Quiz 1 Flashcards
Industrial Revolution
Created a host of new and serious social problems that attracted the attention of social thinkers (1780)
Functionalism
Main focus: values
Main question: how do the institutions of society contribute to value consensus and,thus, social stability
Ideal society: equilibrium
Macro
Theory
A hypothesis about relationship between observed facts.
Used to explain
Sociology
The systematic study of human behaviour in social context
Sociological imagination
The capability to understand the distinction between a person’s troubles and public issues
Values
- Ideas about what is right/wrong and good/bad
* inform what issues sociologists consider important and what theories they favour to study them
Manifest and latent functions
- manifest function: intended and easily observed
- latent function: unitended and less observed
Protestant ethic
Reduction of religious doubts and assurance of a state of grace achieved by working diligently and living modestly
Max Weber
Initiated symbolic interactions.
Argued that early development was facilitated by certain religious beliefs
Verstehende
Understanding of peoples motives and meanings
Proletariat and Bourgeois
- proletariat/worker: people who must sell their labour
- bourgeois/owner: owners of the means of production
Symbolic Interactionism
Main focus: meaning
Main question: how do individuals communicate so as to make their settings meaningful?
Ideal society: respect for the minority views
Micro
Feminist Theory
Main focus: patriarchy
Main question: which social structures and interaction processes maintain male dominance and female subordination
Ideal society: reduction of gender inequality
Micro and macro
Patriarchy
Societal system of male-domination
Hawthorne effect
When people act differently because they know they are being watched
Spuriousness
A statistical relationship between 2 variables
Hypothesis
A question, hunch, or well-conceived conjecture about how the world works
Causation
Involves relationship between 2 variables:
- where a change in one variable produces change or variation in a second variable
- multiple causes are involved in almost every social-scientific explanation
Independent and dependant variable
- independent: hypothesized cause
- dependent: hypothesized effect
Reliability
Consistency with which something can be measured
-a measurement is reliable if it is consistent or repeatable
Validity
Refers to accuracy or relevancy
- am I a measuring what I say
Ethnography
Researchers attempt to provide a de tailed “insiders account” of a particular way of life or culture system
Participant observation
Study of social life that involves the participation of researcher, to varying degrees, in the activities of the group under investigation
Robert Merton
Social structure may have different consequences for different categories of people (manifest and latent functions)
A functionalist
Micro and macro structures
- micro: intimate social relations
- macro: social class relations, patriarchy
Altruistic/anomic/egoistic suicide
Altruistic: occurs when social group involvement is too high (falling on a grenade)
Anomic: cause by lack of social regulation (after bankruptcy or after winning the lottery)
Egoistic: the absence of social interaction (has no friends)
Karl Marx
- all elements of a society’s structure depend on its economic structure
- initiated conflict theory
Mechanical and organic solidarity
- mechanical solidarity: social integration of members of a society who have common values and beliefs
- organic solidarity: social integration that arises out of the need of individuals for one another’s services
Qualitative and quantitative methods
- Quantitive: numbers and statistics
- Qualitative: words and meanings
Durkheim
-demonstrated that suicide rates are strongly influenced by social forces.
