{"id":36189,"date":"2026-09-02T10:33:06","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T14:33:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=36189"},"modified":"2026-09-02T10:33:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T14:33:07","slug":"navigating-the-social-sciences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=36189","title":{"rendered":"navigating the social sciences"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Here is a tentative effort to map the social sciences for a novice, such as a student who’s thinking of taking some social science courses. (It is a counterpart to my recent post on the humanities.<\/a>) I will risk over-generalizations to offer some pointers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would start with three familiar cases:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. Researchers want to understand and, if possible, predict a situation in which many individuals face a similar choice that is concrete and observable. For example, people can buy a specific good at a given price, apply for a job, pursue a particular kind of education, marry, or vote. Although individuals’ motives and beliefs vary, there is a typical reason that one would do each of these things (e.g., one buys a good to possess it) as well as costs, disadvantages, and competitors. Thus it should be possible to model the whole situation with an equation that shows the outcome on one side of the equal sign. To test the model, we want to collect as much data as possible, and the data tend to be concrete and unambiguous. It may not be necessary to work with samples if data can represent all the relevant behavior, as a price reflects all the recent purchases of a given good or an election tallies all the votes. Economics relies heavily (but not exclusively) or large-scale data that markets generate or that bureaucracies collect for planning purposes. The mathematics that’s most useful includes statistics (especially statistical tools for inferring causality) and calculus, which reveals maximum values subject to constraints.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Researchers want to understand a mental characteristic that is not measurable with a single datapoint. For example, they want to understand anxiety, hand-eye coordination, prejudice, or knowledge of the American Civil War. They will probably study specific human subjects, rather than use data to describe populations, and they will devote attention and ingenuity to deriving measures of unobserved, latent, and\/or unconscious characteristics. This is the point of a laboratory test of perception, a multi-item survey that measures an attitude, an in-depth interview, or an exam, which might include graded essay questions along with multiple-choice items. Again, statistics is a useful tool, but now often the main statistical question is whether an individual differs from the mean of a relatively small sample that shows a lot of variation. Qualitative research becomes more prominent. And a different kind of math emerges as useful: factor analysis and related methods that turn many datapoints into scales.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Researchers want to interpret a whole human situation: a cockfight in Bali, adolescence in Samoa, a ceremonial feast in the Pacific Northwest, or indeed, a US high school or a physics lab or a Manhattan apartment building with a doorman. The key questions are what happens and what that means. Often the important happenings (cockfights, gifts, rites of passage, holiday tips) recur regularly and may not seem optional or determined by the individuals’ characteristics, such as their personal desires. Quantitative data become less relevant. Instead, the researcher’s main method is to spend a considerable amount of time in the community, observing intensively and listening to many informants.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    The bastions of these approaches are, respectively, economics, psychology, and anthropology. Each discipline arose to study a restricted range of topics and then expanded by applying its favored methods to other topics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Economists began with markets but have studied topics like voting since at least 1942 (Schumpeter) and probably earlier. Some of the pioneering anthropologists sought to understand what they then called “Man” by conducting ethnographies of people who were presumed to live as early humans had lived. Several assumptions of that approach are now rejected, and ethnography is now applied to all kinds of communities. And psychology emerged from early studies of perception and cognition by people like Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) and William James (1842-1910) plus efforts to define and treat mental illnesses by doctors like Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The discipline now extends to all areas of human and animal life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    As a first approximation, I would say that sociology and political science are not defined by their favored methods; they are methodologically pluralistic. Instead, they are defined by their topics: respectively, society and politics. That said, both make more use of representative surveys of populations than other disciplines do. (Economists would rather work with revealed preferences, and psychologists often intensively study smaller samples.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Also, economics and psychology are often (not always) methodologically individualist, meaning that they seek to analyze group phenomena as aggregates of individuals’ behavior. But sociology has contributed powerful models and methods that treat other things–such as classes or institutions–as the causes of outcomes. Similarly, political science contributes a focus on power, which can be missing in models that presume that people have psychological traits and choose accordingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Unfortunately, I do not read much research in geography, but its unique contribution is spatial analysis. A characteristic tool of geographers is a map. Public health employs many of the methods favored in the other social sciences (including maps), but it addresses diseases and syndromes that affect human beings. “Epidemiology” is derived from the Greek words for “upon the people.” Focusing on non-human factors that are “upon us” requires studying phenomena like contagion and mutation that apply to bacteria and viruses in relation to people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Disciplines like public policy, communications, and education are methodologically pluralistic and defined by their topics. In fact, some professors of these disciplines hold PhDs in the liberal arts and apply methods that they learned there. However, experts in these fields might rightly emphasize their distinctive approaches to research. For instance, public policy research has a distinctive emphasis on feedback loops (how policies affect society, which then affects policy). And education thinks developmentally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Finally, history is often classified among both the humanities and the social sciences. A cultural historian who seeks to enrich our perception of human artifacts is very much a humanist. Likewise, a narrative historian who weaves events and intentional action into a nonfiction narrative is humanistic. But it is also possible to employ methods like econometrics and epidemiology to the past, in which case history operates as a social science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    See also: navigating the disciplines<\/a> (from 2020, with a video); the humanities for specialists and for everyone<\/a>; against methodological individualism<\/a>; three cores of contemporary social science<\/a> (which is worryingly similar to the current post, but written in 2016); is social science too anthropocentric?<\/a> etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Here is a tentative effort to map the social sciences for a novice, such as a student who’s thinking of taking some social science courses. (It is a counterpart to my recent post on the humanities.) I will risk over-generalizations to offer some pointers. I would start with three familiar cases: The bastions of these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,49,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-science-technology-and-society","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36189"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36227,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36189\/revisions\/36227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}