The Social Sciences

Psychology: The scientific study of mind and behavior, encompassing conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes.
Economics: A social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, focusing on the behavior and interactions of economic agents.
Sociology: The scientific study of human society, focusing on social behavior, relationships, interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life.
History: The systematic study and documentation of the human past, using narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events.
Anthropology: The scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both present and past.
Philosophy: A systematic study of general and fundamental questions about existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language (the "love of wisdom").
Political Science: An academic discipline dealing with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and behavior.
Geography: Splits into human geography (built environment, human influence) and physical geography (natural environment), aiming to understand the Earth in terms of physical and spatial relationships.
Religious Studies: The scientific study of religion, describing, comparing, interpreting, and explaining religion with empirical, historically based, and cross-cultural perspectives.

Recursivity foregrounds the situation in which social scientists produce knowledge about a world in which they are always already part.
Social scientists are both subjects (discourses are the medium for analysis) and objects (social agents in the world they analyze).
This creates a fundamental challenge in producing emancipatory knowledge: researchers are socialized into discourses/dispositions created by the socio-political order they aim to challenge, potentially reproducing it unconsciously while attempting to oppose it.
The dispositional tools used to produce knowledge are themselves produced by the world we study, underscoring the need for reflexivity in practice and constituting a central challenge to reflexive research.

Social research methods may be divided into two broad schools:
- Quantitative designs: Approach social phenomena through quantifiable evidence, often relying on statistical analysis of many cases (or across intentionally designed treatments in an experiment) to create valid and reliable general claims.
- Qualitative designs: Emphasize understanding of social phenomena through direct observation, communication with participants, or analysis of texts, and may stress contextual and subjective accuracy over generality.
Social scientists commonly combine quantitative and qualitative approaches as part of a multi-strategy design.