Sociology Definitions 1

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Positivism

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The idea that you can apply the scientific method to the social world and come up with universal laws about the social world

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Sociology

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The scientific study of society

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Microanalysis

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A sociological approach that focuses on personal experience of social life or on small-scale interactions between individuals

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Macroanalysis

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A sociological approach that focuses on the study of large-scale social phenomena such as social institutions, populations, demographic trends, and modes of production

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Social Constructionist Perspective

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A perspective that treats human knowledge as the product of human social activity. Objects of knowledge do not simply exist; they are meaningful insofar as they are constructed within a culture.

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Critical Thinking

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A way of thinking about the social world that involves questioning taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs, and recognizing and exploring the constructed nature of social reality. Critical thinking tends to be tentative in its conclusions, fluid, and marked by an ethic of responsibility for its own motivations and commitments

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Taken for Granted

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The process of giving meaning to the world on the basis of unexamined assumptions. A non critical approach to social explanation simply accepts cultural assumptions without bothering to question or examine them

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Ethnocentrism

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A belief in the superiority of one’s own culture; an inability to see or accept the existence or validity of cultural differences

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Cultural Relativism

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A point of view arguing that judgments of value, or of right and wrong, are culturally specific. The study of culture thus necessarily entails suspending one’s own cultural assumptions, at least provisionally, and studying cultures in relation to each other rather than on their own merits

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Sociological Imagination

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The objective of using a sociologic imagination is to produce an understanding of, or knowledge about human experience that both recognizes the individual’s experiences and places those experiences in a larger social, cultural, historical, political, and economic context.