Discipline & Ideas in Social

science
By: Mr. Omar T. Bualan, RPm, MSPsyc (CAR)
EMERGENCE OF THE SOCIAL
SCIENCES
 OBJECTIVES

At the end of the session, the student will be able

to:
• Know what is social science
• Differentiate social science from natural science
• Learn historical background of social science as discipline
• Identify different disciplines in social science
 What is Social?
• Relating to society or its organization

• Synonyms: communal, community,

community-based, collective, group,
general, popular, civil, civic, public,
societal
 What is Science?
• Scientia- meaning “Know”
• Systematized body of knowledge, based on nature and
facts about life.
• Scientific method: Step by step process
– Observation
– Ask a question (What? How?)
– Do background research
– Construct hypothesis
– Test hypothesis through experiment
– Analyze results
– Draw conclusion
– Communicate the results
– Apply the results
Appropriate for some but
not all questions…
• Are Muslims violent?
• Would young children learn more from watching educational
videos or from unstructured play?
• Do people use the Internet more for entertainment or for social
contact?
• Do you believe on “forever”?
• Does advertising make us feel ugly?
Empiricism

• The kind of evidence that we gather in science

is ‘empirical’ evidence
– Drawn from our interaction with the physical
world
• Science structures experience in ways that help
us to improve on the lessons we learn from the
‘real world’
 What is Social science?
• Social science is an academic discipline which deals
with man in their social context.

• Any discipline or branch of science that deals with

human behavior in its social and cultural aspects.
 Development of social science

• There was a heated controversy over the

appropriateness of the scientific study of people
– Religious/ethical concerns over the ethics of trying to study
people
– Scientific debate over whether humans act according to
‘laws’ of behavior the way inanimate objects do
• This debate continues
Positivism

• From the beginning of the 20th century until the

latter half of the century, social sciences favored
an approach that said that the proper approach
to the study of human behavior was to adopt the
methods and philosophy dominant in natural
sciences.
– Empirical
– Hypothetico-deductive (Testing hypothesis)
– “Nomothetic” (Shared behavior)
Covering laws
• Scholars during the first half of the 20th
century were concerned with attempting to
identify the limited number of laws that
explained all human behavior.
– Covering-law model, Model of explanation according
to which to explain an event by reference to another
event 
More recent developments

• An approach that accepts some level of

uncertainty in the prediction and
understanding of human behavior was adopted
(“Post-positivism”)
– Note: a ‘probabilistic’ model was adopted (William
Trochim)
The new view of social science

• Social scientists recognize that absolute

‘covering laws’ of human beliefs, attitudes
and behaviors are probably not there to
be found
– Instead, relationships among variables are
seen as partial and contingent upon
circumstances, personalities, etc.
 How we study human action with
social science methods?
• INDUCTION (Specific-General)
– Social scientists attempt to develop theory by
generalizing from a number of individual cases or
examples.
• DEDUCTION (General-Specific)
– They then make predictions from the general rules to
a new set of events or cases
• They test their predictions
• With the knowledge gained from the tests, they
reconsider the generalizations they made
• The process begins again (continuous)
 Goals of social science
• In modern study of social science topics, the
goal, generally speaking, is to develop
probabilistic theories by identifying
relationships among concepts
– Concepts are generalized ideas that refer to a
number of individual cases
 Relationships
The two most common types of relationships
in research are
a) Correlational—two concepts are related so
that variance in one coincides with variance
in another
b) Causal—two concepts are related so that
variance in one leads to variance in the
other
Why social science faces
special challenges
The trouble with people
 People are hard to study because:

• They think (and we don’t have direct access to their minds)

• They are complicated
• They are emotional
• They forget
• They change over time
• Individuals are very different
• They can be uncooperative
Thank you!