Lecture 3 Flashcards
Brand Communities
Brand communities afford individuals and groups a sense of membership; the community bonds off its shared interests and enthusiasms
How are brand communities reproduced?
In celebrating brands, the community helps to produce (and reproduce) their value
Examples of brand community get-togethers
social media, meetings, conventions
cultural cognitivists
borrow heavily from the discipline of psychology; import terms and try to apply it to the sociology of culture
Khan and Jerolmack’s study
Went to an elite institution to see how students perceive their work; found that students often do not actually work as hard as they say they do
Vaisey
set out to better understand the relationship between culture and action
what Vaisey was opposed to
culture as a “toolkit” or “repertoire” of resources
What are the two tracks of cognition in dual processes models of cognition?
- a slow, cognitively demanding and deliberate track
- a quick, non-deliberate and largely unconscious track
how a deliberate track is accessed
very easily through talk
surveys
pose a series of questions to respondents, and these may be either open-ended or close-ended survey questions
What surveys are useful for
capturing a large volume of info in a short amount of time
mutually exclusive survey questions
response options do not overlap with eachother
exhaustive survey questions
all possible answers/response options have been provided for respondents
three types of interviews
structured, semi-structured, unstructured
meta-feelings
how we feel about our feelings
uses of interviews
allow researchers to access widely shared social scripts, meaning-making processes, and cultural schemas as well as emotions and meta-feelings
Interview info: the honorable
- The honorable is at work when interviewees provide information that positions themselves in a positive way
- This information is often consistent with broadly held beliefs or expectations about how one should or ought to act
- ex. “I would never steal because stealing is wrong”
interview info: the schematic
- The schematic is at work in how interviewees frame what they say or do
- Schematic information is often couched in particular turns of phrase and can also be communicated through body language
- Schematic information is sometimes (though by no means always) semi-conscious
- How someone draws connections
interview info: the visceral
- The visceral refers to the “emotional landscape” that our interviewees find themselves within, i.e. moral language and charged emotion
- Visceral information can be communicated both verbally or nonverbally through body language
- Accessing visceral information may require that an interviewer ‘read between the lines’
limits of interviews
- “blind spots”
- struggle to capture broad institutional structures and/or historical contexts
- do not always lend themselves to understanding relational outcomes even as much human behaviour is relational
- may produce a more flattering image of interviewees than is due
- not ideal for understanding all forms of behaviour
benefits of focus groups
- allow researchers to better capture relational dynamics
- tend to elicit more organic forms of conversation
amount of questions in an interview
12-15
ethnography
Ethnography involves observation and immersion within a population, social group, neighborhood or setting
benefits of ethnography
- allows researchers to capture behavior as it would ordinarily unfold
- ideal for capturing information about populations that might otherwise be difficult to access and for understanding how actions and reactions are situated within specific social worlds
Mears Very Important People
- Mears provides a window into the exclusive world of elites
- From yacht parties in Monaco to underground clubs in New York City and Miami, she reports on 18 months immersed in a world replete with models and money
digital sociology
- Centers on the study of digital technologies and their data
- The digital refers to:
The topic of social inquiry
The instruments and methods of social research; and
The platforms for engaging with audiences
netnography observation
emphasizes unobtrusive observation and data collection
netnography immersion or embodiment
- Immersive netnography involves active participation as a member of a virtual/online community
- Interviews, informal conversations, and group chats often make up a part of immersive netnography
visual analysis
Well suited for images, representations, and texts
methods in visual analysis
- Content analysis
- Semiology
- Compositional interpretation
- Discourse analysis
coding
- a researcher will develop a coding scheme or an exhaustive list of codes that help to capture key patterns and observations
- Codes are typically descriptive and can be combined with other measures to understand how they relate to one another
