1.1 Types of social science questions
The way social scientists ask questions usually involves looking beyond the story or experience of an individual person – no matter how interesting or moving this case might be. The goal of asking questions is often to try to find any patterns, regularities and trends that may occur beneath these individual lives. This helps to find the links between individual experiences and wider society. Although your experience of the social world might be totally different from someone else’s, asking questions can help you to discover things you have in common with others, or to understand the ways that someone else might have a different viewpoint from you.
Asking questions allows social scientists to explore, describe, explain and critique the social world. Consequently, they can understand it more accurately. Questions are a key form of inquiry, with the aim of generating information. Although there are countless types of questions that can be asked and ways that questions can be framed, in this section you’ll be introduced to four important types of questions: empirical, policy, ethical, philosophical.
In answering the types of questions discussed above, different social scientific disciplines may take contrasting, though complimentary approaches. Consider the example of a social scientist who is interested in researching a recent spike in reports of shoplifting across the country. Researchers from different disciplines may approach this subject in quite different ways.
A geographer might ask empirical questions, in order to consider the way that the built environment of a city influences the likelihood of this type of offence.
A philosopher may approach this problem by asking ethical questions. They may reflect on whether it’s moral for a person to steal in this way. But they may also propose that private property is a form of theft – a social arrangement which is designed to benefit the powerful at the expense of the powerless. Another philosophical way to frame this question is whether stealing to feed one’s family is unethical, if government policy has systematically produced vast disparities of wealth.
A criminologist may look at the problem by asking policy questions. They may draw on official statistics to understand the impact of government programmes and spending, which may have disproportionately affected under-privileged communities, making them more likely to engage in shoplifting out of desperation.
In practice, it’s rare that the approaches taken by different social science disciplines are so clearly distinct. Instead, there is a great deal of compatibility, harmony and overlap between the various disciplines. For example, in designing a research project to look into a national spike in shoplifting, a research team may be formed which includes researchers with specialities in geography, philosophy and criminology (among others). This team might pool their expertise to ask empirical questions, which take into account ethical concerns, with the aim of making policy recommendations which can help to solve the problem.