Social Science Theory and Methodology

Competency 113.1.1: Social Science Theory and Methodology – The graduate examines the distinctive characteristics and forms of social scientific inquiry; recognizes various behavioral, cognitive, and social phenomena; and applies social science theories and methods to evaluate and explain phenomena.

Introduction: What does it mean to think in a social scientific way? In part, social science draws on methods of observation and experimentation utilized in the physical and natural sciences. But social scientists deal with human behavior and social institutions, which are not easily placed in the controlled environment associated with scientific investigation. Social scientists must be prepared to adapt their methods frequently, and they must ask questions that can evolve along with their investigations of social phenomena.

In this summative assessment, you will formulate a significant social scientific question about human psychological development, personality, social interaction, social identity, social classes, or the psychology of group behavior. Your formulation of this question should be based on your reading from Perry and Perry, Contemporary Society, or from another source. Examples of questions that you might examine include the following: How does the mass media influence perceptions of gender? How can family size influence the process of socialization?

You will begin this assessment by formulating your social scientific question and explaining why it is a significant one for analysis. Consider how life for individuals, groups, or society would be affected if the answer to your question were known.
Remember that the question you ask must be something that can be examined methodically and systematically. It must be a question that does not have an immediately evident answer. Based on your reading of Contemporary Society, you will then provide a detailed discussion of three specific research method problems that a social scientist would need to address in order to answer your larger formulated question. A research method problem is a problem (or subordinate question) that must be investigated in order to provide information necessary to answer the overarching question that you have formulated. For example, if you formulated the question ?How does the mass media influence perceptions of gender?? one research problem (i.e., subordinate question) might be, ?What methods (e.g., interviews, opinion polls, etc.) should be used to gather data on individual reactions to media representations of gender??

In the second half of your assessment, you will consider the extent to which your formulated question can or should be answered by applying the scientific method. Does the scientific method provide a complete framework for investigating the three research problems that you have identified? For information on the scientific method and the social sciences, see pages 5?9 of Contemporary Society.

You will conclude with a well-reasoned response to the following question: To what extent does a social scientific perspective rely on methods drawn from the physical and natural sciences?

TASK
A. Analyze a selected topic from a social scientific perspective by doing the following (suggested length of 5?7 pages):
A1. Explain the significance or value to society of your research question, which you have formulated, for social scientific analysis.
A2. Analyze three methodological questions that will help answer the social scientific question that you have formulated.
a. Explain the social scientific analysis required for each of the three methodological questions from part A2, including the following components:
? Identifying the strengths of the method as it applies to the research question
? Identifying the weaknesses of the method as it applies to the research question

A3. Consider the extent to which your chosen topic question can be examined by the application of the scientific method by doing the following:
a. Summarize the steps of the scientific method.
b. Explain how the steps of the scientific method apply to your research question.
c. Discuss challenges that the social sciences could encounter when applying the scientific method to your chosen topic.

(PROFFESSORS NOTES/INSTRUCTIONS ON TASK)
This task focuses on research methodology in the social sciences. It is not a research paper, where you summarize existing research. Do not carry out any experiment of any kind. The task asks for you to choose and justify a research question, also known as a substantive question, and three subordinate Questions, which are methodological. Then the task asks you to summarize the scientific method as used in the natural sciences, and then repeat that summary but for the social sciences using your research topic as the example. End with a comparison of the scientific method between the natural and social sciences.
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(TASK A1: PROFFESSORS NOTES/INSTRUCTIONS ON TASK)
A substantive question is the sort of question a scientist in the field would want to answer. The task instructions limit your topics to, "human psychological development, personality, social interaction, social identity, social classes, or the psychology of group behavior." To come up with a research question appropriate for the social sciences, I suggest either of two approaches.
Build on the findings of existing research. When you find
a subject that interests you, look for specific research findings in the book, and come up with a question that elaborates on those findings. Alternatively, read science news summaries of recent scientific research, especially the Mind and Brain section, and ask questions that elaborate or extend the findings.

Another way to come up with a substantive question is to think about what in your life most concerns you, whatever is most important to you that also falls within the list of appropriate topics. To get through the day, people often have beliefs about important aspects of their lives that they assume are true but do no have scientific evidence to support. Normally, this is not a problem, but a strength of the scientific perspective is the rigorous testing of such assumptions. Think of these assumptions you rely on to get through your daily life, and just convert one into a question. The advantages to this method are that your question will be personally meaningful and that this is a critical-thinking technique real scientists use every day. Finally, your topic does not need to be very original or insightful, as it serves as an illustration to which you will apply the scientific method, but avoid topics that are trivial or whose value is limited only to you. Good science is valuable to as much of society as possible.

Once you have a topic, try to narrow it as much as possible by replacing abstract terms with specific, concrete concerns. Things like "behavior," "socialization," or "social development" are just too broad. The grader will want to know what specific kind of behavior and send it back to you. Often abstract terms are categories, so the better approach is to replace the category by choosing one specific thing.

Scientists phrase questions in ways that make them more answerable with the methods at their disposal. Questions that ask Why are ultimately what everyone is trying to answer, but Why questions and How questions invite a discursive response that only another person can give. But scientists study questions where there is no known answer, so there is no one to explain why or how. Instead, scientists ask questions by suggesting answers. Scientists compare what would happen if their suggested answer were correct to real data of what does happen. They then use math to ascertain how closely their theoretical explanation
matches reality. Ultimately, the math can only say whether the suggested theoretical explanation fits well with the data of reality of not.

Scientists are most concerned with cause-effect relationships. Your question should contain one independent variable as the cause and one dependent variable as the effect. Resist the temptation to include more, as restricting your variables to exactly one of each is an important strategy for narrowing your paper. You will be phrasing your question similar to, "Does the independent variable cause the dependent variable," substituting the actual topic variables. "Why" and "how" questions omit the independent variable, so they are incomplete to a scientist. Asking "What are the effects of . . ." omits the dependent variable
and is also incomplete.

(TASK A2: PROFFESSORS NOTES/INSTRUCTIONS ON TASK)
The three "subordinate questions" (also called "research problems") have to do with how a social scientist would go about answering the substantive question using scientific methods. They are about application of the scientific method itself, not about the substantive question. Information on this part is in chapter 1 of Contemporary Society in the section "Research Methods in the Social Sciences." In addition to that, I have a recorded lecture on research methods, but be sure to at least read the chapter and cite it in your paper.

Perry, J. A., & Perry, E. K. (2009). Contemporary society: An introduction to social science (12th ed.) [CourseSmart version]. Retrieved from http://www.coursesmart.com/IR/4073155/9780205626564?__hdv=6.8 NOTE: Use this link only for your reference list, not for going to the textbook.
To get to the textbooks, click through any topic in the course of study, and use the "General Education Social Science" link where it gives the reading.

The idea here is to ask each question and then discuss your answer in the remainder of the paragraph, including explanations of concepts and strengths and weaknesses of your suggested answer. Your answer should demonstrate to the grader your understanding of the material on methodology from the chapter and that you can apply it to your topic. Structure it so that there are three paragraphs. Begin each with the question and follow with your discussion of your answer, and then move on to the next questions in a new paragraph.CLICK HERE TO GET MORE ON THIS PAPER…..

The first general category of methodological question scientists must ask themselves is about what research design to use. The book explains four under the heading "Research Methods in the Social Sciences." The two most commonly used methods in the social sciences are the experiment and the survey. Experiments have the advantage that they permit the research to test causal relationships. If you have a hypothesis (prediction based on theoretical reasons) that says consuming more calories will cause weigh gain, then an experiment can test that causal relationship. In both experiments and surveys, the
dependent variable of weight is always only measured. Experiments involve actively manipulating the independent variable (hypothesized cause); that is, doing something to research participants (the subjects in the sample), such as by having people in one group eat more calories than people in a comparison group. Because of this, experiments are sometimes impracticable, impossible, or unethical.

As a result, social scientists often turn to surveys as an alternative. In a survey, the cause (independent variable or IV) and effect (dependent variable or DV) are both only measured. The independent variable is not manipulated as in an experiment; therefore, it is not divided into groups getting different treatment, as in the experiment. In the example, rather than manipulating how much people in two groups eat, a survey would only measure how much people eat. Though Surveys are easier to do than experiments, they have the disadvantage that the scientist cannot conclude causation, only that a relationship (also called "association") between the variables exists or not. To conclude the example, a survey may find that eating more calories is associated with weighing more but cannot necessarily conclude the calories were the cause of the weight, despite how obvious such a conclusion may be. Only in the case of the experiment, where the cause of calories consumed can be manipulated by splitting into separate groups treated differently, can the scientist conclude that they were the Cause of the weight.

Another methodological question all scientists must answer before they begin is from whom will they get the data to analyze, the sampling question. The book mixes the discussion of sampling with the survey design, but all research uses samples, which are merely subsets of the entire population of people to whom you want to make an inference. The subset is used because obtaining the entire population is impossible for a variety of reasons. The sample is the source of data, and in the social sciences, that means people. What kind of people do you want in your study? It could be males only, or only females, or both. Or perhaps is could contain people of a certain age or with a specific medical condition or in a particular situation or with a specific experience. It is up to you to
determine what aspects of the sample are most relevant to your topic. If your substantive question was clear and specific, then this will likely be fairly easy.

The book briefly discusses statistics. Though this is not a significant part of this course, some mention here may be useful. Data obtained from a sample need to be analyzed to obtain results that are interpreted to determine a conclusion to the research question. Generally, there are two broad approaches to research statistics. In the case of experiments, the mathematical question is whether the mean (arithmetic average) scores on the dependent variable of the IV groups are different from each other. To revisit the calorie-weigh example, the dependent variable is each person’s weight. Take the mean of this in each group, the one that got the low-calorie diet and the one that got the high calorie diet. We would hypothesize that those in the high-calorie group would weigh more, on average, than those in the other group. This is a mean-difference comparison, and it is how the vast majority of experiments are analyzed.

In the case of surveys, there are no groups because the researcher did not actively manipulate the independent variable (calories consumed) to create the different groups. Instead, people simply vary in the amount of calories they eat and how much they weigh. These two variables are simply measured and a statistical test of association called a correlation is used. A correlation indicates to what extent one can predict the dependent variable (weight) from the independent variable (calories consumed). This may or may not be a causal relationship, and a correlation cannot distinguish between the two. All it can
say is if the two variables are related, which gives the basic ability to predict. Prediction is not quite as good as knowing causation, which includes prediction, but it is worthwhile. A final type of methodological question concerns measurement. In both experiments and surveys, the dependent variable (the effect or outcome of concern) is always measured for the purpose of statistical analysis. How it is measured is always an issue. Some variables are rather obvious, such as weight, but others are not so clear and often are measured with rating scales, such as attractiveness. Though measurement is beyond the scope of this course, it is always a relevant issue in methodology.

(TASK A3: PROFFESSORS NOTES/INSTRUCTIONS ON TASK)
In A3a, summarize the scientific method as given in Contemporary Society under the heading "Steps of the Scientific Method." Here you may use a natural science example simply to illustrate all the individual steps in the method. In A.3.b, repeat the summary of the scientific method but using your topic as the illustration.
If you have the old version of the instructions (V1 UNDERGRAD-0610), A.3.c is different than the new version (V1 UNDERGRAD-0813), which applies to
students SST1 in the current term in September 2013 or later In the old A.3.c, highlight the differences between application of the method between the social and natural sciences. The primary difference is the subject of study, people versus cells or chemical and so forth, and specific methods used. The best source for ideas for A.3.c is the last section of chapter 1, "The Scientific Method in the Social Sciences." In the new A.3.c. (V1 UNDERGRAD-0813), summarize the practical problems you might encounter if you were to carry out your study. The same section of chapter 1 is still relevant.