THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE     Theory, Not Philosophy or Belief     Social Regularities     Aggregates, Not Individuals     A Variable Language

 

One problem students often have with social science research stems from the topics we study.  Unlike some other academic disciplines, we examine things you may feel strongly about and have firm opinions about.  For example, you may have strong feelings about capital punishment--either pro or con.  Social science research cannot tell you whether it is right or wrong.  However, we can learn about how if functions within society, what it's consequences are, and we can understand why some people support the death penalty and others are opposed.     Often, though not always, we focus our attention on the regularities of social life.  If you enter the study of society thinking we are free and even chaotic in our behavior, you will quickly learn that much of what we do fits into understandable and even

predictable patterns.  Our understanding and predictions, however, deal with human groups or aggregates, not individuals.  While we often collect data about individuals, we then combine what we know of several individuals to discover how people behave in general.     Finally, our inquiries typically focus on the variablesthat describe similarities and differences among people.  Level of education, for example, is a variable.  So is prejudice.  Moreover, we can discover that those two variables are related to one another: the more educated people are, the less prejudiced they become.  Thus, we study people for the purpose of understanding variables and how they relate to one another.  In this sense, we say that social scientists speak a "variable language."