44 Types of Social Science

John Spacey, June 29, 2022

Social science is the study of society and its components such as culture, economics, politics, governments, law, education, business and human behavior. These are human systems that are extremely complex and surrounded in grey areas such as perception, language, social behavior and thinking such that social sciences are soft sciences. The following academic fields and subjects are considered social science.

Accountancy	Anthropology
Archaeology	Behavioral Science
Business	Civics
Commerce	Communications
Community Development	Criminology
Cultural Studies	Demography
Development Studies	Economics
Education	Environmental Planning
Ethics	Ethnography
Finance	Gerontology
History	Human Ecology
Human Geography	Human Services
Information Science	International Relations
International Studies	Law
Library Science	Linguistics
Management	Marketing
Media Studies	Organizational Studies
Political Science	Psychology
Public Administration	Public Health
Public Policy	Religious Studies
Social Philosophy	Social Work
Sociology	Urban Planning

There is much overlap between science, social science and the humanities.

Soft Science

The way that people think can't be measured with much accuracy and precision such that areas such as economics, marketing, politics, education and psychology are often based on broad assumptions that aren't always true. For example, economics is largely founded on the assumption that market participants are rational. This isn't always true as captured by the concept of bounded rationality. Soft sciences can be based on the scientific method but reproducibility of results and the predictive accuracy of models may be less than in hard sciences where observations tend to be quite precise and accurate.

44 Types of Social Science

Soft Science

Society

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