Duerden 2005
Conventions & Strategies in the Social Sciences
The Social Sciences: are the fields of learning and research that concern themselves with human behavior, human relationships, and the social, cultural, economic, and political institutions human beings have created. Generally they include anthropology, economics, history, political science, psychology, and sociology. They also include communications, linguistics, education, family science, organizational behavior, demography, geography, internal relations, psychiatry, counseling, social work, and criminology. Social sciences use empirical methods to prove an abstract such as a trend, cultural practice, event in the past, behavior or attitude.
Some Characteristics of Inquiry in the social sciences:
- Knowledge-making begins with questions that usually build on previous research examining human behavior and human systems
- Scholars formulate an hypothesis or series of hypotheses
- They conduct research to test their hypotheses
- Evidence to prove their hypotheses comes from observation
- Evidence may be qualitative or quantitative or researchers may use both and can include surveys and questionnaires, controlled experiments, controlled observations, interviews, and field work
- Validity is achieved by adequate evidence and sound reasoning about the evidence since unlike in the sciences, exact duplications of the experiment or research is not possible
- Researchers can affect their data so care is given to ensure this does not happen
Common Genres:
- Reports of original research (using research report format used in sciences). These may use quantitative data, qualitative data, or a combination of methods. They can include participant observation study reports and survey study reports
- Literature reviews
- Summaries of articles
- Critiques (evaluations of articles). These may be “experienced-based critiques” or “argument based critiques”
- Case Studies
- Proposals
- Position Papers
- Theoretical Debate Articles
Style:
Style is a result of all the many choices a writer makes from subject matter to vocabulary to the construction of sentences, punctuation, and organizing the text. As a student, you will discover that there are various academic styles related to disciplines. The social sciences share some key similarities in style although there are differences. For example, an anthropologist may write quite differently from an economist. However, many of the social sciences do adhere to the conventions of the American Psychological Association (APA). In the body of an article that uses APA, the writer gives the author and date in parentheses rather than the author and page number as we do in MLA: (Duerden, 2004). Thus the APA system stresses the date the article was written because new knowledge arises largely form empirical study, subsequent studies update, and corrections and replacement of knowledge gained from earlier observations. Thus the importance of information is related to how recent it is.
Stylistic Conventions
- The detached persona: “This study investigates” rather than “In this study I will investigate”
- Use of passive voice
- Prevalent use of jargon: Jargon or specialized vocabulary is common. Sometimes writers use long noun strings to name a new concept. For example rather than study how happy people are with their family, they will study “Life satisfaction.” Another might be attention deficit disorder.
- Use of Acronyms and Initialisms: AIDS for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or CODA for children of deaf parents. Initialisms are similar but unlike an acronym, they can’t be pronounced as a word: e.g. personality disorder is shortened to BFD.
- Unbiased and inclusive language: gender neutral references for example