Archival Research

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Archival Research

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The use of existing records that have been produced or maintained by persons or organizations other than the researcher.

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Class Conflict:

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The view of Karl Marx that society is divided into those who own the means of producing wealth and those who do not, giving rise to struggles between classes.

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Constructed Reality:

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: Our experience of the world. Meaning is not something that inheres in things; it is a property that derives from, or arises out of, the interaction that takes place among people in the course of their daily lives.

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Control Group

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The group that affords a neutral standard against which the changes in an experimental group can be measured.

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Correlation

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A change in one variable associated with a change in another variable.

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Dependent Variable

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The variable that is affected in an experimental setting.

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Dialectical Materialism

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The notion in Marxist theory that development depends on the clash of contradictions and the creation of new, more advanced structures out of these clashes.

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Dysfunctions:

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Observed consequences that lessen the adaption or adjustment of a system.

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Economic Determinist

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A believer in the doctrine that economic factors are the primary determinants of the structure of societies and social change.

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Experiment:

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A technique in which researchers work with two groups that are identical in all relevant respects. They introduce a change in one group, but not in the other group. The procedure permits researchers to test the effects of an independent variable on a dependent variable.

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Experimental Group

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The group in which researchers introduce a change in an experimental setting.

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Functions

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Observed consequences that permit the adaption or adjustment of a system.

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Hypothesis

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A proposition that can be tested to determine its validity.

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Independent Variable

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The variable that causes an effect in an experimental setting.

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Latent Functions

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Consequences that are neither intended nor recognition by the participants in a system.

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Macrosociology

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The study of large-scale and long-term social processes.

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Manifest Functions

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Consequences that are intended and recognized by the participants in a system.

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Microsociology

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The detailed study of what individuals say, do, and think moment by moment as they go about their daily lives.

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Participant Observation

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A technique in which researchers engage in activities with the people that they are observing.

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Power

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The ability of individuals and groups to realize their will in human affairs even if it involves the resistance of others.

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Random Sample

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A sampling procedure in which researchers select subjects on the basis of chance so that every individual in the population has the same opportunity to be chosen.

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Social Darwinism

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The application of evolutionary notions and the concept of survival of the fittest to the social world.

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Social Dynamics

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Those aspects of social life that pattern institutional development and have to do with social change.

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Social Facts

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Those aspects of social like that cannot be explained in terms of the biological or mental characteristics of the individual. People experience the social fact as external to themselves in the sense that t has an independent reality and forms a part of their objective environment.

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Social Statics

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Those aspects of social life that have to do with order and stability and that allow societies to hold together and endure.