The Industrial Revolution and Social Sciences

The Industrial Revolution led to many of the convinces that people often take for granted today such as steam power, the telephone, and the diesel engine but also played a vital role in the development of social sciences.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution people lived their lives often never leaving the town or area that they were raised in which limited the amount of social interaction between people of different thoughts or beliefs that in turn hampered the ability of social sciences to grow. Once the Industrial Revolution started in the 1750's people were drawn to cities where factories were springing up because of the development of new technologies such as steam power and mass production machines, these developments required the development of communication and transportation systems that also added a new component into the social development of the population. All of these changes allowed the creation of a more diverse group of social classes because now a person's status could be based off of money instead of birthrights or a monarchy system and provided the perfect environment for the study of social sciences.

The scientific method has two main assumptions that are "we know what we know through senses alone" and "that the mind has the power to receive, record, and rearrange sensations" (Zulke & Kirley, 2002).The two assumptions actually contradict each other as the power of the mind was developed prior to the senses and if the mind has the power to receive, record, and rearrange sensations than the senses are not the only way in which we can learn. An example of this would be a unborn child that is sucking on their thumb, at this point the child has no teeth so it can not be a reaction to teething and no vision to see another child doing the same act; thus the brain sent a signal to the hand to place the thumb in the mouth without the power of any senses.

I personally believe that within the study of social science research that a scientist can be totally objective as long as there are checks and balances in place. The difficulty comes as most people are raised with the values and thoughts of our community, religion, or family and thus have personal beliefs of what is right and wrong or true and false. To ensure that one is totally objective one must have a test or list of questions to prove that the so called outcome of the experiment or research is based