Social Science Research: Why People Are Harder to Study
Project research is almost always research on people — the ones planning, deciding, resisting and reporting. The supplied teaching source sets out five characteristics that separate this kind of work from the scientific ideal, and each one takes something away from what your design can promise.
The five characteristics of social science research
The source introduces social science research as the counterpart to scientific research, and it presents the two as parallel lists of characteristics. Unlike the scientific list, this one carries an attribution: the source credits it to a published business research methods text.
The first two items describe the field. The last three describe its difficulties, and they are the reason this page exists — a project management study that ignores them will overclaim, and an examiner will find the overclaim before you do.
Two lists, side by side
The contrast is easier to use than either list alone. Reading them together tells you which properties of scientific work you can carry across and which you have to renegotiate. The scientific list is treated on scientific research: five defining characteristics.
Scientific research
- Conducted within rules of science
- Based on logic
- Systematic analysis of evidence
- Can be replicated
- Knowledge is cumulative
Social science research
- Deals with people either in groups or individually
- Uses methods and traditions of social science
- People are less predictable than non-human phenomena
- The social world changes
- People are aware of research being conducted on them
The lists are not opposites, and the source does not present them as a choice. Logic, systematic analysis and cumulative contribution are not suspended when your subject is a project team. What changes is that the object of study answers back, moves, and has a view about being studied.
What each characteristic costs your design
The source lists the characteristics without discussing their consequences. The table below is our reading of what each one takes from a design and what can be done about it.
THE FIVE CHARACTERISTICS, THE COST, AND THE MITIGATION
| Characteristic | What it costs your design | What you can do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Deals with people, individually or in groups | Access becomes a live risk. Participants can decline, withdraw or leave the organisation mid-study | Size the study for the access you have confirmed, not the access you hope for |
| Uses methods and traditions of social science | You inherit an argument about method. Your choice has to be defended, not merely stated | Name the tradition you are working in and justify the fit with your question |
| People are less predictable than non-human phenomena | Variance is larger and effects are weaker, so strong causal claims are rarely available | Make the claim smaller and the reasoning tighter. Report the spread, not just the central tendency |
| The social world changes | Findings have a shelf life. The setting can shift between design and submission | Date your data collection precisely and state the conditions that held while you collected |
| People are aware of research being conducted on them | Responses are shaped by the act of asking, and by who is asking | Separate the researcher role from the delivery role where you can, and declare it where you cannot |
Column one is the source's wording. Columns two and three are our synthesis; the source lists the characteristics without discussing their consequences.
Less predictable, so make the claim smaller
The third characteristic is the one that does most damage to a badly framed conclusion. Non-human phenomena repeat; people vary, and they vary for reasons your instrument did not ask about.
The practical effect is on the verbs in your conclusions chapter. Evidence from a project population will usually support is associated with, was reported by, appeared consistently across. It will rarely support causes or will produce. The source's own methodology table is careful in the same way when it describes correlation as a statistical measure of association between two phenomena rather than a demonstration of cause.
This is also where your choice of medium starts to matter. Word data can carry the qualifications that numbers strip out, and numeric data can show the spread that a quotation hides. Most of the exemplar designs use both, for exactly this reason — see qualitative and quantitative research compared.
The social world changes while you are studying it
This is the characteristic the slide deck drops, and it is the one with the sharpest consequence for a study that runs across two or three academic terms. Your organisation restructures. The methodology you were studying is replaced. Half the team you surveyed in March has moved on by September.
Three defences are available, and none of them is exotic. Record the date and the conditions of every collection round so that a later reader can locate your findings in time. Treat any change during the study as data rather than as contamination. And where the change itself is the phenomenon, consider a methodology built for it — the source's comparative methodology is described as comparing different societies whether in the past or in parallel in the present, which is a natural fit. See historical and comparative research methodologies.
Your participants know you are studying them
The fifth characteristic is stated in the source and then left alone. Awareness changes behaviour, and in an organisational setting it changes it in predictable directions: towards the answer the participant thinks is expected, towards the answer that is safe to give, and away from anything that could be attributed back.
For a project manager researching their own organisation the problem compounds. You may be senior to your participants, you may have designed the process they are being asked to assess, and their answers may reach you in a meeting next week. None of that disqualifies the study. All of it belongs in the write-up.
Three practical moves
Say which hat you are wearing
Tell participants explicitly when they are talking to the researcher rather than to the project manager, and keep research material out of delivery forums.
Make honesty cheap
Anonymity, aggregation and a clear statement of who will see the raw material do more for data quality than any wording change to the question.
Put your own role in the limitations
State your relationship to the setting and to the participants. A declared position is a normal feature of applied research; an undeclared one reads as concealment.
The source's treatment of ethics touches this ground but does not cover it. It asks whether your project requires access to confidential or personal information, whether your questions are appropriate and respectful of cultural norms, and whether your collection methods are unbiased and ethical — and then defers the substantive treatment to a topic that is not part of the supplied material. See seeking ethics clearance.
The five characteristics against a real design
One chapter in the exemplar volume — a published collection of master's-level project management studies — examined the human side of project management, specifically the place of human psychology in project risk management. Its design, as reported in the abstract, was a questionnaire together with face-to-face interviews with project managers and project team members.
The broader pattern across the volume is worth noting: survey and interview dominate the seventeen designs, and almost every one pairs a literature review with one or two primary collection methods. That is a field-level statement about the exemplar volume, not a published statistic. The designs are set out on seventeen worked research designs.
Designing with the five in view
Adjusting the design to the characteristic that bites hardest
The second characteristic — that social science research uses the methods and traditions of social science — is the one most often skipped in a methodology chapter. The supplied material never lists those traditions in one place, but it does name the frameworks it considers available: positivism, constructionism and interpretivism as the main epistemological positions, with functionalism, symbolic interactionism, feminism, critical inquiry and postmodernism named as other frameworks used in social science research. Several are covered on functionalism, feminism and postmodern frameworks.
Before you defend a social science design
- You have named the tradition your methods come from and justified it against your question
- Your strongest conclusion is phrased at a size the variance in your data can support
- Every collection round is dated, and the conditions that held at the time are recorded
- You have stated your own relationship to the participants and to the setting
- You have said what you did to make an honest answer safe to give
- You know which version of the five characteristics your own course materials use, and you have worked from the fuller one
What to carry forward
- Three of the five characteristics are limitations. Design for them at the start rather than apologising for them in the final chapter.
- The supplied material carries the list in both four-bullet and five-bullet form. Work from the five-bullet version and note the discrepancy if it matters to your assessment.
- Unpredictability is paid for in the size of the claim. Association, report and pattern are usually defensible; cause usually is not.
- A finding with a date and a boundary written into it survives a changing social world. One without them expires quietly.
- Participant awareness is named in the source but never analysed. You will have to handle it from first principles, and say in the write-up how you did.
Frequently asked questions
Why does the slide deck list four characteristics and the notes list five?
The supplied material does not say. The slide deck omits the characteristic that the social world changes, and nothing in either document acknowledges the difference. This library works from the five-bullet version in the study notes because it is the fuller of the two and the omitted item has real design consequences.
Does studying people mean I cannot make causal claims at all?
It means causal claims are harder to support and need a design built for them. The source notes that people are less predictable than non-human phenomena, and its own methodology table describes correlation as a measure of association rather than cause. Most project research is better served by careful associational claims than by weak causal ones.
How do I handle researching my own team?
Declare it and design around it. Separate the researcher role from the delivery role in how you collect, protect responses through anonymity and aggregation, and state your position in the limitations. The supplied source raises the ethics of collection but defers the substantive treatment to material that is not included.
What are the methods and traditions of social science the source refers to?
The source never lists them under that heading. Elsewhere in the same material it names positivism, constructionism and interpretivism as the epistemological positions generally considered, and functionalism, symbolic interactionism, feminism, critical inquiry and postmodernism as other frameworks used in social science research. That is the closest the material comes.
Is social science research less rigorous than scientific research?
The source draws a contrast, not a hierarchy. Systematic analysis, logical argument and a cumulative contribution are all available in social science work. What differs is the predictability of the subject matter and therefore the scale and durability of the claims you can defend.
References and source attribution
- Veal, A. J. 2005, Business Research Methods: A Managerial Approach, Longman — the work the supplied source attributes its five characteristics of social science research to.
- Bryman, A. 2016, Social Research Methods, 5th ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford (listed among the source's references).
- Clarke, R. J. 2005, Research methods and methodologies, pp. 35–45 — the work the source adapts for its methodology table, including the correlation and comparative entries cited here.
- An edited volume of master's degree research projects in project management, 2018, academic publisher, 378 pp. — the exemplar volume; the illustrative design is paraphrased from a published abstract.
- The supplied teaching source: master's-level teaching material introducing research methods for project management, supplied as study notes and accompanying slides.
Suggested questions for Ask KEVOS
- What are the five characteristics of social science research in the supplied source?
- Why do the study notes and the slides disagree about the number of characteristics?
- How should I word a finding so it survives a change in the organisation I studied?
- What should I do about researching a team I manage?
- How does social science research differ from scientific research in what it can claim?