Social Issue (Essay Sample)

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Skills for the social sciences
Introduction
A society is made of various components and social groups which have been socialized to different cultures, beliefs and values which they follow and adhere to. As a result of these social and cultural differences within the society, they result to various social issues which bring commotion and unrest in the whole society thus requiring immediate solution so that they can be solved once and for all. Some of these social issues experienced in society are poverty, racial discrimination, and gender inequality among many other issues. In common a social issue is defined as any kind of problem that influences many people within a society and they are believed to be caused by factors that exceed an individual's control. As a result of the various social issues experienced in the society, there have been social sciences which are courses that teach more about the various social issues and as well providing the best ways or approaches which can be used to solve such problems through looking at the issue in different dimensions. Therefore, social sciences have contributed much to improve in knowledge on how to solve such problem through various theories like positivism among others which can be used to give an interpretation to any social issue for a better solution. This paper aims at exploring the main differences between qualitative and quantitative research methods in the social sciences. This will be shown by considering a specific social issue in society and trying to indicate how social science has contributed to the investigation of the social issue. The paper will also consider some social sciences theories which help in the interpretation of a social issue for a better solution. An example of such a theory is positivism which is defined as a philosophical theory or system which recognize only things that can be scientifically proved or which are capable of logical and mathematical proof which means that it does not believe in anything that cannot be scientifically proven.
Part 1
As earlier said, there are various social science theories that have been proven to be effective and efficient in interpreting some common social issues in society. Each of the theories uses either qualitative or quantitative methodologies in their work. This paper will consider two social science theories that are positivism and interpretivism theory which uses two different research methodologies. Positivism theory in western philosophy is generally defined as any system that confines itself to the data of experiences and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations and in simple terms, the term positivism borrows much from the ideas and thought of the French philosopher by the name Auguste Comte. From the ideas of Comte sociology Is defined as a positive science and by this, he meant that positivism is the search of invariant laws of both the natural and social world and according to Comte, there are various ways in which these invariant laws can be discovered and this is through observation, experimentation and comparison. Therefore, from this, the primary affirmations of positivism are that any knowledge based on matters of fact is based on the positive data of experience, second beyond the realm of fact is that of pure logic and pure mathematics (Alharahsheh et al., 2020). On the other hand, as it had earlier been said interpretivism theory is an approach in the field of social science that basically opposes the ideologies of positivism in natural science and the interpretivists argue that in order to have a better understanding of human actions we need to achieve an empathetic understanding (Rivas, J. (2010). From the above description it can therefore be agreed that positivism theory uses quantitative research methodologies because it makes use of observation, experimentation in data collection in order to get the real facts about a social issue so that the best interpretations can be made on the other hand interpretivism theory use qualitative research methodologies like phenomenological methods, ethnographic models, case study model among many others in order to interpret and understand the meanings that humans attach to their individual actions.
In general, there are various research methodologies that can be used in carrying out research and in data collection but they are commonly grouped into two categories that are qualitative and quantitative research. Quantitative research mostly puts more emphasizes on objective measurement, statistical analysis of nay data collected from the field using either polls, questionnaires and even surveys. On the other hand, qualitative research involves collection and analysis of non-numerical data to better understand the key concepts, opinions and experiences and some of the commonly used methods of data collection are observation, textual analysis or even interviews and as a result of these the results from this research method are more descriptive compared to the other research method and thus it's very easy to make inferences from the collected data under qualitative research (Silverman, D. (Ed.). (2020). From the above explanation, there are certain methodologies that are used in quantitative research when collecting and analyzing data and in most cases, quantitative research deals with numerical data that is numbers and statistics and this is the reason why the aforementioned methodologies are used in quantitative research because they provide numerical data that can easily be analyzed and interpreted by the researcher. On the other hand qualitative research basically deals with words and meaning and thus the methodologies used in this research provide descriptive data that is in terms of words and with an attached meaning. In the two research approaches that are qualitative and quantitative, the sample size in most cases differ and there are some reasons why the sample size differ and one of the primary reason why the sample size difference is because of the distinct goals of each research approach. For instance, quantitative research seeks to infer from a sample to a population that is the researcher wants to include a variety of types of people in the study so as to generalize beyond those in his/her study (Hennink et al., 2020). Qualitative research on the other hand it typically begins with a certain group, type of individual, event or process and thus the goals under this research can be said to be in-depth understanding.
In a real example and considering the United Kingdom which is faced with various social issues like poverty, inequality among many others. Considering a common issue like gender discrimination in the United Kingdom in which the women are discriminated in many occasions as they are not given equal opportunities like their male counterparts which is a very serious social problem. In order to resolute this problem in the UK society and bring about gender equality in the whole nation a research need to be conducted so that the best information can be gathered based on the root cause of gender inequality and discrimination in the nation so that the best interventions can be adopted. For this case the best research is qualitative in which the researcher can collect data from the population through interviews, focused groups by discussing the issue among a group of people in order to gather opinions that can aid further the research, the researcher can as well opt to use literature review as a method of collecting data by surveying published works by other authors and through these methods the researcher will collect descriptive data for interpretation when still being focused on the main goal of the research that is having an in-depth understanding on the primary cause of gender inequality and discrimination in the United Kingdom. Through analysis and interpretation of the collected data, some inferences can be made. For instance, some of the participants may argue that gender inequality in the nation could be a result of common stereotypes about the female gender which is wrong and unrealistic.
Part 2
Quantitative:
Chirikov, I. et al. (2020) ‘Undergraduate and Graduate Students’ Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic’. UC Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education
Shah, N. et al. (2020) ‘Mental health amongst obstetrics and gynaecology doctors during the COVID-19 pandemic: Results of a UK-wide study’, European Journal of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology, 253, pp. 90–94.
Qualitative:
Williams, S. N. et al. (2020) ‘Public perceptions and experiences of social distancing and social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic: a UK-based focus group study’, BMJ open, 10(7), p. e039334. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2020-039334.
Irawan, A.W., Dwisona, D. and Lestari, M., 2020. Psychological Impacts of Students on Online Learning During the Pandemic COVID-19. KONSELI: Jurnal Bimbingan dan Konseling (E-Journal), 7(1), pp.53-60.
Mental health challenge has become one of the serious problems in many nations more so during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic which has had very serious negative impacts on the mental health of both undergraduate and graduate students and borrowing from the work of Chirikov et al., 2020 which aimed at testing mental health problem on students in tertiary schools. The researcher used a sample of 30,725 undergraduate students and 15,346 graduate and professional students and based on the result of this study 35% of the undergraduate and 32% of graduate and professional students tested positive for major depressive disorders like bipolar...