The mission of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Turku University is to generate new information and understanding through research, and to provide high quality teaching. The Faculty constitutes a community of almost two thousand people, whose academic members - teachers and researchers - respond to the challenges of our time by analysing its social phenomena.
Perspectives on society
Each of the faculty’s professionals approaches society from the perspective of their own academic discipline. Often, tensions and conflicts can arise; for social questions are, by their nature, charged with social values. These different perspectives each contribute to social debate and to strengthening the quality and vitality of societal research.
The defining characteristic of the research carried out within the faculty is a critical approach to the reliability of different kinds of information, and more especially to the validity of the conclusions which may be drawn; in social science research it is crucial to be able to see behind and beyond the apparently obvious facts and explanations. It is particularly important to distinguish between reliably identifiable patterns of change in social phenomena and accidental variation.
Examples of reasearch in our Faculty
The amount of knowledge is constantly increasing, but at the same time, it is becoming more and more difficult to recognise reliable information. To cope with the problems and phenomena that affect our daily lives, we need to develop our abilities to understand and evaluate scientific knowledge. The Fostering Finnish Science Capital (FINSCI) project aims to address this need by investigating and developing Finnish science capital, i.e., the possibilities for individuals to interact with science and get to know people in science, as well as their scientific literacy, critical thinking, and science communication skills.
Research in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, education, and social sciences is combined to create new knowledge on the affective and neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie successful science learning and decision-making, and to create science-based methods for formal and informal science learning. The main goal of the project is to develop community science practices and public engagement with science to increase the accessibility of science.
The FINSCI consortium is led by the University of Turku and Psychology Adjunct Professor Johanna Kaakinen, and it includes the University of Eastern Finland, the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Science Center Heureka, and the science association Skope ry. The project is funded by the Strategic Research Council (SRC) established within the Academy of Finland. FINSCI is part of the council’s LITERACY program, which seeks solutions to how information can be used critically and constructively to support individual and societal decision-making and activities.
CLIMATE-NUDGE is a consortium funded by the Strategic Research Council, which applies behavioral sciences, especially nudge theory, to help individuals make climate-friendly decisions. The idea is to alter choice architecture to steer individuals towards better choices for them and for society without limiting freedom.
The nudges co-created and tested together with the stakeholders will focus on 1) decreasing greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector and 2) optimizing the use of carbon storage in the forest sector. The effects of nudges will be compared with the effects of more traditional societal steering methods, such as taxation.
To ensure the creation of fair and acceptable actions, rigorous ethical evaluation is embedded in the process. Impacts on economic and health effects will be assessed. This multidisciplinary project delivers human-centric, scalable, cost-effective, health-promoting, and ethically sustainable nudging alternatives that complement traditional steering actions to mitigate climate change.
You can contact the consortium PI, Paula Salo, for more information about the project.
is an academically driven cross-national survey that has been conducted across Europe since its establishment in 2001. Every two years, face-to-face interviews are conducted with newly selected, cross-sectional samples.
The survey measures the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviour patterns of diverse populations in more than thirty nations. The main aims of the ESS are:
- to chart stability and change in social structure, conditions, and attitudes in Europe and to interpret how Europe’s social, political, and moral fabric is changing;
- to achieve and spread higher standards of rigour in cross-national research in the social sciences, including, for example, questionnaire design and pre-testing, sampling, data collection, reduction of bias, and the reliability of questions;
- to introduce soundly-based indicators of national progress, based on citizens’ perceptions and judgements of key aspects of their societies;
- to undertake and facilitate the training of European social researchers in comparative quantitative measurement and analysis;
- to improve the visibility and outreach of data on social change among academics, policymakers, and the wider public.
The ESS data is available free of charge for non-commercial use and can be downloaded from this website after a short registration.
The Director of the ESS ERIC is Professor Rory Fitzgerald, and the ESS ERIC Headquarters are located at City, University of London. In Finland, the ESS is coordinated at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Turku. From the beginning, the National Coordinator has been Professor of Social Policy, Heikki Ervasti. Fieldwork in Finland has been implemented by Statistics Finland.
The multidisciplinary FLUX consortium seeks evidence-based solutions for influencing and adapting to changes in fertility dynamics that accelerate population ageing. The overarching goal is to improve the social and economic sustainability of Finnish society. FLUX focuses on the changing fertility and family dynamics in Finland and provides insights into (1) the underlying causes of the changes, (2) the effects these changes have on individuals and society, (3) the linkages of the dynamics with social and gender inequalities and psychosocial and economic well-being, and (4) how social and family policies at both the state and local government levels can tackle the challenges created by the low-fertility landscape. FLUX brings together leading researchers from demography and other key disciplines relevant to understanding the causes and consequences of changing fertility and family dynamics.
The four-year (2023–2027) Research Council of Finland project examines the “Reproduction Wars” in the United States after the constitutional right to abortion was overturned in June 2022, resulting in a respatialization of women’s bodily rights, contested within progressive and reactionary politics of each state. The project probes the topic through four specific lenses:
- law as lived experience
- rhetorical imaginaries
- transborder mobilities
- performative practices within the U.S.-Mexico transborder region
Surviving traumatic experiences requires a person to use resources that would have otherwise been targeted to learning new things, maintaining social relations, or engaging meaningful activities. Children fleeing from their home country, due to war and violence, have experienced multiple traumatic events and some of them suffer from mental health problems. This may affect their ability to learn. In this project, we develop, pilot and implement a new tool to be used in the school system for evaluating and supporting the mental health, cognitive functions and social competence of refugee children. The gains are twofold. First, we gain groundbreaking data of individual differences on cognitive functions, mental health and social competence among refugee children, and are able to compare it to that of other immigrant children and native Finnish children. Second, we can offer knowledge to support the learning and school belonging at the first stage of refugee children’s school career.
