SOCIAL SCIENCES

SOCIAL SCIENCES

CLASSIFICATION OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

COMPILED

BY

ODO Collins Chibuzo, Faculty of Engineering, ENUGU STATE UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY.

 

INTRODUCTION

Assuming you can travel back to those days when your great grandparents were children. You found that your home and the surroundings look very different. If you travel back further, you will be even more surprised and fascinated by the food, clothes and even the language that your ancestors were using. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what happened in the past?  Do you realize that we can relate with our past even today. Does it not sound like a mystery that we must solve? In order to do this, we will use sources to understand how human life progressed from pre-historic times till today and the source is social science. Social Science, as the name itself suggests, is concerned about society. It aims at understanding all aspects of society as well as finding solutions to deal with social problems. It is a broad area of knowledge and includes several different disciplines under its domain.

Social science from the foregoing can be defined as the scientific study of man and the society with focus on the behavioral network that undergirds various societal groupings and institutions. It is the learning that investigates the dynamics or forces that defines as well as distinguishes individuals, groups and human society in the context of behavioral models and adaptations. The study of social science has become a vital component of study in all institutions of higher learning both nationally and globally. This work therefore, is an effort directed at examining the classification of the social sciences. Put simply, it is an effort that is aimed at providing a structured or taxonomic perspective with respect to the study of social sciences. It is an introduction which serves as a window through which those who wish to have a romance, an appreciation of the subject matter of social science would have a glance. Furthermore, it seeks to promote a quest for a further enquiry into this area of learning with a view to mobilizing a citizenry of educated generation who will bring to bear a multi-dimensional approach or mind-set in dealing with the ever increasing and compounding challenges of modern society.

Theoretical and Conceptual Framework

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The idea of social sciences espoused in this work is situated within the context of various ideas constructed by different scholars. According to Bonner et al (1960) all social sciences share a commonality of anthropocentric focus by recognizing their main subject matter as relating to man's social behavior. Bonner, Hill and Wilier (1960) in their contribution  social sciences as those areas of study that attempt to apply scientific approach to the study of man and his relations with other men. Furthermore, Huang and Chang (2008) posit that social science defines those disciplines that are concerned with human beings; analyzing  people's  behavior  as well as their cultures with respect to their epochs  and space. In  other  words.  it is the study of man in all their social behavior variety across time and space. Ebo (1982) in his own contribution submits that social sciences relate to those  mental or cultural sciences  which deals with the activities of the individual or a number of groups.

Against this backdrop social science can be defined as the study of man in the context of his social dynamism. it is the scientific investigation of man as a social being. The above View is corroborated by Uzuegbunam and lgweonu (2014: 3) when they posit that “the central idea of all the disciplines of sciences is man and all aspects of his social behavior. This paper therefore is an attempt at examining the basic integral components or disciplines that comes under the study of  as a social animal.

CLASSIFICATION/DISCIPLINES OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

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One way to classify the social sciences is from their specific object of study. In this sense we can mention:  Sciences focused on social interaction. This section includes all the disciplines that find in the exchange between people their object of study. Whether they focus on the causes, development or consequences of that exchange, the focus is fully social. Some of the ones that can be mentioned are: economics, psychology, religion, geography, political science, sociology, and anthropology. We shall now discuss some of the above classification of social sciences below.

ECONOMICS

It was economics that first attained the status of a single and separate science, in ideal at least, among the social sciences. That autonomy and self-regulation that the physiocrats and Smith had found, or thought they had found, in the processes of wealth, in the operation of prices, rents, interest, and wages, during the 18th century became the basis of a separate and distinctive economics—or, as it was often called, “political economy”—in the 19th. Hence the emphasis upon what came to be widely called laissez-faire. If, as it was argued, the processes of wealth operate naturally in terms of their own built-in mechanisms, then not only should these be studied separately but they should, in any wise polity, be left alone by government and society. This was, in general, the overriding emphasis of such thinkers as Ricardo, Mill, and Nassau William Senior in England, of Frédéric Bastiat and Say in France, and, somewhat later, the Austrian school of Carl Menger. This emphasis is today called “classical” in economics, and it is even now, though with substantial modifications, a strong position in the field.
There were almost from the beginning, however, economists who diverged sharply from this laissez-faire, classical view. In Germany especially there were the so-called historical economists. They proceeded less from the discipline of historiography than from the presuppositions of social evolution, referred to above. Such figures as Wilhelm Roscher and Karl Knies in Germany tended to dismiss the assumptions of timelessness and universality regarding economic behavior that were almost axiomatic among the followers of Smith, and they strongly insisted upon the developmental character of capitalism, evolving in a long series of stages from other types of economy.
Also prominent throughout the century were those who came to be called the socialists. They too repudiated any notion of timelessness and universality in capitalism and its elements of private property, competition, and profit. Not only was this system but a passing stage of economic development; it could be and, as Marx was to emphasize, would be shortly supplanted by a more humane and also realistic economic system based upon cooperation, the people’s ownership of the means of production, and planning that would eradicate the vices of competition and conflict.

PSYCHOLOGY

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Psychology is an academic and applied field involving the study of behavior and mental processes. It attempts to understand the role human behavior plays in social dynamics while incorporating physiological and neurological processes into its conceptions of mental functioning.
Psychology is often thought of as clinical psychology, which focuses on assessment and treatment of problems in living and psychopathology. In reality, psychology is a very broad field and most psychologists limit their interest to a small subsection of the discipline. Psychology has myriad specialties including: social psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, industrial-organizational psychology, mathematical psychology, neuropsychology, and parapsychology, to name only a few.
Psychology is generally classified within the social sciences, although, since it overlaps with the natural sciences it is also considered one of the behavioral sciences—a broad field that spans the social and natural sciences. 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.

GEOGRAPHY

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Geography is the science that studies the lands, the features, the inhabitants, and the phenomena of the Earth. Geography has been called "the world discipline" and "the bridge between the human and the physical sciences." The field of geography is generally split into two distinct branches: physical and human. Physical geography examines phenomena related to the natural environment: climate, oceans, soils, and the measurement of earth. Human geography 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 through fields as diverse as Cultural geography, transportation, health, military operations, and cities. Other branches of geography include Social geography, regional geography, geomantics, and environmental geography which looks at the interactions between the environment and humans combining physical and human geography.
Geography has four major traditions: (1) a spatial tradition, the spatial analysis of the natural and the human phenomena (geography as the study of distribution), (2) an area studies (places and regions) tradition, (3) a man-land tradition, the study of the man-land relationship, and (4) an earth science tradition. The first geographers focused on the science of map making and finding ways to precisely project the surface of the earth. In this sense, geography bridges some gaps between the natural sciences and social sciences.
Modern geography is an all-encompassing discipline that foremost seeks to understand the Earth and all of its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but how they have changed and come to be. The fields of Urban Planning, Regional Science, and Planetology are closely related to geography. Practitioners of geography use many technologies and methods to collect data such as remote sensing, aerial photography, statistics, and global positioning systems (GPS).

SOCIOLOGY

Sociology generally concerns itself with 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. Sociology offers insights about the social world that extend beyond explanations that rely on individual personalities and behavior. 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.
Sociology comprises a cluster of sub-disciplines that examine different dimensions of society. These include demography, which studies changes in a population size or type; criminology, which studies criminal behavior and deviance; social stratification, which studies inequality and class structure; political sociology which studies government and laws; sociology of race and sociology of gender, which examine the social construction of race and gender as well as race and gender inequality. New sociological fields and sub-fields such as network analysis and environmental sociology continue to evolve; many of them are very cross-disciplinary in nature.
Sociologists use a diversity of research methods, including case studies, historical research, interviewing, participant observation, social network analysis, survey research, statistical analysis, and model building, among other approaches. The results of sociological research aid educators, lawmakers, administrators, developers, and others interested in resolving social problems and formulating public policy.

CONCLUSION

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Notwithstanding that social sciences shares a divergence or differentiation of disciplines that are discussed above, there is an underlying unity or oneness among them. This is predicted on the fact that though each of the disciplines share its techniques of inquiry and specialized subject matter all of the disciplines converge into one main focus of interest which is the subject of man's social behaviour. it is against this backdrop that various scholars of social sciences from different disciplines have continued to promote multidisciplinary approach or strategy in providing answers to expanding challenges of human behaviour in modern times. Furthermore, as development continues to elude our nation on the political, social, economic, spiritual and technological landscape of life more emphasis must be directed towards promoting educational system that fosters the teaching of social sciences at the first and second years’ level of our university education. More so when it has been noted that it is the legitimate responsibility of social science to provide direction for conceptualizing development. This is why this work proposes inter-disciplinary studies such as political theology, religion and technology, theology of medicine as a way of building a synergy not only among social sciences disciplines but also with natural sciences. 

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