You and your world: Introducing the social sciences

Introduction

Welcome to an Introduction to the Social Sciences.

This course will explain what the social sciences are; and suggest that learning to think like a social scientist will help you to better understand the world around you. Two ideas that are used extensively in the social sciences are society and the social world. These ideas are related, but distinct.

Society can be thought of as a group of diverse people who share a geographic territory, interact with a common social structure, and follow the same laws or rules. They typically share many similar cultural values and expectations of each other. However, in some highly multicultural societies there may also be many cultural differences.

The social world by contrast refers to the idea that people’s lives and society, more generally, are shaped by a variety of relationships, cultures, communities and institutions. This course asks you to view your world as fundamentally a social world. Think, for example, about the way your life is shaped by the relationships you have with others around you, and the way you shape their lives in turn.

Social scientists are interested in the study of people, how they live together, and how people behave, interact and organise themselves. A good way to think of social science, is as a general academic approach that thinks about human behaviour and social relationships. There are several distinct but related disciplines within the social sciences – including sociology, geography, religious studies, economics and many others. These disciplines all look at the same basic issues but place a different focus and emphasis on various factors – such as the way each would look at culture, individual behaviour, social groups, trends and patterns.

Within this course, you will look at a pair of social concepts: interconnection and inequality to think about how these social science ideas can deepen your understanding of everyday topics in the social world.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course D112 You and your world: introducing the social sciences [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .