What are the key challenges facing society in the 21st century? Lack of housing, drug addiction, discriminatory values, economic marginalisation, domestic violence, anti-social behaviour, disaffected youth and health inequalities?
November 30, 1998 www.amazon.com Watch the full lecture: thefilmarchived.blogspot.com The social sciences are the fields of academic scholarship which explore aspects of human society. Positivist social scientists use methods resembling those of the natural sciences as tools for understanding society, and so define “science” in its stricter modern sense. Interpretivist social scientists, by contrast, may use social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than constructing empirically falsifiable theories, and thus treat “science” in its broader, classical sense. In modern academic practice researchers are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies (for instance, by combining quantitative and qualitative techniques). Social science is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences. These fields include: anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, political science, sociology and, in certain contexts, psychology. Subjects such as international relations and social work are concerned primarily with application and do not constitute social sciences per se. The term may be used, however, in the specific context of referring to the original science of society established in 19th century sociology. Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber are typically cited as the principal architects of modern social science by this definition. Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916, Waco, Texas – March 20, 1962 …
Prof. François Pichette, Téluq / Université du Québec à Montréal Quebec City. The question of what constitutes science has been debated for a long time in philosophy of science, where some actors even consider the matter pointless (eg, Auroux, 2000). However, increased regulations in research ethics in Canada have made the debate a concrete preoccupation. Research ethics regulators have had to define research (eg, TCPS, 1998; 2010) and consequently, in the course of their work, ethics committees in Canadian universities are compelled to reflect on whether projects submitted to them represent scientific research. Citing real cases, this paper presents three types of projects in social sciences that appear not to meet commonly accepted criteria for scientificity, all the while representing a majority of the projects involving human participants examined by the author over the last five years. The typical pattern of a purely qualitative study based on a very small number of participants is described, highlighting the frequent absence of hypothesis testing, hypothesis generation, variables, or systematicity. The paper raises again the question of applicability and/or generalizability of data as a criterion for determining the scientific nature of projects. It also suggests that social sciences, like natural sciences, can be either scientific or not, if this determination is based not on the topic that is investigated but on the way researchers investigate it.
