How Do You Conduct Social Science Research?
Social science is the study of human society. It includes a group of diverse academic disciplines including history, sociology, political science, anthropology, law, geography, economics and education. Although these fields focus on different aspects of human society, they follow the same general methods for conducting research. Pick a topic to research. Narrow the topic down as much as you can. Develop one question, a hypothesis, to answer about this topic. For example, you might want to study elections in the United States. You could narrow this down to congressional elections and ask the following question: What factors do voters consider when voting for their Representative? Develop a research design explaining how you will answer this question. Base your outline on one of two research methods–qualitative or quantitative. The qualitative method uses the researcher’s personal observations of the data to draw inferences, while the quantitative approach uses statistical analyses of t
