Social science: The

basics
An introduction to the application
of scientific method to human
behavior
 Knowledge
• What does knowledge allow
us to do?
–Predict
–Control
–Understand
Beatty’s unscientific sources of
knowledge
• Intuition
• Tenacity
• Common sense
• Personal experience
• Authority
• Rationalism
 So what are we to do?
• Develop ways to reduce the bias and
improve our ability to observe
• ‘Science’ as a means to systematically
study the world
– First developed in ‘hard’ or ‘natural’ sciences
• Human beings were not the object of study
• Study moves from description to classification to
correlation to ‘causality’
 Science
• Draws upon the other sources of
knowledge
• Systematically tests ideas in the empirical
world
– Precise
– Objective
– Cumulative
 Appropriate for some but
not all questions
• Are Muslims violent?
• Would young children learn more from watching
educational videos or from unstructured play?
• Do people use the Internet more for
entertainment or for social contact?
• What is the meaning of life?
• Should the government license websites?
• Does advertising make us feel ugly?
• What colors should I wear together?
 Empiricism
• The kind of evidence that we gather in
science is ‘empirical’ evidence
– Drawn from our interaction with the physical
world
• Science structures experience in ways that
help us to improve on the lessons we learn
from the ‘real world’
 Social science
• Scientific study applied to human behavior
did not really get going till the 1800s
– Excitement over the successes of natural
sciences
• Industrial machinery
• Vaccines against disease
• Optics
• Astronomical discoveries
• Navigation
 Development of social science
• There was a heated controversy over the
appropriateness of the scientific study of
people
– Religious/ethical concerns over the ethics of
trying to study people
– Scientific debate over whether humans act
according to ‘laws’ of behavior the way
inanimate objects do
• This debate continues
 Positivism
• From the beginning of the 20th century until the
latter half of the century, social sciences favored
an approach that said that the proper approach
to the study of human behavior was to adopt the
methods and philosophy dominant in natural
sciences.
– Empirical
– Hypothetico-deductive
– “Nomothetic”
 Covering laws
• Scholars during the first half of the 20th
century were concerned with attempting to
identify the limited number of laws that
explained all human behavior.
• Over time, their frustration, coupled with
an increasing understanding of the
uncertainty even of natural sciences led to
an abandonment of the attempt by most
social scientists.
 More recent developments
• An approach that accepts some level of
uncertainty in the prediction and
understanding of human behavior was
adopted (“Post-positivism”)
– Note: a ‘probabilistic’ model was adopted
(Trochim)
 The new view of social science
• Social scientists recognize that absolute
‘covering laws’ of human beliefs, attitudes
and behaviors are probably not there to be
found
– Instead, relationships among variables are
seen as partial and contingent upon
circumstances, personalities, etc.
 How we study human action with
social science methods
• Social scientists attempt to develop theory by
generalizing from a number of individual cases
or examples
– Induction
• They then make predictions from the general
rules to a new set of events or cases
– Deduction
• They test their predictions
• With the knowledge gained from the tests, they
reconsider the generalizations they made
• The process begins again (continuous)
 Social science community
• The development of knowledge in a discipline is
a community undertaking
– The best approximation to truth is attained through
multiple researchers applying different theories and
methods to the same questions
• Scientists act as a profession, policing each
other and critiquing each other’s theories and
research
– Conferences, etc. bring researchers looking at similar
problems together
 Goals of social science
• In modern study of social science topics,
the goal, generally speaking, is to develop
probabilistic theories by identifying
relationships among concepts
• Concepts are generalized ideas that refer
to a number of individual cases
 Relationships
The two most common types of relationships
in research are
a) Correlational—two concepts are related so
that variance in one coincides with variance
in another
b) Causal—two concepts are related so that
variance in one leads to variance in the
other
 Examples: Correlation
If you find that people who use illegal drugs
at an early age watch druggie movies, it
could be either that
a) kids exposed to druggie movies are more
likely to use drugs at an early age or
b) kids who use drugs at an early age are
attracted to druggie movies
 Examples: Causality
If you find that exposure to pro-abstinence
messages leads to later onset of sexual
behavior but not vice versa, and there is
no other plausible explanation for the
relationship, then you conclude that you
have a causal relationship
Representing relationships

+
Drug movies Drug use

__
Exposure to
pro-abstinence Onset of sexual activity
messages
Basic theoretical statement

Determines

Violent video
Gender self-definition
game play
 Concepts and variables
• Variables are concepts that take more
than one value
– Otherwise, they are a ‘constant’
• E.g., the star that the Earth revolves around
 Basic research statement

Independent Variable Dependent Variable

Relationship:
Determines

Gender identity Violent video

game play
 Antecedent variable

Antecedent Variable

Social construction
of gender

Independent Variable Dependent Variable

Gender Violent video

identity game play
 Mediating variable
Mediating Variable

Parents’ political
liberalism

Independent Variable
Dependent Variable

Gender identity Violent video

game play
 Intervening Variable

Intervening Variable
Independent Variable Dependent Variable

Gender Personal Violent video

identity aggressiveness game play
 Confound—“third variable”
explanation
Antecedent Variable

Hormonal balance

Independent Variable Dependent Variable

Gender Violent video

X X X
identity game play
 It can get quite complicated

Papies, Dominik, and Michel Clement. "Adoption of New Movie Distribution

Services on the Internet." Journal of Media Economics 21.3 (2008): 131-57.
 It can get quite complicated

Papies, Dominik, and Michel Clement. "Adoption of New Movie Distribution

Services on the Internet." Journal of Media Economics 21.3 (2008): 131-57.
Paek, Hye-Jin. "Mechanisms through Which Adolescents Attend and Respond to
Antismoking Media Campaigns." Journal of Communication 58.1 (2008): 84-105.
 Some variables to
play around with
Gender Sex Age

Education Interest in technology Video Game Play

Game genre preference Game playing skill Sociability (Tendency

toward interaction with
others, friendships)
Enjoyment of fantasy Social conservatism Psychological
compulsion

Sports experience Income Film genre preference

Why social science faces
special challenges
The trouble with people
 People are hard to study
because:

• They think
• (and we don’t have direct access to their
minds)
 People are hard to study
because:
• They don’t simply react to your stimulus
– They try to guess what you’re doing and
anticipate what your goal is
• They may intentionally help or hinder your goal (as
they see it)
• They are affected by a wide range of
things in their environment
– You can’t control all the things that might
affect your subjects
 People are hard to study
because:

• They are complicated

• They are emotional
• They forget
• They change over time
• Individuals are very different
• They can be uncooperative
 People are hard to study
because:
• Ethics limit what you can do to study them