Audrey Osler suggests 10 reasons why you need social science:. Social science can open up debate and give us a say in shaping our collective future. The social sciences developed as a field of study during the nineteenth century. Social science helped people understand the consequences and application of the new technologies of the age, such as steam power. The growth of railways and factories not only transformed the economy and the world of work, but also changed forever the way people organised their family lives and leisure.
Today nanotechnology and advances in medical research will have a significant impact on the way we live. They present us with a bewildering range of ethical, legal and social issues.
That way we will make informed choices that shape the future. We all resent paying to withdraw our money from cash machines. Without this kind of analysis we may feel like pawns in a global game of chess. With the knowledge and understanding that social science offers us, we will feel empowered to act for ourselves, and to influence decisions being made on our behalf.
From sports sociologists to public health experts, from those interpreting medical statistics to those evaluating policies for our care in old age, social scientists are working hard to make sure that our health, leisure and social care services work to best effect.
Our eating habits are influenced by a whole range of circumstances. Some apparently unhealthy choices may seem rational: if the person doing the shopping knows that others will simply not eat the healthy option and it will just go to waste, they may simply not buy it. Psychologists at the University of Liverpool spent time in a steel factory to work out what needs doing to create a safer environment. Accidents at work happen even in the best regulated companies that provide staff training and take all necessary precautions.
Employers need to see people as individuals who take their lead from those with whom they identify. These principles have also been shown to work in crowd control. One common myth is that if you take measures to reduce crime in one neighbourhood the criminals simply move on, leading to increased crime in another area.
Sociologists at Nottingham Trent University worked closely with police to reduce crime through a method involving scanning for crime patterns. They were able to identify patterns that regular police work had not picked up, so avoiding guess work and lost time. A technique called situational crime prevention developed by the same team is now regularly used by the police, working with the public and private sectors to prevent crime.
For example, in one area there was a serious problem of lead being stolen from community building roofs. By working with dealers in the scrap metal market, and persuading them to keep records, it then became too risky to buy what might be stolen lead.
Yet in our fast changing world, there is a place for the social scientist as public intellectual. Social science helps to educate the public regarding social policy. It raises attention to a multiple of different perspectives on society and is supportive of the public when it comes to holding politicians and the media to account.
Along with the transformation of media into the digital age, social science has made modern democracy more transparent than it once was. It is much easier to access multiple angles from peer-reviewed research on individual topics of debate. Not only that, but the internet allows us to share our own.
Understanding the world around us can certainly make living in it more manageable. Not only that but by understanding society we better understand what we need to do to contribute to it. It broadens our horizons by opening our eyes to different social movements and cultures.
It promotes taking a multi-layered approach when forming opinions, thus developing the power of thinking and reasoning. By being mindful of the environment you are in and the factors that affect it, you become more mindful of how you are within your environment.
Social sciences cover more than you might initially imagine. The internet is rife with social science articles that cover a wide range of research being done in the field. From the reasons why college students binge-watch television shows to the ethical implications of government surveillance. Social science covers a vast array of what makes us who we are and where that may take us. These kinds of studies highlight both the reasons why people do what they do and also how people react to the decisions that are being made for them.
This allows for better-informed decisions as to what we, as a species and individually, should be doing to move forward.
In better understanding the social sciences and what they cover we quickly come to realize just how important their role is. They bridge the vital gap between the people making the decisions and those affected by them.
Social science continues to engage in cross-disciplinary work in diverse fields such as engineering, biology, medicine, computing, and mathematics.
As we move forward it is becoming quite clear that no subject area can operate independently without drawing on the research of other disciplines. It is here that social science plays its most important role. Skip to content Researcher Blog. A Definition of Social Science The social sciences are a group of academic disciplines that are primarily concerned with the study of society. Strictly speaking, the social sciences include: Anthropology Economics Political science Sociology Social psychology Whilst they are definite crossovers with other subjects.
Anthropology Anthropology studies the past and present of humans, our behavior, and societies. Anthropologists are concerned with questions such as: Why are some people light-skinned while others are dark-skinned? Why do people who belong to a particular community suffer more from a specific disease than people belonging to another community?
Why in some cultures do children leave the house of their parents at a certain age while in some they do not? How do birth, death, and marriage ceremonies vary within different communities? Sociology Whilst anthropology is mainly focussed on how the individual affects the whole. He died in without ever landing a full-time university post or indeed any steady employment. Today, social science receives much less federal funding than the biological and physical sciences do.
Social scientists are accused of being "soft," of trafficking in theories so lacking in precision and predictive power that they don't deserve to be called scientific. Some social scientists—I'll call them "softies"—shrug off this criticism, because they identify less with physicists and chemists than with scholars in the humanities. As far as I can tell, my social-science colleagues aren't seething with resentment at being lumped together with the humanities folks.
Other social scientists, "hardies," yearn for and believe they can eventually attain the same status as, say, molecular biology. Softies and hardies have been fighting for as long as I can remember. In , for example, the Harvard biologist E. Wilson contended in his blockbuster Sociobiology that social science would only become truly scientific by embracing evolutionary theory and genetics.
Horrified softies denounced sociobiology as a throwback to social Darwinism and eugenics, two of the most noxious social applications of science. The term "sociobiology" became so controversial that it is rarely used today, except by softies as an insult. Hardies nonetheless embraced the tenets of sociobiology. They tacked the term "evolutionary" to their fields—spawning disciplines such as evolutionary psychology and evolutionary economics—and churned out conjectures about the adaptive origins of war and capitalism.
More recently, as the prestige of neuroscience has surged, hardies have discovered the benefits of including magnetic-resonance imaging and other brain-scanning experiments in grant proposals, and they have attached the prefix "neuro" to their disciplines, yielding coinages such as neuroeconomics and neuroanthropology.
Hardies also emulate the hardest science of all: physics. Thus we now have econophysics, which models economic activity with concepts borrowed from fluid dynamics, solid-state physics and statistical mechanics. For a terrific overview, see the aforementioned The Physics of Wall Street. This alliance has especially deep roots: Comte sometimes used the term "social physics" in lieu of sociology.
But modern researchers, unlike Comte, can run their complex mathematical models on powerful computers. Softies look askance at the aspirations of hardies—with good reason. The recent recession provides a powerful demonstration of social science's limits.
The world's smartest economists, equipped with the most sophisticated mathematical models and powerful computers that money can buy, did not foresee—or at any rate could not prevent—the financial calamities that struck the United States and the rest of the world in Even when fortified by the latest findings from neuroscience, genetics, and other fields, social science will never approach the precision and predictive power of the hard sciences.
Physics addresses phenomena—electrons, elements, electromagnetism, the nuclear forces, gravity—that are relatively simple, stable and amenable to precise mathematical definition.
Gravity works in exactly the same way whether you measure it in 17th-century England or 21st-century America, in Zambia or on Alpha Centauri.
Every neutron is identical to every other neutron. In contrast, the basic units of social systems—people—are all different from each other; each person who has ever lived is unique in ways that are not trivial but essential to our humanity. Each individual mind also keeps changing in response to new experiences—reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra , watching Lord of the Rings , banging your head on the ice while playing pond hockey, having a baby, teaching freshman composition.
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