slam Studying Anthropology." Business Insider, 21 Oct. 2011, www.businessinsider.com/rick-scott-thinks-liberal-arts-degrees-are-not-needed-unless-you-want-to-work-for-him-2011-10. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Jaschik, Scott. "More Criticism of ‘Academic Bill of Rights.’" Inside Higher Ed, 9 Jan. 2006, www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/01/09/more-criticism-academic-bill-rights. Accessed 12 July 2024.

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"Undergraduate Degree Fields." National Center for Education Statistics, May 2024, nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta. Accessed 12 July 2024.