Dominant Approaches and Ideas in the Social Sciences

I. Empirical-Analytical Approaches in the Social Sciences

Microlevel Approaches in the Social Sciences

• Rational Choice Theory (RCT)
• Symbolic Interactionism

Macrolevel Approaches in the Social Sciences

• Structural-functionalism
• Institutionalism

Interdisciplinary Approach in the Social Sciences

• Human-environment system approach

II. Historical-Hermeneutic Approaches in the Social Sciences

• Psychoanalysis
• Hermeneutic-phenomonology

III. Empirical-Critical Approaches in the Social Sciences

• Marxism
• Feminist Theory

Sociology and Demography

Sociology

Sociology is the study of human social relationships and institutions. Sociology’s subject matter is diverse, ranging from crime to religion, from the family to the state, from the divisions of race and social class to the shared beliefs of a common culture, and from social stability to radical change in whole societies. Unifying the study of these diverse subjects of study is sociology’s purpose of understanding how human action and consciousness both shape and are shaped by surrounding cultural and social structures.

The range of social scientific methods has also expanded. Social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-twentieth century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophic approaches towards the analysis of society. Conversely, the end of the 1990s and the beginning of 2000s have seen the rise of new analytically, mathematically and computationally rigorous techniques, such as agent-based modelling and social network analysis.

Sociologists emphasize the careful gathering and analysis of evidence about social life to develop and enrich our understanding of key social processes. The research methods sociologists use are varied. Sociologists observe the everyday life of groups, conduct large-scale surveys, interpret historical documents, analyze census data, study video-taped interactions, interview participants of groups, and conduct laboratory experiments. The research methods and theories of sociology yield powerful insights into the social processes shaping human lives and social problems and prospects in the contemporary world. 

According to Durkheim, the three branches of sociology include:

• Social morphology - refers to the geographical setting and population density of specific areas and how those aspects affect social society.
• Social physiology - refers to the religion, morals, law, economic and political aspects of society and they way in which each discipline affects human society as a whole.
• General sociology - referred to by Durkheim as the philosophical part of sociology as it works to discover social laws that come from specialized social associations.

Demography

"demos" - the people

Demography is the study of statistics such as births, deaths, income, or the incidence of disease, which illustrate the changing structure of human populations. It is the statistical study of populations, especially human beings.

Demographic analysis can cover whole societies or groups defined by criteria such as education, nationality, religion, and ethnicity. Educational institutions usually treat demography as a field of sociology, though there are a number of independent demography departments.

Formal demography limits its object of study to the measurement of population processes, while the broader field of social demography or population studies also analyses the relationships between economic, social, cultural, and biological processes influencing a population.

Psychology

Psychology is the study of behavior and mind, embracing all aspects of conscious and unconscious experience as well as thought. It is an academic discipline and a social science which seeks to understand individuals and groups by establishing general principles and researching specific cases.

Psychology is really a very new science, with most advances happening over the past 150 years or so.  However, it's origins can be traced back to ancient Greece, 400 – 500 years BC.  The emphasis was a philosophical one, with great thinkers such as Socrates influencing Plato, who in turn influenced Aristotle.

Psychology is a multifaceted discipline and includes many sub-fields of study such areas as:

• Human development
• Sports
• Health
• Clinical
• Social Behavior
• Cognitive Processes

Because psychology is a science it attempts to investigate the causes of behavior using systematic and objective procedures for observation, measurement and analysis,backed-up by theoretical interpretations, generalizations, explanations and predictions.

The classic contemporary perspectives in psychology to adopt these strategies were the behaviorists, who were renowned for their reliance on controlled laboratory experiment and rejection of any unseen or subconscious forces as causes of behavior.  And later,cognitive psychology adopted this rigorous, scientific, lab based scientific approach too.

With its broad scope, psychology investigates an enormous range of phenomena:

• learning and memory
• sensation and perception
• motivation and emotion
• thinking and language
• personality and social behavior
• intelligence
• child development
• mental illness

Furthermore, psychologists examine these topics from a variety of complementary psychological perspectives.

Each psychological perspective is underpinned by a shared set of assumptions of what people are like, what is important to study and how to study it.  Some conduct detailed biological studies of the brain, others explore how we process information; others analyze the role of evolution, and still others study the influence of culture and society.

Political Science

Political science is a social science which deals with systems of government, and the analysis of political activities, political thoughts and political behavior. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics which is commonly thought of as determining of the distribution of power and resources. Political scientists "see themselves engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions, and from these revelations they attempt to construct general principles about the way the world of politics works."

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 and official records, secondary sources such as scholarly journal articles, survey research, statistical analysis, case studies, experimental research and model building.

Approaches include:

• Positivism - a philosophical theory stating that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations.
• Interpretivism - a concept and a method central to a rejection of positivistic social science.
• Rational Choice Theory - a framework for understanding and often formally modeling social and economic behavior.
• Behavioralism - seeks to examine the behavior, actions, and acts of individuals – rather than the characteristics of institutions such as legislatures, executives, and judiciaries – and groups in different social settings and explain this behavior as it relates to the political system.
• Structuralism - the methodology that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure.
• Post-Structuralism - the rejection of the self-sufficiency of the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures.
• Realism - the belief that some aspects of reality are ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, perceptions, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc.
• Institutionalism - uses institutions to find sequences of social, political, economic behavior and change across time. It is a comparative approach to the study of all aspects of human organizations and does so by relying heavily on case studies.

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning.

Linguists focusing on structure attempt to understand the rules regarding language use that native speakers know (not always consciously). All linguistic structures can be broken down into component parts that are combined according to (sub)conscious rules, over multiple levels of analysis. Linguistics has many sub-fields concerned with particular aspects of linguistic structure.

Sub-fields that focus on a grammatical study of language include the following:

• Phonetics - the study of the physical properties of speech sound production and perception.
• Phonology - the study of sounds as abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning (phonemes)
• Morphology - the study of morphemes, or the internal structures of words and how they can be modified
• Syntax - the study of how words combine to form grammatical phrases and sentences
• Semantics - the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences
• Pragmatics - the study of how utterances are used in communicative acts, and the role played by context and non-linguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning
• Discourse analysis - the analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)
• Stylistics - the study of linguistic factors (rhetoric, diction, stress) that place a discourse in context
• Semiotics - the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.