SPX 18

• Anthropology It is the study of humankind in all aspects including its origin, evolution, culture, growth and development.
• Psychology It is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes, growth and developmental stages and its characteristics; effects of nature and heredity; mental diseases and disorders.
• Economics It is the study that analyzes the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. Trades, Imports, exports, inflation rates, etc.
• Political Science It addresses important relevant questions, from government and politics, protection of rights and the organization of power within countries to international relations and terrorism.
• Sociology It is a diverse discipline, which aims to explain societal trends and institutions to make sense of behavior, culture, politics, and the economy, etc.
• Geography It is the study of places and the relationships between people and their environment. The distribution of living organisms in the whole world.
• Social Science, in its broadest sense is the study of society and the manner in which people behave and influence the world around them.
• Social science

  It provides an understanding of how the world works using social and behavioral explanations.
• Positivism was founded by August Comte during the early 19th century. It is a social theory that incorporated the methods and perspectives of natural science in studying society.
• Positivism empirical observations are the only acceptable method of gathering data and the observable phenomena are the only recognized truth.
• Positivism Consequently, its emphasis on empirical data became its central weakness; it failed to take into consideration human subjectivity, emotions, and the underlying social structures existing in all social phenomena.
• Rational choice theory (RCT) is an economic theory used in framing individual behavior to easily predict individual preferences and choices.
• Rational choice theory

  Individuals are always rational in decision making and always choose the best option that will maximize their happiness. Individual choices are influenced by individual preferences but are also limited by constraints such as time and resources. Its assumption that humans are rational is also its weakness as it fails to consider human subjectivity in decision making.
• Marxism is a very influential theory in the socials sciences as it provided a holistic perspective of society.
• By criticizing capitalism as an economic system, Marxism gave a framework that touched on how the economy influences the creation of or changes in the structures of society.
• Marxism

  This is known as the base-superstructure model. Its emphasis on underlying social structures, however, diminished human agency and ingenuity as a mere function of the existing relations of production and base-superstructure orientation.
• Structuralism is an approach or method of looking at society as a construct.
• Structuralism aims to show the underlying structures within society that govern the life of people.
• structuralism can be seen in various social and political movements and studies such as Marxism, Environmental Determinism, and Linguistics.
• Institutionalism is an approach that studies the different effects of formal and informal institutions in society.
• Institutions are the established sets of laws or practices that influence and organize society. The intellectual history of the approach is basically divided into two: old intitutionalism and new instiyutionalism.
• Old Institutionalism of the 19th century that is focused on the study of formal government institution.
• New Institutionalism of the late 20th century that includes the study of formal and informal institutions in society, adopting a sociological treatment.
• Behaviorism emphasized the scientific study of observable human emotions and stated that human behavior is influenced by environmental factors and can be modified with the controlled application of negative and positive stimulus.
• The main goal of behaviorism is to study, predict, and control behavior.
• Phenomenology includes and highlights human experience and consciousness in the study of society and social phenomena, Qualitative data is therefore the most significant data source for social scientists who use the phenomenological perspective.
• Feminism is divided into three waves, all focused on empowering women and addressing historical inequality between men and women.
• Feminism

  It revolutionized social theory by highlighting women's issues in the social sciences, and forwarding the observation that social research is gendered.
• Feminism

  It also opened once insignificant areas in social research such as the home and domestic life as areas of politics and resistance along with new methods in field research such as autoethnography. As an ideology, it is aimed at promoting gender equality and rights
• Symbolic interactionism emerged in the mid-20th century with influences from Scottish moralists and American pragmatist philosophers.
• Symbolic interactionism It is a micro-level framework and perspective in sociology that is also a reaction to the positivist way of looking into society and positivist social research that emphasized a "bottom-up" approach where the focus shifted to face-to-face encounters and everyday relations to explain the operations of society.
• Symbolic interactionism The main concepts in the study symbols, signs, objects, language, and the interplay between these factors in human behavior.
• Human-environment systems is a scientific framework that aims to understand the interactions between human systems and environment systems and how changes in one consequently affect the other.
• Human-environment systems One of its central assumptions is that human and environment systems are complex and composed of different parts.
• Human-environment systems The pressures exerted by humans on the environment produce negative effects such as degradation and pollution which eventually affect the environment and communities.
• Geography is the discipline that mostly uses this framework it represents human-environment interactions through maps that locate different spatial processes like migration and settlement patterns.
• Psychoanalysis is a therapeutic method and a theory of the human mind that was founded by Sigmund Freud in the 1890s.
• Psychoanalysis is focused on the study of consciousness that usually relies on methods that tap into the person's unconscious to uncover latent emotions.
• Psychoanalysis The human consciousness is made up of three components: the id, ego and superego. The inability of the ego to balance the id and superego and the occurrence of traumatic events create problems in one's personality.