Social Science Knowledge

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Man is a social animal; Aristotle said that well over two-thousand years ago, and it is a perfect avenue in which to segue our discussion toward the social sciences. Our interactions with other people shape our identities. Social science is an academic discipline that concerns itself with studying the relationships between people within a society. The category of "social science" as a whole has a large number of academic branches; some of these include economics, demography, sociology, history, political science, linguistics, law, and anthropology.

So how do we obtain this "social science knowledge" that the title of this post refers to? Social scientists utilize experimental methodology to better understand society. There are two schools of thought about how is the best way to collect the date social scientists use to make conclusions about people and society. The first method is called positivism; these social scientists use the scientific method, just as scientists in the natural sciences do -- researchers in this group define science in its strict modern sense. The second method is interpretivism and the people who subscribe to this method may utilize social critiques or symbolic interpretation as opposed to constructing empirically falsifiable theories.

By using social science to analyze human behavior, social scientists can predict the outcome of certain situations which enables us to grow on a societal level. One particular article, "Parental Characteristics Associated With Bullying Perpetrating in US Children Age 10 to 17 Years," seeks to find what the connection is between primary school bullies and their parents. This is precisely the type of problem that social science is equipt to handle. Bullying is defined as repeated aggression by a dominant person toward another person who is comparatively weaker. The article described a study in which it was discovered that it the parents of bullies are more likely to be angry and communicate poorly with their children when compared to the parents of non-billies. The study found a positive correlation between the parents of non-bullies and their likelihood to communicate intelligently with their children, helping with homework, or perhaps being supportive of new friendships. As stated earlier, correlation does not imply causation, but this study gave researchers an interesting set of baseline data to work with, provoking new ideas and possibly more experiments in the future. So are bullies bad? Bullies are a product of their environment, and it is not always easy to give yes or no answers to these types of questions.

While our class was studying the academic discipline of social science and how it relates to the theme of the course, we had a guest speaker come to Cal Poly and discuss the interaction she faces with the mentally ill every day at her place of employment. She sided with Locke over Hobbes, electing to believe in the essential goodness of humankind; this is an opinion that we both share. She spoke about how she would begin to feel caught up in her clients lives -- sometimes for the worst. She mentioned one time in particular when a client of her's committed suicide; something of that magnitude would be extremely difficult to cope with emotionally, and she agreed, saying that it can be a challenge to "unplug" from work at the end of the day. I greatly admire her empathy towards those less fortunate than she, as well as gumption to keep it up when presented with challenges.

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Works Cited

Shetgiri, Rashimi, MD, Hua Lin, PhD, Rosa M. Avila, MSPH, and Glenn Flores, MD. “Parental Characteristics Associated With Bullying Perpetuation in US Children Aged 10 to 17 Years.” Parent Characteristics and Bullying. American Journal of Public Health, Dec. 2012. PDF.