20 Learning to Think Like a Social Scientist

Growing up as a talkative and curious child, I tested my parents’ patience on long road trips by reading every single billboard aloud. I was a seeker of knowledge from a very early age, but my first formal introduction to the study of people and society happened when I was 16 years old. In my senior year of high school, I signed up for an Advanced Placement class on social science research. The class introduced several research methods, from surveys and interviews to the analysis of archival materials. I chose to write a paper on the life of Mahatma Gandhi. I fell in love with research (and, to this day, I keep that paper in a box in my storage room). When I entered college, I considered majoring in library sciences. But I had always secretly dreamt of writing a novel; thus, I declared a major in literature.

What I didn’t know at the time of my freshman choice was that the line that separates fiction and non-fiction is blurrier than one might first imagine. Both forms of writing entail rigorous forms of “research” about the human experience, although each uses different methods of validation. The dreamy teenager in me favored the imagination for constructing good stories. I became an avid reader. By the time I turned 14, I was proud to announce that I had read One Hundred Years of Solitude, the classic work of magical realism by the Nobel prizewinner Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But I was a pesky reader, frequently arguing with the stories, demanding evidence to make sense of contradictions and predicaments in the plots. Although as a teenager I would have never claimed (or known) to call myself a “social scientist,” the inclination to corroborate claims of truth in making sense of the world was already shaping my worldview.

In my first English composition courses in college, I became fascinated by long-form essays in magazines. I remember a report in Newsweek about a restaurant called Sambo’s and the controversy that erupted in the 1970s about the racist stereotypes surrounding that name. I now recognize that news story and the critical commentaries published by non-fiction writers as one of the first times I realized that the meaning of any human expression (a word, a name, or an idea) is never confined to a single interpretation. Nearly 30 years later, while pursuing a doctoral degree in anthropology, I returned to the study of stereotypes as one of my core topics. The seed of a profound idea had somehow been planted in me: most things worth knowing begin with a general sentiment of bewilderment.

During my junior year in college, the itch for knowledge that I had felt since childhood crystalized around a life-changing experience. In the summer of 1982, I spent three months living in Kenya, Africa, as part of a Christian mission. I met Kenyans who showed incredible kindness to me and our group as individuals, but who also expressed harsh critiques about inequalities between rich and poor countries. The church leaders consistently spoke about the work we were doing as charity — doing for those who can’t do for themselves. But that explanation clashed with the reality I heard from my new African friends. They were smart, determined, and fierce people. They were doing for themselves! The obstacles that stood in their way were not of their own making.

In my hunger to learn more about Africa, I found a class in the political science department called “Facts and Myths of Third World Under-Development.” The first book assigned in the class was Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon was a philosopher and activist who tried to make sense of the struggles of African nations through a combination of psychology and political economy. His main point was that the conditions of poverty of African societies were not “natural,” or inevitable; they were created as the result of historical struggles through a system of colonialism. I found in Fanon’s words the kind of explanation that fit the realities I had witnessed in Kenya. As much as my African friends appreciated the “charity” offered by our mission, they longed for more lasting changes, especially in the world order that extracts value from Africa in the form of natural resources and cheap labor without giving nearly as much back in return.

My curiosity grew. I began to read authors who spoke and wrote about social structures, power dynamics, and human dignity. Storytelling continued to be an effective tool some of the best authors used to convey ideas. Although I never wrote a novel, I became interested in studying how fantasy and imagination are an important part of how people cope and concoct strategies to push through the pain of inequality and historical trauma. Through graduate studies in political science and anthropology I learned how to organize ideas, gather evidence, and assess complex problems from multiple angles. Rather than acquiring a manual for specific answers, I learned from my social science training how to be a systematic thinker — not someone who gets ahead of the facts or is led only by first impressions. From anthropology specifically I learned that one can apply the same careful system of inquiry and analysis to everyday problems. As many of my classmates and I lived through the usual dramas of college dating life, a social science perspective helped me ask, what do love and family mean in different cultures?

When I look back, I see my childhood habit of reading road signs as an omen: I would become someone committed to “reading” the world around me and making sense of what makes us human. I have had a rewarding occupational life applying the range of social science skills in many different jobs: working for elected public officials, producing large cultural events, and helping build nonprofit organizations. Being a social scientist means living life continuously intrigued and surprised by the widely diverse answers humans give to the most important questions.

About the author

name: Maribel Alvarez

Maribel Alvarez received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Arizona and is the Jim Griffith Chair in Public Folklore at the UA’s College of Social & Behavioral Sciences.