All articles starting with S
44,216 articles
Social network
Social network: a set of actors (nodes) connected by ties (relationships), studied via social network analysis founded in Moreno's 1930s sociometry; distinct from social network sites like Facebook, which make networks visible online.
Social network analysis
Social network analysis (SNA) studies social structure by mapping relationships among actors, such as people, organizations, or countries, rather than treating individuals as independent units.
Social networking service
Social networking service (SNS): online platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and X where users build profiles and connection lists. Defined by boyd and Ellison; began with SixDegrees.com in 1997; distinct from topical forums and social media generally.
Social neuroscience
Social neuroscience: interdisciplinary field studying neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms of social behavior; term coined early 1990s (Cacioppo and Berntson); distinct from the journal Social Neuroscience (2006).
Social norm
Social norm: an informal, self-enforcing rule of behavior in a group, distinct from law and moral norms, sustained by descriptive and injunctive expectations and by sanctions ranging from disapproval to ostracism.
Social norms approach
The social norms approach is a health promotion method that surveys a population and communicates true majority norms to reduce risky behavior, most commonly student drinking.
Social novel
The social novel (French: roman social) is a literary genre denouncing social problems and their effects on the working classes through realist fiction, shaped in nineteenth-century France with Zola's Germinal.
Social order
Social order is the stable, predictable arrangement of social life that makes cooperation, trade, and justice possible; sociologists since Comte and Durkheim have studied how it arises.
Social organization
Social organization: the patterned arrangement of relationships, roles, groups, institutions, and networks coordinating a society, studied through functionalism, conflict theory, interactionism, network science, emergency-response frameworks, and digital platforms.
Social ownership
Social ownership, also called socialisation of production, is the collective ownership of productive property by a state, community, cooperative, or society, central to socialist thought.
Social parasitism (offense)
Social parasitism (tuneyadstvo, příživnictví) was a socialist-era criminal offense punishing able-bodied people who avoided work and lived by unfair means, used in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and briefly Belarus against beggars, prostitutes, and dissidents such as Joseph Brodsky.
Social physics
Social physics, also called sociophysics, is the application of physics, especially statistical physics, to collective social phenomena like opinion formation, voting, and the spread of ideas.
Social policy
Social policy: government laws, programs, and institutions protecting people against poverty, unemployment, sickness, and old age; also called the welfare state, studied through Esping-Andersen's welfare regime typologies and OECD social spending data.
Social programs in the United States
Social programs in the United States, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, SNAP, and TANF, form a decentralized safety net created mainly by the 1935 Social Security Act and the 1965 amendments.
Social Progress Index
Social Progress Index (SPI): composite measure by Social Progress Imperative, devised by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in 2013, scoring 171 countries on Basic Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing, and Opportunity using 57 non-economic indicators, excluding GDP.
Social proof
Social proof, popularized by Robert Cialdini's Influence (1984), is the tendency to decide what is correct by observing what similar others do, strongest under uncertainty; an informational form of conformity distinct from normative influence.
Social psychology
Social psychology, a field shared with sociology (sociological social psychology), is the scientific study of how individuals think, feel, and behave in social contexts. Key facts: Lewin's Behavior = f(person, situation), Sherif, Asch, Milgram, Zimbardo landmark studies, and the replication crisis.
Social realism
Social realism, an international realist art movement of the interwar period depicting working-class and poor conditions critically; distinct from Soviet Socialist Realism (Stalin, 1934); figures include Orozco, Rivera, Shahn, Gropper.
Social rejection
Social rejection: being explicitly told one is not wanted; related to ostracism (being ignored and excluded) and social exclusion. Threatens belonging, self-esteem, control, meaningful existence; studied chiefly via the Cyberball paradigm; meta-analytic effects large (d > 1.4).
Social relation
Social relation: a connection between people who are at least minimally interdependent, influencing each other's thoughts, feelings, or behavior; central concept of sociology (Weber, Simmel, Marx), classified structurally and functionally, and measured in relationship science and health research.
Social research
Social research: systematic study of human societies using surveys, field research, experiments, and secondary data analysis. Rooted in Enlightenment thought and Comte's positivism, shaped by Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, and now including mixed methods designs.
Social responsibility
Social responsibility: the obligation of organizations and individuals to benefit society beyond legal and profit requirements; in business known as CSR, rooted in Bowen's 1953 work, Carroll's pyramid, ISO 26000, and modern ESG law.
Social Responsiveness Scale
The Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) is a 65-item questionnaire, completed by parents, teachers, or adults, that quantifies social impairment as a continuous trait rather than a categorical autism diagnosis.
Social return on investment
Social return on investment (SROI) is a framework used in nonprofit and social enterprise management that expresses social value as a ratio, such as £3 per £1 invested.
Social revolution
Social revolution: rapid, violent transformation of a society's class structure together with its government and regime, distinct from coups and political revolutions; classic cases are France 1789, Russia 1917, and China 1911–1949.
Social Savvy Class 101 (0교시는 인싸타임)
Social Savvy Class 101 (0교시는 인싸타임) is an 8-episode 2024 South Korean teen romantic-comedy web drama on Cinema Heaven, directed by Bae Ha-neul, starring Kim Woo-seok and Kang Na-eon as students entangled by an anonymous secrets app.
Social science
Social science: the study of society and human behavior, spanning disciplines such as economics, sociology, psychology, and demography; uses quantitative, qualitative, and experimental methods under human-subjects rules and informs public policy.
Social science & medicine
Social Science & Medicine (Soc Sci Med, ISSN 0277-9536) is Elsevier's interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal of social science research on health, founded in 1967, merged from six part titles in 1982, publishing 24 issues yearly across seven editorial offices.
Social Science Research Network
The Social Science Research Network, known as SSRN, is an open-access preprint repository founded in 1994 in Rochester, New York, and owned by Elsevier since 2016.
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) is Canada's federal agency funding postsecondary research and training in the social sciences and humanities, created in 1977.