Introduction to Part III of the Course:
 Content & Finding Aids for Social Science Disciplines-Professional Areas

In Part III of the course, we will give you an overview of some of the points to remember about the disciplines and professional areas that comprise what we have labeled as the social sciences.  You will find these 15 areas, and our subject guides to them, laid out for you in several places:

• The course's home site, http://www.ou.edu/ap/lis5703

• Dr Bob's Find it on the Web page:  http://www.ou.edu/webhelp/

The 15 areas, along with the initial overview category labeled "General Social Science," are . . .

Organization of the 15 Areas:  

For scheduling purposes, we have 5 weekly sessions devoted to this part of the course.  Therefore, we will be artificially grouping the 15 areas into sub-groups of three.  Those sub-groups, and the weekly sessions they will be considered in, are as follows:

Are these five groupings natural categories?  Well, not really.  You see, the need to build five 3-unit weekly sessions was a foremost goal for us, so a trinity of units (15 units introduced over 5 weeks) was necessary.  Furthermore, we could easily show how a unit in Session 15 (say, education) is much closer, theoretically, to psychology (learning theory, for example), than to its Session 15 compatriots--journalism or public administration.  And the same goes for public administration, which is much "closer" in its philosophical underpinnings to political science or to business than it is to education or journalism.  However, it is the case that all three of the Session 15 areas are professional practice areas that borrow their disciplinary underpinnings from other social science disciplines.  So we will stand by the groups that we have constructed as, at least, an inoffensive organization of social science areas that does no real harm to someone's personal view of how the social science areas are related to one another.

Goals of this Part (Part III) of the Course: 

While we are walking you through the major areas of the social sciences, one discipline or professional area at a time, you will still have before you the task of finishing off your pathfinder.  We do not mean for the content of this part of the course--the course's last five weeks--to conflict with that goal.  Indeed, we will not give you formal exercises for any of these disciplines or professional areas; we will just present our overview on what to look for (in terms, especially, of comprehensive, recurrent bibliographic resources) if you have need in the future to use the resources of one or another of them.

Psychology, Sociology, Communication

The disciplines of psychology, sociology and communication are a special group.

• Psychology, other than parts of anthropology (anatomy) and geography (geosciences), is the social science discipline most closely associated with the sciences (biology), and with the bio-medical sciences.

• Sociology was one of the later of the social sciences, and was at one time thought to be the youngest of the social sciences.  It started in the 19th century, with Comte introducing the term sociology in 1838.  It found its way into university courses and curricula by the late 1800's.

• Communication, "the exchange of meanings between individuals through a common system of symbols," turns out to be even younger than sociology, and the youngest discipline in the social sciences.  It is really a product of the 20th century, coming out of a variety of other social science disciplines, like political science and psychology.

There are two special features of these disciplines that need to be mentioned:

• quantification of research methods

• behavioral sciences

Quantification has to do with both the procedures used to sample and analyze subjects from underlying populations, and also with the testing done to determine differences between (and among) sampled groups to estimate strength of relationship between variables, etc.  Research methods--and sampling procedures--are so "numerate" that many students find it very difficult to read the methods, findings and conclusions of research in these areas without having had university coursework in statistical methods, research methods, and tests and measurements.

A strong emphasis of research in many of the social sciences beginning in the middle of the 20th century is now called behaviorism.  As noted by the Encyclopedia Britannica, the behavioral sciences are . . .

any of various disciplines dealing with the subject of human actions, usually including the fields of sociology, social and cultural anthropology, psychology, and behavioral aspects of biology, economics, geography, law, psychiatry, and political science. The term gained currency in the 1950s in the United States; it is often used synonymously with “social sciences,” although some writers distinguish between them. The term behavioral sciences suggests an approach that is more experimental than that connoted by the older term social sciences.

As you can see, the emphasis of the behavioral sciences is, in terms of research methods, experimental.  So those parts of a variety of social science disciplines that use experimental research designs may refer to themselves, at times, as behavioral.  Do not be confused, though: even the new, standard encyclopedia of these areas is named the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Psychology

For a good overview of psychology, you should read this encyclopedic resource about it:

"Psychology" (pdf file) Encyclopedia Britannica

A recent change in psychology is its association with the area, or view, called cognitive science.  Indeed, cognition is a concept central to psychology.

One of the special features of psychology, mentioned above, is its association with the biological sciences and the medical sciences.  In fact, unlike the other social sciences, psychology has topics of interest to be found in science indexing and abstracting services, like Biological Abstracts, and medical and health science databases, like MEDLINE.

Of course, the fundamental indexing and abstracting service for psychology is what is now called PsychINFO.  Called Psychological Abstracts in its original print version, this service is the central means of comprehensive, recurrent bibliography for psychology.

Never to be overlooked however are those more general social science, and general non-specific indexing tools, like ArticleFirst and Social Sciences Citation Index part of Web of Science.  Also, note that inspection of the indexing and/or abstracting services of other associated disciplines (like, for example, sociology's Sociological Abstracts, and education's ERIC service) can ferret out articles and books that you couldn't find in PsychINFO.

There are also mission-oriented, interdisciplinary, and multi-disciplinary tools that you might consider, like human factors literature covered by Ergonomics Abstracts.  Don't forget to look for dissertations and theses in Dissertation Abstracts, and also check for papers read at meetings in PapersFirst and official conference proceedings in Proceedings.

Sociology

The overview of sociology that will give you a quick sense of its broadness and high number of meaningful overlap with other social science disciplines is this EB article:

"Sociology" (pdf file) Encyclopedia Britannica

As this article says, sociology looks at "human societies, their interactions, and the processes that change and preserve them."  It is a behavioral science, and makes heavy use of statistical methodologies involving multivariate models of explanation, correlation and regression. 

The main main recurrent bibliographic control tool for sociology is, of course, Sociological Abstracts.  As demography is a component of sociology, one should also not forget about Statistical Universe, a Congressional Information Service database set that includes the American Statistics Index (ASI), Statistical Reference Index (SRI), Index to International Statistics (IIS).  A standard, annual update of the important literature in sociology is the International Bibliography of Sociology, published since 1951; although it is available online, OU Libraries has only the print version of this important, standard tool.

Just as we stated for psychology, you should not overlook using the more general social science and general non-specific indexing tools like ArticleFirst and the Social Sciences Citation Index part of Web of Science.  Also, note that inspection of the indexing and/or abstracting services of other associated disciplines (for example, psychology's PsychINFO and education's ERIC service) can locate articles and books that you couldn't find in Sociological Abstracts.

Communication

The youngest of the social science disciplines, communication, is described in this EB article:

"Communication," (pdf file) Encyclopedia Britannica

Although communication as a disciplinary area does possess standard comprehensive bibliographic tools that cover its own content areas, OU Libraries does not have the online versions of them (see, for example, ComIndex and ComAbstracts at the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship: http://www.cios.org/www/comindex.htm).  It does maintain subscriptions to the print based services, however: Communication Abstracts.

Remember, though, that communication, as a discipline is quite interdisciplinary, with a good deal of its bibliographic control coming from associated disciplines and professional areas, such as psychology, sociology, education and business.  So, don't forget to search in PsychINFO, Sociological Abstracts, ERIC, and business resources like ABI/Inform.  And, as always, don't overlook the more general social science, and general non-specific indexing tools, like ArticleFirst and Social Sciences Citation Index part of Web of Science.