Exam 1 Flashcards
Sociology
Definition
The systematic (scientific) study of human societies and the social structures (relations, institutions, characters) people create interacting with one another (human behavior) in the many groups that make up a society
Social institutions
Definition
•A web of social relations
•The relatively permanent structural arrangements centered around the tasks of meeting the important material and nonmaterial requirements of a society
•Institutions contribute to the maintenance and continuance of any society
Functionalism, Conflict theory, Symbolic Interactionism
Comparison
Functionalism
✓Developed the concept of a social fact
✓Provided an analysis of the roots of social solidarity
✓Provided an analysis of religion as a force in modern life
Emphasize on social stability made it difficult to theorize social change
Theorizing how things play in maintaining social order
Conflict Theory
•Explains social organization and change in terms of the conflict built into social relationships
•Asks: Functional for whom? Who benefits? Who loses?
•Weakness: Overlooks the forces of stability, equilibrium, and consensus in society
Freedom
Symbolic Interactionism
✓Interpretative Sociology
✓Key Question: “What motivates behavior?”
✓Introduced an interpretation of individual actions
Individual to individual
✓Proposed a typology of different kinds of social actions differentiated by motivations that guide them
Durkheim, Marx, Weber
Comparison
Durkheim & Functionalism
Marx Conflict Theory
Weber & Symbolic Interactionism
Experiment, Survey, Participant Obs, Content Analysis
Definitions
Experiment- a scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact.
Survey- a general view, examination, or description of someone or something.
Participant observation- a research method where the researcher immerses themself in a particular social setting or group, observing the behaviors, interactions, and practices of the participants.
Content analysis- a research tool used to determine the presence of certain words, themes, or concepts within some given qualitative data
Sampling and Generalization
Definitions
Sampling- the process by which a researcher takes a smaller group from the target population she/he is interested in studying.
generalization- an observable trend that is generalized throughout a society or community, but it is not a specific law or rule of interaction
Reliability and validity
reliability- concerned with the accuracy of the actual measuring instrument or procedure
validity- concerned with the study’s success at measuring what the researchers set out to measure
Social relations
•Stable patterns of conduct (interactions) between:
•Social Statuses (Individuals)
•Groups
•Institutions
•Nation States
•That are recurrent in time and space
Social character
A cultural and interactional style that distinguishes one group, community and/or society from another
Ecology
The effect the physical environment has on the organization of human communities
Demography
the statistical study of human populations. Demography examines the size, structure, and movements of populations over space and time. It uses methods from history, economics, anthropology, sociology, and other fields.
Sociological imagination
Personal troubles
Public issues
Biography/history
Sociological imagination-
we should look at the intersection of our personal stories with the larger social context
•This is developing the ability to grasp the relationship between individual lives (biography) and the larger social forces (relations, institutions, and characters) that shape them
an ability to see the context which shapes your individual decision making, as well as the decisions made by others
an awareness of the relationship between who we are as individuals and the social forces that shape our lives.
Personal troubles- obstacles that individuals face as individuals rather than as a consequence of the social position.
Solvable within self
1 kid has a cavity
Public issues- obstacles that individuals in similar positions face; aka social problems
Solvable by public fugures, public solutions
60% if kids gave cavities
Biography/history- organized sports
Baseball and football example
Social Fact
A social fact, is any phenomenon that exercises control over the lives of individuals due to its been accepted as a norm by a large number of people.
The French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined the term, and argued that the discipline of sociology should be understood as the empirical study of social facts.
Commodity Fetishism
Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things (money and merchandise) and not as relationships that exist among people.
Social Action
an act which takes into account the actions and reactions of individuals.
According to Max Weber, “Action is ‘social’ insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course.”
