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15 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Sociology |
The study of human society. |
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Social Imagination |
The ability to see the connections between our personal experience and the larger forces of history. |
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Social Institution |
A complex group of interdependent positions that, together, perform a social role and reproduce themselves over time; also defined in a narrow sense as any institution in a society that works to shape the behavior of the groups or people within it. |
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Verstehen |
German for "understanding." The concept of Verstehen comes from Max Weber and is the basis of interpretive sociology in which researchers imagine themselves experiencing the life positions of the social actors they want to understand rather than treating those people as objects to be examined. |
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Anomie |
A sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no longer reasonably expect life to be predictable; too little social regulation; normlessness. |
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Positivist sociology |
A strain within sociology that believes the social world can be described and predicted by certain describable relationships (akin to a social physics). |
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Double consciousness |
A concept conceived by W. E. B. Du Bois to describe the two behavioral scripts, one for moving through the world and other incorporating the external opinions of prejudiced onlookers, which are constantly maintained by African Americans. |
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Functionalism |
The theory that various social institutions and processes in society exist to serve some important (or necessary) function to keep society running. |
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Conflict theory |
The idea that conflict between competing interests is the basic, animating force of social change and society in general. |
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Symbolic interactionism |
A micro-level theory in which shared meanings, orientations, and assumptions form the basic motivations behind people's actions. |
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Postmodernism |
A condition characterized by a questioning of the notion of progress and history, the replacement of narrative within pastiche, and multiple, perhaps even conflicting, identities resulting from disjointed affiliations. |
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Social constructions |
An entity that exists because people behave as if it exists and whose existence is perpetuated as people and social institutions act in accordance with widely agreed-upon formal rules or informal norms of behavior associated with that entity. |
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Midrange theory |
A theory that attempts to predict how certain social institutions tend to function. |
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Microsociology |
A branch of sociology that seeks to understand local interactional contexts; its method of choice are ethnographic, generally including participant observation and in-depth interviews. |
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Macrosociology |
A branch of sociology generally concerned with social dynamics at a higher level of analysis- that is, across the breadth of a society. |
