At the risk of annoyingly oversimplifying and omitting important exceptions,* I’d propose that three major\u00a0efforts\u00a0drive\u00a0most of social science today:<\/p>\n
1. Causal explanations of concrete human behaviors<\/em><\/p>\n People buy commodities at a given price, or vote for a given candidate, or even die at a given age.\u00a0To explain why, social scientists often use either statistical models or controlled experiments. These two methods are conceptually related, because one interpretation\u00a0of a regression model is that it mimics the results of an experiment.<\/p>\n Regression models are used across the social sciences, including such applied social sciences such as business and education. Economics is the discipline that historically has had the most influence on these methods, because economists tend to be good at math, the discipline is large and influential, and lots of concrete data on economic behavior is available. However, economists increasingly study all kinds of behavior that\u00a0have nothing to do with money, and some sophisticated techniques for these purposes originate in other disciplines. For instance, education researchers developed Hierarchical Linear Modeling<\/a> because they so often encounter individuals nested in classrooms, nested in schools, nested in communities.\u00a0HLM is now used in other contexts as well.<\/p>\n 2. Detection of unobserved psychological factors<\/em><\/p>\n Some important human characteristics are not concrete behaviors and are not directly observable. For instance, you can’t tell how much a teenager knows about US history by just looking at\u00a0her. You can give her a 100-item\u00a0test and compute a knowledge score from her answers, but much science and art goes into designing the test and interpreting\u00a0the data. The same is true of emotional states, character traits, etc.<\/p>\n Once you have valid and reliable measures of such inner psychological states, you can\u00a0put them into the kinds of causal models described in #1. But it is a major task just to determine who has which inner traits.\u00a0By the way, if people know and can be trusted to disclose their own inner\u00a0psychological states, then all this research is unnecessary. We’d just ask people whether they know\u00a0US history, trust their teachers,\u00a0or feel\u00a0angry. An important premise is that we have unconscious or unarticulated inner lives that can be revealed better from outside. For instance, I’d find out how much US history I know by taking a test written by someone else.<\/p>\n Psychology–like economics, a large and influential discipline–has driven the development of these methods, but they are used across the social sciences.<\/p>\n 3. Interpretation of purposive human activity in context<\/em><\/p>\n People’s behavior can (sometimes) be causally explained, but it also requires interpretation. Voting is a concrete act, but what does it mean for an American to vote in a church basement<\/a>? (Note that this is not the same question as why<\/em>\u00a0some of our\u00a0polling places are\u00a0in churches. The causal explanation might have little bearing on the significance of this phenomenon.) Likewise, what are\u00a0the meanings\u00a0of a Balinese cockfight<\/a> to the people who watch and participate–and, specifically, what does it mean\u00a0when\u00a0cockfighting is traditional yet\u00a0illegal?<\/p>\n In ethnography, the emphasis is on interpretation, particularity, context, and translation rather than generalizable\u00a0explanations\u00a0or unconscious states. A characteristic method is to ask people what things mean to them in their most familiar settings.<\/p>\n Ethnography has–to me–an odd origin. Late-Victorian anthropologists wanted to turn traditionally philosophical questions about the nature of “Man” into empirical questions. They were Darwinians, so they presumed that our essential natures were evolved, clearly\u00a0evident in\u00a0prehistoric contexts, but obscured by subsequent cultural variation. So they visited so-called “prehistoric” communities to understand how they worked. Now most of that conceptual apparatus\u00a0has been criticized. For instance, hunter-gatherer societies are in history, have often developed from other kinds of societies, and vary profoundly. But ethnographic techniques remain\u00a0illuminating in all kinds of settings that no one would call “prehistoric,”\u00a0including Silicon Valley office parks and even departments of anthropology. They are used across the social sciences, and they overlap with the humanities.<\/p>\n I haven’t mentioned a host of specific techniques or even whole disciplines, such as sociology and\u00a0political science. But I’d propose that the three methodological programs described here are dominant.\u00a0A field like political science takes its name from the phenomena it studies–government and politics–but it draws on, and contributes to, causal modeling, psychometrics, and ethnography. To the extent that all of these approaches make\u00a0problematic assumptions (e.g., methodological individualism<\/a>, or a simplistic fact\/value distinction<\/a>), then those assumptions are pervasive in the social sciences.<\/p>\n