Social Sciences and the Next Development Agenda

Ever since their modernr einvention, the social sciences have had to deal with at least four aspects of change. The first and most basic of these has been the process of biological and social reproduction. The second has been the concern over what Adam Smith called the “wealth of nations”. The third has been the question of the distribution of such wealth and its translation into life chanc…

Social Sciences and the Humanities

The Ontario Curriculum,Grades 9 and 10: Social Sciences and the Humanities,1999 will be imple- mented in Ontario secondary schools starting in September 1999 for students in Grade 9 and in September 2000 for students in Grade 10.This document replaces the sections in The Common Curriculum: Policies and Outcomes,Grades 1–9,1995 that relate to subjects in social sci- ences and the humanities in…

SOCIAL SCIENCES

The revised syllabus for the Social Sciences in Classes VI-XII attempts to advance an on-going process of assisting children and young people to understand that a healthy engagement with the world must come as much from the way society takes shape and functions as from a proper sense of its material and physical foundations. From this, it is expected, a vision will evolve that the Social Scienc…

TEACHING OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

The social sciences encompass diverse concerns of society and include a wide a range of content, drawn from the disciplines of history, geography, political science, economics and sociology. The selection and organisation of material into a meaningful social science curriculum, enabling students to develop a critical understanding of society, is therefore a challenging task. The possibilities…

The Social Sciences in Australia and the Experience of Law

This essay reviews Stuart Macintyre’s recent political history of the symbiotic relationship between the Australian social sciences and the federal government, and considers whether this captures the position and experience of the discipline of law. Macintyre has provided his readers with a thought-provoking account of how, over the past 60 years, various personalities and organisations (prin…

Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences

Research studies use a variety of methods, are of variable quality and may appear to have contradictory findings ... Research information can seem to users like small jigsaw pieces in a box where there may be several pictures, several duplicates and several missing pieces. Under these circumstances it can be difficult for the researcher, research funder or user to make sense of the research or …

Controversies in the evolutionary social sciences:a guide for the perplexed

It is 25 years since modern evolutionary ideas were first applied extensively to human behavior,jump-starting a field of study once known as ‘sociobiology’. Over the years,distinct styles of evolutionary analysis have emerged within the social sciences.Although there is considerable complementarity between approaches that emphasize the study of psychological mechanisms and those that focus …

Information Technologies and the Social Sciences

The Occasional Papers of the School of Social Science are versions of talks given at the School’s weekly Thursday Seminar. At these seminars, Members present work-in-progress and then take questions. There is often lively conversation and debate, some of which will be included with the papers. We have chosen papers we thought would be of interest to a broad audience. Our aim is to capture…

Information-seeking Behavior of Social Sciences and Humanities Researchers in…

This study focuses on how Internet technology influences and contributes to the information-seeking process in the social sciences and humanities. The study examines the information-seeking behavior of faculty and doctoral students in these fields and observes and extends Ellis’s model of information-seeking behavior for social scientists, which includes six characteristics: starting,…

Faculty of Social Sciences

When writing a piece of work, you need to refer in your text to material written or produced by others. This procedure is called citing or quoting references. Failure to do so implies that what you have written is all your own work, when it isn’t. This amounts to plagiarism, which is against University Regulations and is regarded as a serious offence. It is also an offence to self-plagiarise …

ENGLISH ACADEMIC VOCABULARY FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

The aims of the pracce book are to familiarise students with the main features of academic vocabulary, to enrich students’ academic vocabulary, to enable students to use diconaries and other reference books efficiently and to equip students with metalanguage and learning strategies needed for independent acquisi on of academic vocabulary. Apart from broadening students’ academic vocabulary,…

Social Sciences HISTORY Learner's Book

A leader is a person who guides others, leading the way by example, creating an environment in which his or her subordinates or other team members feel actively involved in the entire process. A leader does not act as the boss of the team, but is committed to carrying out the mission and goals of the venture. Anybody can be a good leader, because leaders are not actually born – they are made.…

American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences

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ISBN/ISSN

0179-4639

Collation

1-135

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'Science' in the Social Sciences

Two works of lasting influence on the theory and practice of the social sciences were Emile Durkheim’s Suicide (1897) and G. Yule’s An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics (1911). Both advanced the thesis that statistical data can be used to identify the causes of socially distributed phenomena. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, several philosophers began to question what…

BAYESIANANALYSISFORTHESOCIAL SCIENCES

Generally, “Bayesian analysis” refers to the statistical analysis of data that relies on Bayes’ Theorem, presented below. Bayes’ Theorem tells us how to update prior beliefs about parameters or hypotheses in light of data, to yield posterior beliefs. Or, even more simply, Bayes’ Theorem tells us how to learn rationally about parameters from data. As we shall see, Bayesian analysis…

Decolonising the social sciences in the global South

South-driven initiatives on endogenous knowledge production owe a great debt to Claude Ake. Against this backdrop, this paper reviews the strengths and weaknesses of Ake’s account of the social sciences and knowledge production in Africa. It discusses his legacy and presents him as one of the most fertile and influential voices within the social science community in the continent. Being a pol…

Economic Concepts for the Social Sciences

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ISBN/ISSN

0-521-79262-2

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1-20

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Re-inventing the Social Sciences

Through its programmes the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation seeks to support reflections and endeavours on issues of a global nature and on crucial problems to the collective search of a better future for society. In this context the Foundation created in 1993 the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, with Professor Immanuel Wallerstein as its chair, which produced th…

Gradgrinding the Social Sciences:The Politics of Metrics of Political Science

This article employs an interpretive approach, and in the light of contributions to this symposium by Butler and McAllister, and McLean et al., holds that metrics of research ‘quality’ are socially constructed and hence are as ‘subjective’ as peer review. Thus it rejects the use of stand-alone metrics as an ‘objective’ basis to inform funding allocations. Rather, the optimum method …

Karl Popper and the Social Sciences

The social sciences have a rich tradition, as shown by its various authors and theories found throughout written history. In the 1st century BC, for example, Seneca the younger stated that “human beings are social animals” (Cl.1.3.2). Not long before, in the 4th century BC, Aristotle insisted that “man is by nature [emphasis mine] a political animal” (Pol. 1.1.9). This chapter focuses o…

Methodology Transfers Between Social Sciences and Humanities in Relation to…

Social sciences may be regarded as derived from humanities such as philosophy and history, but have been developed in different ways (sometimes parallel but often opposite ways) from humanities. In this chapter, social sciences denote the set of social scientific branches (economics, sociology, etc.) while social science denotes the general concept abstracted from each of social sciences. Analo…

The underestimated humanities and social sciences

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Collation

1-6

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Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences: Research Workshops on Interd…

This report is the first published product of a collaborative effort sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council in the United States and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (ASUSSR) on social and behavioral science research directed toward the prevention of nuclear war. In 1985, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) established a Committee on Contributions of Behav…

The Behavioral and Social Sciences: Achievements and Opportunities

This is a report on scientific frontiers in the behavioral and social sciences —leading research questions and fundamental problems—and on the new resources needed to work on them. This volume is a successor to two earlier studies by the Committee on Basic Research in the Behavioral and Social Sciences. In one, Behavioral and Social Science: Fifty Years of Discovery (1986), we scanned the w…

THINKING SPATIALLY IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

The table of numbers or statistics is such a common way to organize information that we scarcely if ever think about its significance. Tables are used to organize information about states from the decennial census; to report the comparative performance of national economies; to summarize the performance of individual schools in a state; and for a host of other purposes. In most cases a simple c…