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Computational Thinking and Social Science | :copyright: Matti Nelimarkka | 2023 | Sage Publishing
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Chapter 1

A New Kind of Social Science Requires New Skills

Learning goals

  • List the potential benefits computers and computation have for social-science-based research;
  • List three skills required for using computers as an effective research tool;
  • Understand how these skills are built throughout the book.

Ongoing changes in social sciences

As social scientist learn to use computers in their research, we can see changes on their research:

  1. Sample size increase
  2. Analysis speed increase
  3. New kinds of ways for doing research emerge
  4. We can approach data with a tabula rasa
  5. New kind of data sources emerge

Computers' increasing role

  • SPSS, Atlas.TI or Stata do not provide us with the tools to fully benefit from computers.
  • Scholars need to speak with computer: command it to do operations, calculations, and produce meaningful results.

Computers' increasing role

  • Social science imagination: the ability to think about societal phenomena using existing concepts and theories from social science and identifying the interplay between individuals and structures at play in the society.
  • Technological imagination: the ability to repurpose and develop technologies to better suit the analysis at hand.

Learning activity

  • Pair discussion: What reasons the book gives for focusing both on social science and technological imagination?
  • Pair discussion: Exercise 1.3
  • Group discussion: Exercise 1.5
  • Homework assignment: Exercise 1.7 (if 1.3 and 1.5 are done in class)

Effective use of a computer

  1. skills to command and speak with a computer, or programming,
  2. imagination on what is an interesting question for social sciences and society
  3. understanding the possibilities computers provide for scholars

Effective use of a computer

Programming

  • Cognitive component: solving the problem
  • Technical component: skills to write computer programs

Effective use of a computer

Research design

  • Different methodological approaches
  • Cases from current scholarly work
  • Social science imagination

Effective use of a computer

Fundamentals

  • Research ethics
  • Reliability and validity
  • Integration of theory and empirical research

Review questions

  1. What are the impacts that computers and computing technology have for social science research?
  2. Programming tasks can be divided into two different sub-tasks: what are they?
  3. Why are social science imagination and technological imagination important in computational social science projects?
  4. The book uses an interwoven structure to introduce programming, research design with computational approaches, and core computational social science skills. Why is that?