SOC200 - Paradigms (Chapters 2 + 4) Flashcards
PARADIGM
model/framework for observation + understanding which shapes what we see + how we understand it
•Powerful for how we see things/limit what we are seeing
•How we are socialized influences how we perceive things
•represent variety of views – offers insights others lack + ignores aspects of social life others reveal
Early Positivism: Auguste compte
elements of sociology can be traced back to enlightenment
•coined term, driven by idea that society can be explained scientifically
•In 1800s was radical idea, most ppl didn’t inquire about society
Early Positivism
- Positivism: using stats, discovering universal law, quantitative
- Compte saw it as relying on science to understand society not religion
- Replace religion + mythical understanding
Conflict Paradigm: Marx
- Observe poverty + economic dislocation due to industrial revolution
- Social behaviour oriented around conflict by owners of production + those who don’t, attempt dominate others + avoid being dominated
- Applied when group has competing interests
Conflict Paradigm: Marx
- Rise in capitalism: capital concentrated in small upper class
- Majority can only sell labour
- George Zimmel: conflict in small group processes – intimacy
- Groups with competing interest
Symbolic interactionism
common understanding on how to interact
•Cooley: looking glass self
•Similar to psychology theories
•More focused on common understanding betw ppl in participation in social life
•Mead: take role of other, process of ppl reaching common understanding through language + other symbolic systems
Ethnomethodology: ppl methodology
•Structures continually made as ppl interect
•Interactions follow general pattern but has some difference
•Focused on communication
Garfinkel – ppl continually creating social structure through actions + interactions, creating their realities
Ethnomethodology: ppl methodology
•Big on breaching experiments: violation of social norms (elevator)
•How submicrolevel interactions (gestures) can maintain social order
everyone is continuously trying to make sense of life, acting like a social scientist
Structural Functionalism
not as popular, viewing society as a whole organism – made up of parts each contributes to functioning of the whole
•Parsons, Durkheim
•Seek to understand roles played in larger society as way of understanding why they persist + how eliminate them
Feminist Paradigms
way of understanding society incorporating gender
•recognizing gender inequality
•doesn’t see other paradigms as taking into account viewpoint of women + must include women’s experiences + standpoints
•Focused on gender diff + how they relate to rest of social organization
•Counters to male worldview that dominates in theory + research
6 Social Science Paradigms
Points of view grounded in assumptions about reality (a way of looking at the world)
•Moving into different paradigms seen as progress, never goes backward
•In social science, we never really drop one
(Social) Theory
Interrelated statements intended to explain what we actually see (according to the paradigm)
attempts to systematically explain observations in life
Macrotheory Topics
Studies large aggregate entities:
-Struggle among economic classes (Marx)
-Interrelation among major institutions
aimed at understanding big picture of institutions, whole societies + interactions among societies
Microtheory Topics
understanding social life at intimate level of individuals & small groups + interactions
- student-faculty interactions
- conversation analysis
DEDUCTIVE MODEL OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
- Interest + theory: hard to say which comes first
- Axiom/postulate: uncontested premises
- Concept: general ideas related to research
- Proposition: conclusions about relationships, drawn from postulates
DEDUCTIVE MODEL OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
- Hypothesis: specified expectations from empirical reality
- Operationalization: defining variable + how you’re going to measure it
- Groups, category, variables, attributes
DEDUCTIVE MODEL OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
- Testable Hypothesis: only focus on operational variables, what we work with
- Observation: see whether observation confirm hypothesis
- Move back to working hypothesis + re-evaluate theory
EXPLORATORY Research: pilot study
When examining new interest/subject of study
•problem not clearly defined beforehand
•Satisfies researcher’s initial curiosity
•Tests feasibility of more in depth study
•Helps develop methods to be used in a subsequent study
EXPLORATORY Research
- Rarely provide satisfactory answers to questions
- Popular in marketing + stats Canada
- Narrow + small sample
- Seldom definitive because of representativeness
DESCRIPTIVE
Careful + precise scientific observation + description of events/relationships, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, HOW?
•precursor to explanatory study seeking to examine why the described pattern exists
•Just to highlight relationships that already exists
DESCRIPTIVE
eg. Marketing studies giving a breakdown of consumer behaviour by demographic + economic characteristics
•Canadian Census publications
•Don’t attempt to explain why
EXPLANATORY: WHY?
seeks to clarify relationships betw variables through
hypotheses
CAUSALITY versus CORRELATION
•In academic papers
•Often helpful in confirming + disconfirming theory
RESEARCH
- Research likely contains all 3
* Start out in exploratory, then describe, then explain
Idiographic Explanation
exhaust the idiosyncratic causes of condition/event
full + complete understanding of relationship + its causes
•Scope of the explanation limited to case at hand
•Intent is to explain one case fully
•Mostly qualitative
Nomothetic Explanation
•Seeks explanations that can be generalized to a class of situations
•Only partial explanations
•Intent is to explain most substantive factors driving the relationship
seek to identify few causal factors that influence a class of conditions or events
CAUSATION IN IDIOGRAPHIC MODELS OF EXPLANATION
series of events,thoughts/actions result in particular event/outcome concerned with context + understanding outcome as part of interrelated set of larger circumstances
retrospective approach to understanding makes it deterministic model of causality because it is explaining what already happened
CAUSATION IN IDIOGRAPHIC MODELS OF EXPLANATION
Reliance on retrospective piecing together of events and relationships makes it difficult to definitively establish one causal story over another. Leaves the research open to alternate explanations.
CAUSATION IN NOMOTHETIC MODELS OF EXPLANATION
Belief that variation in one variable followed by variation in other variable
focus on partial but substantive explanations makes it probabilistic
Exceptional cases do not disconfirm the pattern
CAUSATION IN NOMOTHETIC MODELS OF EXPLANATION
Partial explanations, though they may claim to be a general law, do not give a complete picture of what causes the relationship
more open to misunderstanding and misinterpretation
THREE MAIN CRITERIA IN NOMOTHETIC CAUSALITY: variables must be correlated
When one variable changes, so does the other to a substantial degree
THREE MAIN CRITERIA IN NOMOTHETIC CAUSALITY: cause must precede the effect
Often the ordering of two variables in the social sciences is unclear
THREE MAIN CRITERIA IN NOMOTHETIC CAUSALITY: variables must be nonspurious
detected correlation between the IV and DV cannot be greatly explained by a third IV that is correlated with the DV
•Spurious relationships: coincidental statistical correlation betw two variables that is shown to be caused by some third variable
STUDY DESIGN and CAUSALITY
Studies that collect data over time are useful for establishing causality in the social sciences
Temporal sequence is often crucial for ruling out spurious relationships – another key criterion for establishing causality
STUDY DESIGNS AND THE TIME DIMENSION
- Cross Sectional: one point in time
- Cohort: following group of same age range
- Not studying same ppl, but studying ppl in same generation 10 years later
STUDY DESIGNS AND THE TIME DIMENSION
- Trend: looking at age group of ppl at diff points in time
- Panel*: same ppl over time
- Panel attrition: ppl dropping out before study is over
Necessary cause
represents condition that must be present for effect to follow
•Discovering cause that is both necessary and sufficient is most satisfying outcome in research
•Never discover a single causes that are absolutely necessary and absolutely sufficient when analyzing them
Sufficient cause
represents condition that, if present, guarantees of fact in question
•Doesn’t mean only possible cause of particular effect
•It is not uncommon to find causal factors that are 100% necessary or 100% sufficient
