The social science disciplines are branches of knowledge taught and researched at the college or university level. Social science disciplines are defined and recognized by the
academic journals in which research is published, and the learned social science societies and academic departments or faculties to which their practitioners belong. Social science fields of study usually have several sub-disciplines or branches, and the distinguishing lines between these are often both arbitrary and ambiguous. The following are widely-considered to be social sciences: Within the United States, anthropology is divided into four sub-fields: archaeology,
physical or biological anthropology,
anthropological linguistics, and
cultural anthropology. It is an area that is offered at most undergraduate institutions. The word () in Ancient Greek means "human being" or "person".
Eric Wolf described sociocultural anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences". The goal of anthropology is to provide a
holistic account of humans and human nature. This means that, though anthropologists generally specialize in only one sub-field, they always keep in mind the biological, linguistic, historic and cultural aspects of any problem. Since anthropology arose as a science in Western societies that were complex and industrial, a major trend within anthropology has been a methodological drive to study peoples in societies with more simple social organization, sometimes called "primitive" in anthropological literature, but without any connotation of "inferior". Today, anthropologists use terms such as "less complex" societies or refer to specific modes of
subsistence or
production, such as "pastoralist" or "forager" or "horticulturalist" to refer to humans living in non-industrial, non-Western cultures, such people or folk () remaining of great interest within anthropology. The quest for holism leads most anthropologists to study a people in detail, using biogenetic, archaeological, and linguistic data alongside direct observation of contemporary customs. In the 1990s and 2000s, calls for clarification of what constitutes a
culture, of how an observer knows where his or her own culture ends and another begins, and other crucial topics in writing anthropology were heard. It is possible to view all human cultures as part of one large, evolving global culture. These dynamic relationships, between what can be observed on the ground, as opposed to what can be observed by compiling many local observations remain fundamental in any kind of anthropology, whether cultural, biological, linguistic or archaeological.
Communication studies Communication studies deals with processes of human
communication, commonly defined as the sharing of symbols to create
meaning. The discipline encompasses a range of topics, from face-to-face conversation to mass media outlets such as television broadcasting. Communication studies also examine how messages are interpreted through the political, cultural, economic, and social dimensions of their contexts. Communication is institutionalized under many different names at different universities, including
communication,
communication studies,
speech communication,
rhetorical studies,
communication science,
media studies,
communication arts,
mass communication,
media ecology, and
communication and media science. Communication studies integrate aspects of both social sciences and the humanities. As a social science, the discipline often overlaps with sociology, psychology, anthropology, biology, political science, economics, and public policy, among others. From a humanities perspective, communication is concerned with rhetoric and persuasion (traditional graduate programs in communication studies trace their history to the rhetoricians of
Ancient Greece). The field applies to outside disciplines as well, including engineering, architecture, mathematics, and information science.
Economics Economics is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. The word "economics" is from the
Ancient Greek (, "family, household, estate") and (, "custom, law"), and hence means "household management" or "management of the state". An
economist is a person using economic concepts and data in the course of employment, or someone who has earned a
degree in the subject. The classic brief definition of economics, set out by
Lionel Robbins in 1932, is "the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses". Without scarcity and alternative uses, there is no
economic problem. Briefer yet is "the study of how people seek to satisfy needs and wants" and "the study of the financial aspects of human behavior". Market,
Guatemala. Economics has two broad branches:
microeconomics, where the unit of analysis is the individual agent, such as a household or firm, and
macroeconomics, where the unit of analysis is an economy as a whole. Another division of the subject distinguishes
positive economics, which seeks to predict and explain economic phenomena, from
normative economics, which orders choices and actions by some criterion; such orderings necessarily involve
subjective value judgments. Since the early part of the 20th century, economics has focused largely on measurable quantities, employing both theoretical models and empirical analysis. Quantitative models, however, can be traced as far back as the
physiocratic school. Economic reasoning has been increasingly applied in recent decades to other social situations such as
politics, law,
psychology,
history,
religion, marriage and family life, and other social interactions. The expanding domain of economics in the social sciences has been described as economic imperialism.
Education , in Italy Education
encompasses teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, positive judgement and well-developed wisdom. Education has as one of its fundamental aspects the imparting of culture from generation to generation (see
socialization). To educate means 'to draw out', from the
Latin educare, or to facilitate the realization of an individual's potential and talents. It is an application of
pedagogy, a body of theoretical and applied research relating to teaching and learning and draws on many disciplines such as psychology,
philosophy,
computer science, linguistics,
neuroscience, sociology and anthropology.
Geography Geography as a discipline can be split broadly into two main sub fields:
human geography and
physical geography. The former focuses largely on the
built environment and how space is created, viewed and managed by humans as well as the influence humans have on the space they occupy. This may involve
cultural geography,
transportation,
health,
military operations, and
cities. The latter examines the natural environment and how the climate, vegetation and life, soil,
oceans, water and
landforms are produced and interact (is also commonly regarded as an
Earth Science). However, the
National Research Council classifies history as a social science. The
historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use
primary sources and other evidence to research and then to
write history. The
Social Science History Association, formed in 1976, brings together scholars from numerous disciplines interested in
social history.
Law in London The social science of law, jurisprudence, in common parlance, means a rule that (unlike a rule of
ethics) is capable of enforcement through institutions. and the adjective
legal comes from the
Latin word .
Linguistics , recognized as the father of modern
linguistics Linguistics investigates the cognitive and social aspects of human language. The field is divided into areas that focus on aspects of the linguistic signal, such as
syntax (the study of the rules that govern the structure of sentences),
semantics (the study of meaning),
morphology (the study of the structure of words),
phonetics (the study of speech sounds) and
phonology (the study of the abstract sound system of a particular language); however, work in areas like
evolutionary linguistics (the study of the origins and evolution of language) and
psycholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in human language) cut across these divisions. The overwhelming majority of modern research in linguistics takes a predominantly
synchronic perspective (focusing on language at a particular point in time), and a great deal of it—partly owing to the influence of
Noam Chomsky—aims at formulating theories of the cognitive processing of language. However, language does not exist in a vacuum, or only in the brain, and approaches like contact linguistics,
creole studies,
discourse analysis, social interactional linguistics, and
sociolinguistics explore language in its social context. Sociolinguistics often makes use of traditional quantitative analysis and statistics in investigating the frequency of features, while some disciplines, like contact linguistics, focus on qualitative analysis. While certain areas of linguistics can thus be understood as clearly falling within the social sciences, other areas, like
acoustic phonetics and
neurolinguistics, draw on the natural sciences. Linguistics draws only secondarily on the humanities, which played a rather greater role in linguistic inquiry in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Ferdinand Saussure was one of the founders of 20th century linguistics.
Political science asserted that man is a political animal in his
Politics. Political science is an academic and research discipline that deals with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of
political systems and political behaviour. Fields and subfields of political science include
political economy,
political theory and philosophy, civics and
comparative politics, theory of
direct democracy, apolitical governance, participatory direct democracy, national systems, cross-national political analysis, political development, international relations,
foreign policy,
international law, politics, public administration, administrative behaviour, public law, judicial behaviour, and
public policy. Political science also studies
power in international relations and the theory of
great powers and
superpowers. Political science is methodologically diverse, although recent years have witnessed an upsurge in the use of the
scientific method, that is, the proliferation of formal-deductive model building and quantitative hypothesis testing. Approaches to the discipline include
rational choice, classical political philosophy,
interpretivism,
structuralism, and
behaviouralism,
realism, pluralism, and institutionalism. Political science, as one of the social sciences, uses methods and techniques that relate to the kinds of inquiries sought: primary sources such as historical documents, interviews, and official records, as well as secondary sources such as
scholarly articles, are used in building and testing theories. Empirical methods include
survey research,
statistical analysis or econometrics,
case studies, experiments, and model building.
Psychology was the founder of
experimental psychology. Psychology is an academic and applied field involving the study of behaviour and mental processes. Psychology also refers to the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including problems of individuals' daily lives and the treatment of
mental illness. The word
psychology comes from the
Ancient Greek (psyche, "soul" or "mind") and the suffix
logy ("study"). Psychology differs from anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology in seeking to capture explanatory generalizations about the
mental function and overt behaviour of individuals, while the other disciplines focus on creating descriptive generalizations about the functioning of social groups or situation-specific human behaviour. In practice, however, there is quite a lot of cross-fertilization that takes place among the various fields. Psychology differs from
biology and neuroscience in that it is primarily concerned with the interaction of mental processes and behaviour, and of the overall processes of a system, and not simply the biological or neural processes themselves, though the subfield of
neuropsychology combines the study of the actual neural processes with the study of the mental effects they have subjectively produced. Many people associate psychology with
clinical psychology, which focuses on assessment and treatment of problems in living and psychopathology. In reality, psychology has myriad specialties including
social psychology,
developmental psychology,
cognitive psychology,
educational psychology,
industrial-organizational psychology,
mathematical psychology, neuropsychology, and
quantitative analysis of behaviour. Psychology is a very broad science that is rarely tackled as a whole, major block. Although some subfields encompass a natural science base and a social science application, others can be clearly distinguished as having little to do with the social sciences or having a lot to do with the social sciences. For example, biological psychology is considered a natural science with a social scientific application (as is clinical medicine), social and occupational psychology are, generally speaking, purely social sciences, whereas neuropsychology is a natural science that lacks application out of the scientific tradition entirely. In British universities, emphasis on what tenet of psychology a student has studied and/or concentrated is communicated through the degree conferred:
BPsy indicates a balance between natural and social sciences,
BSc indicates a strong (or entire) scientific concentration, whereas a
BA underlines a majority of social science credits. This is not always necessarily the case however, and in many UK institutions students studying the
BPsy,
BSc, and
BA follow the same curriculum as outlined by The
British Psychological Society and have the same options of specialism open to them regardless of whether they choose a balance, a heavy science basis, or heavy social science basis to their degree. If they applied to read the
BA. for example, but specialized in heavily science-based modules, then they will still generally be awarded the
BA.
Sociology is considered one of the founding fathers of sociology. Sociology is the systematic study of society, individuals' relationship to their societies, the consequences of difference, and other aspects of human
social action. The meaning of the word comes from the suffix
-logy, which means "study of", derived from Ancient Greek, and the stem
soci-, which is from the Latin word , meaning "companion", or society in general.
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) coined the term
sociology to describe a way to apply natural science principles and techniques to the social world in 1838. Comte endeavoured to unify history, psychology and economics through the descriptive understanding of the social realm. He proposed that social ills could be remedied through sociological positivism, an epistemological approach outlined in
The Course in Positive Philosophy [1830–1842] and
A General View of Positivism (1844). Though Comte is generally regarded as the "Father of Sociology", the discipline was formally established by another French thinker, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who developed positivism as a foundation to practical social research. Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at the
University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his
Rules of the Sociological Method. In 1896, he established the journal . Durkheim's seminal monograph,
Suicide (1897), a case study of suicide rates among
Catholic and
Protestant populations, distinguished sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy.
Karl Marx rejected Comte's positivism but nevertheless aimed to establish a
science of society based on
historical materialism, becoming recognized as a founding figure of sociology posthumously as the term gained broader meaning. Around the start of the 20th century, the first wave of German sociologists, including Max Weber and
Georg Simmel, developed sociological antipositivism. The field may be broadly recognized as an amalgam of three modes of social thought in particular: Durkheimian positivism and
structural functionalism; Marxist historical materialism and
conflict theory; and Weberian antipositivism and verstehen analysis. American sociology broadly arose on a separate trajectory, with little Marxist influence, an emphasis on rigorous experimental methodology, and a closer association with
pragmatism and
social psychology. In the 1920s, the
Chicago school developed
symbolic interactionism. Meanwhile, in the 1930s, the
Frankfurt School pioneered the idea of
critical theory, an interdisciplinary form of
Marxist sociology drawing upon thinkers as diverse as
Sigmund Freud and
Friedrich Nietzsche. Critical theory would take on something of a life of its own after World War II, influencing
literary criticism and the
Birmingham School establishment of
cultural studies. Sociology evolved as an academic response to the challenges of
modernity, such as
industrialization,
urbanization,
secularization, and a perceived process of enveloping
rationalization. The field generally concerns the
social rules and processes that bind and separate people not only as individuals, but as members of
associations,
groups,
communities and
institutions, and includes the examination of the organization and development of human social life. The sociological field of interest ranges from the analysis of short
contacts between anonymous individuals on the street to the study of
global social processes. In the terms of sociologists
Peter L. Berger and
Thomas Luckmann, social scientists seek an understanding of the
Social Construction of Reality. Most sociologists work in one or more
subfields. One useful way to describe the discipline is as a cluster of sub-fields that examine different dimensions of society. For example,
social stratification studies inequality and class structure; demography studies changes in population size or type; criminology examines criminal behaviour and deviance; and
political sociology studies the interaction between society and state. Since its inception, sociological epistemologies, methods, and frames of enquiry, have significantly expanded and diverged. In 1969, feminist sociologists challenged the discipline's
androcentrism at the American Sociological Association's annual conference. This led to the founding of the organization Sociologists for Women in Society, and, eventually, a new sociology journal,
Gender & Society. Today, the
sociology of gender is considered to be one of the most prominent sub-fields in the discipline. New sociological sub-fields continue to appear — such as
community studies,
computational sociology,
environmental sociology, network analysis,
actor-network theory, gender studies, and a growing list, many of which are
cross-disciplinary in nature. ==Additional fields of study==