Sociology Midterm-deck 1 Flashcards
Sociological Imagination
ability to connect personal biography with historical and structural context
Make the familiar strange
awareness of relationship between individual and society
3 categories of norms
Folkways, mores, laws
Folkways
Customs, traditions, habits
Mildly enforced
Manners, dress, eating behaviors
If violate: just seen as odd
Mores
Very strong norms, strictly enforced
bigamy, incest, cannibalism
if violate: strong negative judgement, may lead to arrest
Laws
designed, maintained and enforced by political authority
speeding tickets, taxes, murder
Legal consequences, social reactions will vary
- Group Loyalty
Violation: apostasy
- Privacy
Violation: intrusion
- Prudence
Careful, good judgement to avoid consequences
violation: Indiscretion (lack of good judgement)
- Conventionality
Violation: bizarreness
- Responsibility
Violation: Irresponsibility
6.Participation
Violation: Alienation
7.Moderation
Violation: Hedonism (self-indulgence) and asceticism (avoidance of all indulgence)
8.Honesty
Violation: Deceitfulness
- Peacefulness
Violation: Disruption
- Courtesy
Violation: uncouthness/rudeness
3 questions good sociologist asks
- What is the structure of this particular society?
- Where does this society stand in human history?
- What varieties of men and women prevail in this society and in this period?
Theory
Set of statements to explain phenomenon
Both explanatory and predictive
Constructing good theory - scientists main goal
Functionalism (Organicism)
Macrosociology
World is stable, ongoing entity- endures rather than changes; societal stability
Society as a system – a sum of interrelated parts which work together (in function) to maintain & restore equilibrium & stability
Functions are neutral (not good or bad)
Value consensus rather than conflict
Society as a living organism with parts contributing to survival
Parson’s functionalism
If a social institution or other aspect of social life is not functional, it will not be passed on across generations
Therefore, if a social institution or other aspect of social life has been passed on, it is somehow functional
Manifest functions
open, stated, and conscious functions of
institutions that involve the intended, recognized consequences of an aspect of society
Latent functions
unconscious or unintended functions that
may reflect hidden purposes of an institution
ex. Mrs degree from college
Critiques of functionalism
Society is social, not biological
doesn’t account for change
Conflict perspective
Social change occurs through conflict Inequalities are unfair, expense less powerful
groups
Sees social behavior in terms of tension between groups over power or the allocation of resources
Is impressed with social change (not endurance) over time
Symbolic Interactionism
-uses everyday (microsociological) forms of interaction to help generate ideas that will ultimately help us to explain society as a whole
-focuses on local contexts, not large societies
-individuals and groups act purposefully to secure their ends and create
meaning
-motivated by learned values, not materials
-people seek to create meaning for themselves
Symbols
- anything that displays meaning
- can be object, language, non-verbal behavior
Social Construction of Reality (Thomas)
An entity in a social system that is constructed by participants in a particular culture or society because people:
agree to behave as if it exists or concur on
following certain conventional rules around it
-people interacting in a social system create a concept/representation of each other’s actions, and these concepts become habituated into roles played by members of society
Cycle of Meaning (Blumer)
signs and signals have different meaning for different societies, based on shared interactions between people
the meaning of something is a social product, not inherent in things
Dramaturgical theory of social
interaction (Goffman)
Social life as a theatrical performance
we are all actors on a stage
front stage and back stage versions of ourselves
Operationalization
Define what you are trying to measure
Define how you are going to measure the variables of interest
Creating measurement of the abstract
Independent Variable
a measured factor that the researcher believes has a causal impact on the dependent variable
Dependent Variable
Outcome researcher is trying to explain
Validity
the degree to which a measure or scale
truly reflects the phenomena under study
Reliability
the extent to which a measure
produces consistent results
Proving causation
- Determine correlation
- Determine direction
- Eliminate confounds/ alternative explanations
Steps to research
Select a topic • Define a problem • Review the literature • Formulate a hypothesis • Choose a research method • Collect data • Analyze results • Share results
High culture
held in highest esteem by a culture
pursuit of intellectual refinement
Material culture
everything that is part of our constructed environment
books, fashion, monuments
Nonmaterial culture
non-physical; values, beliefs, behaviors, norms
included language through the meanings we assign to words
concepts such as class and inequality
Cultural relativism
to recognize differences across cultures without passing judgement on, or assigning value to those differences
Subculture
a group united by sets
of concepts, values, traits, and/or behavioral patterns that distinguish it from others within the same culture or society
ex. youth culture vs. mainstream adult culture
dating vs. hookup culture
Sociological imagination- view on dating/hook-up culture
your individual experience of courtship depends on the economic and historical place you are in
• Had you been born at a different time, you would experience something completely different
changes occurred due to invention of birth control, acceptance of abortion
