A Guide to Understanding Social Science Research for Natural Scientists

Abstract

Natural scientists are increasingly interested in social research because they recognize that conservation problems are commonly social problems. Interpreting social research, however, requires at least a basic understanding of the philosophical principles and theoretical assumptions of the discipline, which are embedded in the design of social research. Natural scientists who engage in social science but are unfamiliar with these principles and assumptions can misinterpret their results. We developed a guide to assist natural scientists in understanding the philosophical basis of social science to support the meaningful interpretation of social research outcomes. The 3 fundamental elements of research are ontology, what exists in the human world that researchers can acquire knowledge about; epistemology, how knowledge is created; and philosophical perspective, the philosophical orientation of the researcher that guides her or his action. Many elements of the guide also apply to the natural sciences. Natural scientists can use the guide to assist them in interpreting social science research to determine how the ontological position of the researcher can influence the nature of the research; how the epistemological position can be used to support the legitimacy of different types of knowledge; and how philosophical perspective can shape the researcher's choice of methods and affect interpretation, communication, and application of results. The use of this guide can also support and promote the effective integration of the natural and social sciences to generate more insightful and relevant conservation research outcomes.

Societal, Policy and Academic ‘Visions’ for the Future of the Marine Environment and Its Management, Exemplified in the Western and Northern Isles of Scotland

“…The programmatic translation of new information into meaning might be called an epistemology, an account of "the validity, scope, and methods of acquiring knowledge" (Moon and Blackman 2014). Of course, it is our own academic epistemology that presents us with these concepts as part of our world-views.…”

“…Our interpretation of SES starts from their definition as a 'linked systems of people and nature' (Berkes and Folke 1998), or as 'human-environment systems' (Ostrom 2007), and the ontological realistic (Moon and Blackman 2014) view that at a minimum a SES is a spatio-temporally bounded site of interaction within and between biophysical processes and information communication processes. It is tempting to refer to the biophysical processes as 'nature' and the communication processes as 'society', but, as Latour (1993Latour ( , 2004 has argued, these are constructed and hegemonistic labels.…”

What happens at the gap between knowledge and practice? Spaces of encounter and misencounter between environmental scientists and local people

“…I will introduce the reader to theoretical concepts of contact and encounter, and support these theories with detailed examples of how scientists and local people interact based on 15 months of fieldwork carried out in the Madidi region of Bolivian Amazonia. This is an important contribution because there is increasing recognition among conservation scientists of the need to incorporate different social theoretical frameworks and methodologies into the environmental sciences, but unfamiliarity with different epistemologies means that these perspectives are often ignored (Moon andBlackman 2014, Nielsen andD'haen 2014). To look more in depth at who and what exists within the gap, I now turn to theories of contact and encounter that have examined relations between different groups and cultures in diverse settings.…”

Realizing the transformative potential of conservation through the social sciences, arts and humanities

“…There has been subsequent calls for the 'mainstreaming of the social sciences in conservation' (Bennett et al, 2017b). The conservation social sciences are a rigorous set of disciplines, theories and methods for systematically understanding and characterizing the human dimensions to facilitate evidence-based conservation (see Bennett et al, 2017a;Charnley et al, 2017;Moon and Blackman, 2014). While the potential contributions of the conservation social sciences are vast, we are concerned that too much of the current attention is on research that serves an instrumental purpose, by which we mean that the social sciences are used to justify and promote status quo conservation practices.…”