Behavioral and Social Science Research A National Resource, Part I (1982) / Chapter Skim
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2. The Nature and Methods of the Behavioral and Social Sciences
2. The Nature and Methods of the Behavioral and Social Sciences
Pages 8-32
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From page 8... ...
Take a particular event the decision of a woman to seek a job outside the home. Most social scientists would be relatively uninterested in the particular decision of a particular woman but would formulate research questions in terms of accounting for why some women work outside the home while others do not and why women have been entering the labor force in increasing numbers in recent years.
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From page 9... ...
Moreover, these fields overlap substantially, and the same problems are often addressed by researchers from different disciplines. For example, the relationship between attitudes and behavior is a problem of social psychology, which is regarded as a subspecialty of both psychology and sociology; various questions regarding employment and earnings are of interest to both sociologists and economists; voting is studied by both political scientists and sociologists; and so on.
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From page 10... ...
Physiological psychologists attempt to explain behavioral regularities in terms of physiological and neurochemical processes and structures with a primary emphasis on brain-behavior relations. Cognitive psychologists view behavior as a consequence of internal processes that occur as the individual acquires, manipulates, and retains information; the paper on reading as a cognitive process by Carpenter and Just (in Part II)
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From page 11... ...
. But a broader demographic perspective within sociology leads to a focus on the interrelations among such social characteristics as education, occupation, income, race, and place of residence as well as age and sex.
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From page 12... ...
Because of their different origins anthropology arising in historical coincidence with the colonizing and missionary spread of the West to other parts of the world, and sociology arising in connection with the fundamental transformations in the West of the industrial and democratic revolutions anthropologists and sociologists traditionally have studied social life in different settings. Anthropologists have concentrated on small, simple, often nonliterate societies, whereas sociologists have mainly studied large, complex, literate civilizations.
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From page 13... ...
While anthropological research has centered on certain institutional aspects, such as kinship, magic, and religion, that have been thought to infuse simpler societies, these subjects are not without interest to sociologists; by the same token, especially in modern times, anthropologists have interested themselves in economic structure, political structure, stratification, economic development, and other aspects of social life. Finally, both anthropologists and sociologists have recently come to take a greater interest in history and the work of historians.
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From page 14... ...
Some deal with the analysis of a special factor of production: For example, the analysis of money and banking focuses on the structure and dynamics of money, capital, and credit in the economy, while labor economics is the specialized study of conditions affecting that particular factor. Other specialties vary according to the scope of analysis covered for example, regional economics, national economics, and international economics.
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From page 15... ...
The theory of democracy has been gradually expanded and deepened as a result of empirical studies of elections, political parties, public participation, public opinion, legislative behavior, and so forth. One tradition of political science is concerned with describing and analyzing formal political institutions at different political and geographical levels.
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From page 16... ...
Preoccupied in earlier decades with Western constitutional governments and large-scale political institutions, it extends more recently into the study and analysis of socialist and communist forms of government as well as the emerging systems of governments, parties, and political arrangements in the less developed countries of the world. In the postwar decades, especially the l950s and early 1960s, two new approaches emerged in political science: the behavioral approach and the functional approach.
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From page 17... ...
Environmental geographers are interested in the forces that affect the development and use of land and water for agriculture, grazing, and recreation, the characteristics of landscape that are valued and preserved, and the manifestations of uncertainty and risk in land use. The geographer uses the earth's landscape as laboratory, both to test basic social science and physical science theories and to provide comparative observations for the development of new theory.
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From page 18... ...
Much of the improved quality of today's demographic sociology rests on the efforts of historians to evaluate and detect errors in the population records of the past. The focus of modern political history on revolutions, the nation-state and its institutions, and industrialization reveals the overlap of historical and political science research in both data and concepts.
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From page 19... ...
Modern statistical practice depends mainly on the formulation of probability models of social and physical systems, on methods of collecting and analyzing numerical data, and on the design of efficient and informative experiments. Statistical science as we know it today is largely a development of the 20th century.
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From page 20... ...
Statistical methods are used to obtain estimates of the undercount of various subgroups of the population, and they provide a theoretical framework for making adjustments for this undercount. In political science, statistical models of voting patterns and voting behavior in popular elections, legislative bodies, international assemblies, and other forums have been developed.
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From page 21... ...
DYNAMICS OF DEVELOPMENT IN THE BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES A general map of the subject matter of the main behavioral and social science disciplines, like all maps, is likely to be misleading because it is a kind of cross-sectional photograph, frozen in space and time and unable to capture the shifting characteristics of its changing territories. A truer picture would include a great deal of vitality and change, if for no other reason than that behavioral and social scientists, like all scientists, are committed as a matter of principle to open empirical investigation and to the revision or rejection of concepts and theories not supported by empirical demonstration.
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From page 22... ...
To mention only a few examples: It is now possible to describe the distribution of traits, attitudes, and behaviors in the population as a whole through the use of sample surveys; to monitor trends in the state of the economy and comparisons between economic systems through the use of national accounts and economic indicators; to analyze the behavior of newborn infants through visual preference techniques; and to assess the cognitive performance of individuals and populations through the use of standardized tests. The data generated by these means not only provide more accurate information about ourselves and our society but also facilitate the formulation and testing of more complex and sophisticated hypotheses about human behavior and social organizations than were previously possible.
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From page 23... ...
who produced, exchanged, and consumed goods and services according to the laws of supply and demand. Classical economists typically made a number of simplifying assumptions: that all economic actors had full knowledge of market conditions, that no economic actor had the power singly to influence output or prices, and that all economic actors would behave according to some kind of rational market calculus.
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From page 24... ...
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the dominant explanations of crime were built on the assumption that its main determinants lay in the biological realm, and various efforts were made to identify characteristic physical traits or body types associated with criminal behavior. While these explanations were crude and hardly qualify as theory in any formal sense, they nonetheless contained the assumption that psychological or temperamental features of criminal behavior were either altogether unimportant or derivative from more fundamental biological determinants; moreover, the social contexts of crime were altogether unexamined.
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From page 25... ...
Peopled mainly by economists and political scientists but including some others as well, this special area involves the study of determinants, dynamics, and outcomes of processes by which societies make decisions about policies affecting their members; it includes as well the study ~J ~.^,_ ~^^A^~ ~^ Jew ~ ~A$.AA~lVAl~
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From page 26... ...
, and the study of international economic, political, and social systems. Built on no single behavioral or social science discipline, these lines of inquiry are inherently interdisciplinary, involving economists, geographers, political scientists, social anthropologists, sociologists, and historians as well as scholars from the humanistic disciplines, and represent one of the main areas of close and active collaboration between American and foreign social scientists.
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From page 27... ...
Attempts to identify the general principles by which organisms learn, to specify the conditions under which prices rise and fall, and to account for the tendency of social classes to reproduce themselves are examples of this general approach, in which the aims of research in the social and behavioral sciences are taken to be no different from those of any other science. The fact that many generalizations or laws in the behavioral and social sciences are probabilistic rather than deterministic, tendencies rather than absolutes, allies these disciplines with much of biology and with areas of physical science as diverse as quantum mechanics and meteorology and distinguishes them from the deterministic approaches of 1 9th-century physics and chemistry.
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From page 28... ...
Although relying mainly on nonexperimental data, many of these fields are highly quantitative. Relatively elaborate statistical procedures have been developed to approximate as closely as possible by statistical adjustments the kind of control of extraneous factors possible in experimental procedures.
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From page 29... ...
the interest was in testing how families would respond to varying levels of income subsidy and various rates of "taxation" (that is, partial reduction in the subsidy for people who earn income on their own)
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From page 30... ...
From this observation, one would not want to conclude that storks bring babies, at least not without first statistically controlling for size of place in order to test the hypothesis that the observed association arises because rural areas tend to have both high birth rates and large stork populations. This example illustrates both the logic and the limitation of statistical controls.
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From page 31... ...
for an extended discussion of this topic. STATISTICALLY UNCONTROEEED OBSERVATION There are many research problems in the behavioral and social sciences for which it is not possible, practical, or desirable to collect sample data or to attempt statistical controls.
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From page 32... ...
Another example of this kind of study is the detailed clinical investigation of individuals with complex or unusual personality disorders. Such studies provide the richest kinds of primary data, capture the texture of social life firsthand, and often are valuable as a means of generating hypotheses.
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