Future Of Social Sciences Research Articles

Verbal behavior and the future of social science.

Natural language processing (NLP)-previously the domain of a select few language and computer scientists-is undergoing an unprecedented surge in popularity across disciplines. The ubiquity of language data, alongside extremely rapid methodological innovations, has magnetized the field, attracting researchers with the promise of measuring, forecasting, and understanding the most central questions in business, psychology, biology, sociology, the humanities, and beyond. The power of language analysis to reveal insights into human thought, feeling, and behavior has become a core interest emerging from recent technological advances, which are being probed to unearth deeply embedded truths about the human condition. However, NLP research has reached a critical juncture, sitting at the cusp of societal transformation in many aspects of daily life. The details of how NLP research develops over the next 3-5 years will define this transformation. In this emerging, near-infinite space of NLP-driven research, we provide a critical frame of reference for how, when, and why these technologies should evolve in a particularly transdisciplinary manner. Specifically, we discuss (a) the urgency of pairing existing and emerging NLP research with existing scientific knowledge, theory, and principles from the behavioral sciences; (b) the coevolution of NLP technologies; and (c) the practical implications and ethical consequences of expanding language analysis using broader psychosocial theories of the human condition. While our discussion focuses principally on using language as a window in the individual mind, this topic holds substantial implications for other disciplines and lines of inquiry, including the dynamics of social interaction and beyond. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Verbal Behavior and the Future of Social Science

Supplemental Material for Verbal Behavior and the Future of Social Science

Introduction to the special issue

At the crossroads of fast-paced communication trends and the partnerships EFSA has forged with its peer organisations globally, social sciences evolved to become an integrated part of the organisation’s work - the topic also grew to become a salient part of the scientific programme of EFSA conferences. Organised every three to four years, the latter aim to bring together experts and stakeholders to discuss key food safety topics and share knowledge, data and expertise. Most recently, the ONE Conference held in Brussels 21-24 June 2022, offered the opportunity to do so as part of the session on ‘Putting science into context – the future of social sciences in risk analysis’. In this special issue, we wish to highlight some of the key points discussed and offer the opportunity for conference speakers, coming from organisations that inspired the evolution of social science at EFSA, to further elaborate the evidence-based approaches employed to strengthen communication and engagement in their work. We also welcome commentaries of established experts in this area on key conference takeaways and ways forward to continuously improve the application of humanities and social sciences in regulatory organisations working in the realm of food regulation, food safety and public health and nutrition.

Objectivity in Social Sciences: Embracing Openness

Value-laden social sciences have been discussed over its objectivity ever since its birth. The issue around objectivity is of methodological and oncological importance, further concerning the disciplines’ credibility and long-term development. This paper aims to bring about several crucial debates around this topic, hoping to bring in new spotlights for the academia’s faith in the future of social sciences. It thus reviews some essential literature pieces, and analyses and summarises their core points and distinct perspectives. The paper focuses on three major topics, the value-laden nature of social sciences, the cultural factors and the fall of fact/value dichotomy. In conclusion, it suggests for a kind of openness in the academia, as scholars admit the subjectiveness lying in their work and open themselves for scrutiny and judgement.

The Embeddedness of Social Sciences and Economics in Research on Resources

Sustainability, local development, and ecology are keywords that cover a wide range of research fields in both experimental and social sciences. The transversal nature of this knowledge area creates synergies but also divergences, making a continuous review of the existing literature necessary in order to facilitate research. There has been an increasing number of articles that have analyzed trends in the literature and the state-of-the-art in many subjects. In this Special Issue of Resources, the most prestigious researchers analyzed the past and future of Social Sciences in Resources from an economic, social, and environmental perspective.

The Computational Turn in Social Sciences. Challenges of the New Empiricism in the Age of Big Data

Today large amounts of data are available to use for research on human behaviour: social media, data from online social networks, vast amounts of digital text, sensory information from personal hand-held and other devices, information from search engine usage and other online services, etc. The industry that relies on collecting, combining, selling and analysing digital footprints for all kinds of purposes ranging from simple targeted advertising to risk assessments and mass surveillance is developing with lightning speed. (Van Es and Schafer, 2017). However, such data could increasingly be used to address larger societal issues of social interactions and relations, inequality, education, healthcare, political participation, and more. The advances in the use of such data in social sciences offer the possibility to answer questions that were beyond research in the past, and this new generation of large-scale, complex, and usually unstructured data requires new forms of data analysis and scientific applications. Some also suggest that as a consequence of the data revolution that we are already living in, a major paradigm shift in science is expected with far-reaching consequences to how research is conducted and knowledge is produced (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, 2013; Meyer and Schroeder, 2015). While the course of development in the data-driven industries and research seems to be unambiguous for the future in terms of its expected impact on business and how societies function in general, today the possibilities are still frequently overestimated by some ‘positivistic prophets’ – coming mostly from outside academia. In addition to presenting the main arguments of the papers in this section, the purpose of this editorial is to highlight a few of those issues and challenges that may shape the future of social sciences and of those who pursue in it, in relation to the new data landscape. After briefly elaborating on the definitions of Big Data, the focus will move to the question of epistemology; the changing dynamics among various fields of sciences; the new divides in access to data; and the main ideas behind the critical approach that social sciences might follow to find their right place in the puzzle.

The retreat of the state and the future of social science

Amidst deep cuts to public spending, the UK Coalition government announced in 2010 that it would be substantially reducing its subsidy of social science within higher education. As part of the same deficit reduction strategy, the government is cutting funding to local authorities, disproportionately hitting urban councils in the most deprived areas of the country. Just as evidence is needed on the impact of cuts on local communities, social science is in need of a renewed public agenda to legitimate its activities. This article argues that the retreat of the state creates an opportunity, and an imperative, for social science to adopt an embedded approach to research, which addresses publicly important questions, involves the public in the research process and engages the public with its findings. The article offers critical reflections on conducting and facilitating embedded research and how this approach to social science may help to secure the future of the discipline.

What can we say about the future of social science?

Social science has for the most part lost its ambition to be ‘science’, as shown in the recent change in the American Anthropological Association statement of purpose. The new term is expertise. The change points to something fundamental: social science methods are now largely stable; they have well-developed uses for public and policy audiences; because they are user-friendly they are unlikely to radically change, and new problems arise for them to be applied to. New concepts are developed, but they do not develop into ‘theories’ in a scientific sense. So what is expertise? It is something other than fact generation: it is the result of aggregating and assessing research in an area. Experts engage with one another, so there is a community of expertise. Yet there is also another sense of ‘scientific’: using the tools of natural science and extending them to the social. The current means of doing this for social science is through neuroscience. These methods could serve to filter and validate social science concepts.

Happy Tweets

We analyze data from nearly 2 million text messages (tweets) across over 16,000 users on Twitter to examine differences between Christians and atheists in natural language. Analyses reveal that Christians use more positive emotion words and less negative emotion words than atheists. Moreover, two independent paths predict differences in expressions of happiness: frequency of words related to an intuitive (vs. analytic) thinking style and frequency of words related to social relationships. These findings provide the first evidence that the relationship between religion and happiness is partially mediated by thinking style. This research also provides support for previous laboratory studies and self-report data, suggesting that social connection partially mediates the relationship between religiosity and happiness. Implications for theory and the future of social science using computational methods to analyze social media are discussed.

EVALUATION OF ATTITUDES AND INTERESTS TOWARDS ICT: ORIENTATION FOR PROBLEM EXPERIENCES

The transformation process occurring in the educational field, which has resulted from the generalized development and application of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), differs from preceding technological revolutions in the amazingly accelerated pace it sets. Reflecting upon the implications of the generalized and increasing adoption of ICT is undeniably important for the present and future of social sciences and, particularly, for the areas of pedagogy and didactics. The new model of Higher Education involves new methods, demands and challenges, where the use of ICT represents one of the basic competences. The present study aims to provide an evaluation of interests and attitudes towards Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in a sample of 224 post-graduate students of the Master's Degree in Teacher Training: Secondary and Upper Secondary Education, Vocational Training and Language Teaching, aged from 22 to 49 years old. The questionnaire includes questions aimed to evaluate different aspects, which facilitate interactive learning: computer knowledge; knowing the value of the Internet; place and frequency of online access; and usefulness of certain tools such as video-film, power point, Moodle, forums, wikis, chats, video-forums and blogs. Additionally, the questionnaire includes a number of questions about the potential applications of the Internet in an educational context. Results showed that all students are familiar with the Internet and that they first got to know it from friends. More important is the fact that most of them consider the Internet as a potential educational resource and not only as a support or reinforcement tool that complements the textbook and they like to use ICT and think of them as useful tools in their learning/teaching process. There are differences based on gender and specialization in the perception of the role that ICT is to play in the university context. In particular, men from the specialization Foreign Language consider that weblogs do facilitate peer-to-peer and student-teacher communication and give less importance than women to the item stating that the families’ socioeconomic level has an influence on our knowledge of the Internet. To conclude, the information obtained from the present study is of interest both for training teachers and for integrating ICT in the academic curricula. Key words: attitudes, ICT, learning, university students.

Future of Social Sciences and Humanities in Corporate Universities: Curricula, Exclusions, Inclusions, and Voice

During three preceding sessions of the Institute for European Studies (IES) Topical Seminar, three themes were discussed: (1) The university as a corporation, focusing on faculty involvement and partnership with the corporation and the corporate world beyond the university, (2) the students as inheritors of culture and the university as the means of perpetuating cultural norms, and (3) the economic base of higher education. In my focus on the curriculum, I am basically looking at the philosophical, ethical, and pedagogical dynamics of all the above elements when mapping and disseminating knowledge. I am also looking at how knowledge itself, a main asset of the university, is manipulated between research, teaching, and learning by the old and new guard of academia. Though the three essays (Barazangi, 1993; hooks, 1994, Middleton, 1993) being analyzed under the curriculum theme were written for different cases and from different worldviews, they share the same historical context. A time when the New Right movements were back lashing at the different cultural groups, including women, as these groups voiced their concerns about curricular inclusions and exclusions, these reactions were manifested in the multicultural vs. mainstream curricula, in the affirmative action admission and testing practices, and in social welfare policies. The contemporary context consists, in addition, in recent emphases by funding agencies on educational components in research proposals even by NSF, especially in K-12. Residential learning among college students, is replacing ethnic-based dorms or language houses. Yet, the old philosophy of dichotomized subject matters and fields of studies still prevails in recent discussions of liberal arts curricula. A recent report by the Curriculum Committee of the Cornell College of Arts and Sciences still classifies reasoning skills into quantitative and qualitative, with an add-on of moral reasoning. Furthermore, engagement in learning is mainly still treated as a practical skill for the arts and sciences and not part of their main mission, and so on.

Los desafíos de los posgrados en ciencias sociales en Chile

This story describes a research thesis determining that the different layers of the world society become benchmarks for counseling in social sciences post grade education in Chile. Territorial and regional levels guide post grade education towards fields of thematic nature while supranational level is initially present in the development of disciplinary nature post grades with a clear interest in scientific research and methods and theories of those knowledge bodies. In this science area, characterization of post grades in Chile can be understood through a permanent thematicprofessional/disciplinary distinction and the diverse emphasis it gives to specific study programs and training. In this sense, challenges on how to encourage post grades are related to debates between Humbolt School and Napoleonic formation. The solution of this dilemma is critical for the future of social sciences in Chile.

The paradox of observing, autopoiesis, and the future of social sciences

AbstractThe current debate in social sciences show that the paradox of observing—the embeddedness of observer in the process of observing—is at the heart of the controversy about their cognitive status and future. Although the problem of observing has been addressed in numerous theoretical perspectives—some of which (Habermas, Leydesdorff, Maturana, and Luhmann) are examined in this article—the prospects for resolving this paradox remain problematic. Locating a point, which allows reflection on the process of autopoiesis in general, not just the operation of a particular autopoietic system, may be one condition for resolving this paradox. Such point will offer reflection on all autopoietic systems, including the observer. The dynamic balance between equilibrium and disequilibrium is the mechanism, which regulates the process of autopoiesis. Since the function of regulation is essentially a reflective function, this equilibrium between equilibrium and disequilibrium, which can be identified with the concept of homeorhesis introduced by Conrad Waddington, may offer a possibility to reflect on the process of observing. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Praxis for the Poor: Piven and Cloward and the Future of Social Science in Social Welfare. By Sanford F. Schramm. New York: University Press. Pp. xi +303. $65.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).

<i>Praxis for the Poor: Piven and Cloward and the Future of Social Science in Social Welfare</i>. By Sanford F. Schramm. New York: University Press. Pp. xi +303. $65.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).

Product Review: Praxis for the Poor: Piven and Cloward and the Future of Social Science in Social Welfare

Product Review: Praxis for the Poor: Piven and Cloward and the Future of Social Science in Social Welfare

Praxis for the poor: Piven and Cloward and the future of social science in social welfare

Acknowledgments Introduction I The Theory of Practice 1 What Accessibility Can't Do: The Politics of Welfare Scholarship 2 The Future of the Past: Jane Addams and the Social Work of Politics 3 Radical Incrementalism Personi?ed: The Piven and Cloward Legacy 4 Which Side Are You On? Rethinking Research and Advocacy in Social Welfare II The Practice of Theory 5 The Old Is New: The Racial Basis of Welfare Reform 6 Putting a Black Face on Welfare: The Good and the Bad7 Success Stories: Welfare Reform, Policy Discourse, and the Politics of Research, by Sanford F. Schram and Joe Soss 8 Compliant Subjects for a New World Order: Globalization and the Behavior Modi?cation Regime of Welfare ReformAppendix: Sources and Measures for Data in Chapter 5 Notes Index About the Author

The ethos of social science

A ll succession is by degree, and as I undertake to succeed Irving Louis Horowitz as editor-in-chief of SOCIETY, I am reminded that fate and faith often go together. This transition was born of Irving's intuition, my hope, and our shared belief in the future of social science for the public good. Irving Horowitz has entrusted to me and to all who admire and believe in his work a great legacy, indeed, an institutional legacy, the measure of which is evident in all that Transaction Publishers has accomplished for the cause of social science. I take this special occasion to celebrate the importance of SOCIETY as a unique institution of social science. Throughout this century, the ambitions of science have succeeded in transforming the world in which billions live. No person reading this is in the slightest way remote from the influence and effects of these ambi t ions , and despi te the haranguing that a monolithically conceived "science" now receives in some precincts of our cultural elites, the arguments for basic scientific research and rigorous education in science have never been more urgent. The English language may now be the lingua franca of global communication; and capitalism may have become the lingua franca of economic progress and opportunity for ever larger numbers of people; but science remains the lingua franca of global transformation. Encomiums to science today are fewer and seemingly less credible as compared to the end of the nineteenth century when the pursuits of knowledge and truth were viewed by opponents and proponents alike as acts of dissent, first against religious ideas, then against political systems. At that time, the leading rhetoricians of science were not above enjoying their disapproval. No scientist today can pursue scientific investigation without coming faceto-face with tenacious forms of resistance, which range between inerrant readers of sacred texts and relativist interpreters of profane ones. On one side the guardians of what is absolutely given compete for public attention with those who can only affirm what is absolutely not, Whether fundamentalists or deconstructionists, both share one thing in common: they disc la im the progress of enlightenment. These forms of resistance ought to be one of the central subjects of social science. Yet they should not be confused for social science.

The time of space and the space of time: the future of social science

Time and space are irremediably locked together and constitute a single dimension, TimeSpace. Social science, as invented between 1850 and 1914, has involved limited interpretations of TimeSpace emphasizing either eternal TimeSpaces (economics, sociology, political science) or episodic geopolitical TimeSpaces (history, anthropology, Oriental studies). The difficulty for establishing a successful discipline of geography was that it straddled these two kinds of TimeSpace. Social science neglected three other types of TimeSpace that were potentially subversive. The Annales school of history emphasized cyclic-ideological TimeSpace and structural TimeSpace which transcend the old choice between the idiographic and nomothetic through the study of historical systems. Historical systems are defined by structural TimeSpace and function through cyclico-ideological TimeSpace. Between structural TimeSpaces there is transformational TimeSpace and our historical social system is reaching such a moment of bifurcation. Intellectually, social science needs refashioning into a tool of this transformation and, politically, we have to dare to develop a sober utopia and to seek to construct it.