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56 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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What is the definition of Sociology?
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The scientific study of interactions and relations among human beings
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What is the Thomas theorem?
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If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences
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What is Comte's Law of Three Stages?
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Stage one: theological stage - religious leaders were the major sources of knowledge and intellectual authority
Stage two: metaphysical - people turned to philosophers for guidance Stage three: scientific - knowledge is based on scientific principles |
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What is mechanical solidarity?
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When people in the community function together as a simple machine based on their similar circumstances, goals, values, and ideas
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What is organic solidarity?
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When people function as a complex entity that depends on the proper functioning of a variety of parts, or organs; people use specialized occupations
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What is collective conscience?
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Similar circumstances that lead people to have shared ideas, values, and goals
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What is sui generis?
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A unique reality of their own, that social facts must be distinguished from individual biological or psychological facts
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What is a social fact?
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Manners of acting, thinking, and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control
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What is Gemeinschaft?
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Intimate associations
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What is Gesellschaft?
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Impersonal associations
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What is rational behavior?
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People act on motives and tend to see others more of a means to an end; it is calculating and efficient
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What is nonrational behavior?
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Behavior that is not especially geared to achieving some goal but simply to be experienced or appreciated for itself
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What is proletariat?
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Workers - the people who survived by selling their labor to the bourgeoisie
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What is bourgeoisie?
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The people who own the means of production - specifically the owners of the factories that produced the goods sold and distributed throughout society`
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Marx's epiphenomenal theory
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Economy comes first, everything else - ideas, values, social conventions, art, literature, morals, law, and even religion are secondary to the services of the economic realities of society
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Survival of the fittest
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Spencer's notion that only the superior ought to prosper
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Jane Addams
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The first sociologist to win the Nobel Prize
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W.E.B. DuBois
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The first African American to receive a Ph. D from Harvard University - argued against Marx and focused on racial differences
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What is sociological imagination?
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The ability to look beyond personal troubles of individuals to see the public issues of social structure
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Suicide rates and integration
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Suicide is a social issue - the rate of suicide varies with the degree to which people have strong ties to their social groups
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Institutional racism
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Racism is a result of factors built into social systems, because of this individuals may get locked into a larger pattern of racist behavior, perhaps without being aware or able to resist
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Manifest consequences
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Intended and obvious
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Latent consequences
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Unintended and frequently hidden
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Functions vs. Dysfunctions
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Functions are consequences of actions both manifest and latent
Dysfunctions are latent consequences that have a positive effect on society |
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What is the uncertainty principle?
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There are important limits on science's ability to measure and predict the behavior of physical objects - impossible to measure, predict, or know both the position and momentum simultaneously of a particle with precision in both
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Albert Einstein
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Rejected Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - thus did not agree with fuzzy objects
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Chaos theory
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A very small initial difference may lead to an enormous change to the outcome - butterfly effect
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Topic Areas in sociology
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Age, art, culture, economy, environment, gender, law, military, etc. basically anything that can be put into a category
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What is a paradigm?
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A framework or model of the world based on assumptions about the nature of the social world
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Functionalist paradigm
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Three major assumptions: 1. great deal of consensus about what values and norms are important in society 2. society is an entity that is made up of many integrated parts 3. Society tends to seek stability
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The Conflict paradigm
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three assumptions - 1. within society there are subgroups of people who cherish different beliefs and have conflicting values and goals 2. society is made up of subgroups that are ruthless competitors for scarce resources 3. Society is never harmonious
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The Symbolic Interactionist paradigm
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four assumptions - 1. how people act depends on how they evaluate reality 2. people learn from others how to see and evaluate society 3. people work to interpret their own behavior and others to determine what these behaviors mean 4. when people do associate meanings to behaviors in the same way there is misunderstanding and conflict
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Microsociology
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Focus on the interactions of individuals and the context of those interactions
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Macrosociology
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Focus on broader social phenomena such as whole social structures, systems, and institutions
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Empirical
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Things that can be observed through the use of one's physical senses
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Inconvenient facts
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Max Weber - pieces of evidence that contradict what you have always believed and/ or want to believe about the social world
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Ethnocentrism
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The process of judging other peoples and their customs and norms as inferior to one's own people, customs, and norms
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Genocide
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"Ethnic cleansing" - mass murder of a group of people that are seen as a threat and inferior
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Culture shock
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A feeling of disorientation from encounters with different cultures that challenge one's taken-for-granted assumptions about the way things are and ought to be
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Napoleon Chagnon's experience with Yanomamo
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Met an Indian culture that was very different from Europe and managed to absorb their culture after more than a year of living with them
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Cultural Relativism
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The belief that other people and their ways of doing things can be understood only in terms of the cultural context of those people
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Variables
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Concepts or constructs of interest to us
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Attribute
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A characteristic or a quality that describes a thing
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Hypothesis
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The result of relationships between different variables
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Independent variable
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A variable that is believed to influence another variable (to be a cause)
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Dependent variable
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A variable that is thought to be influenced by the independent variable (to be an effect)
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Positive relations
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Variables that vary in the same direction
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Negative relations
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Variables that vary in the opposite direction
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Operational definitions
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Transforming the variables into things that can be observed and measured by listing its attributes
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Steps for tables and figures
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1. Carefully examine title of table 2. Determine the source of the data 3. Read any notes that accompany table or figure 4. examine footnotes 5. Look for trends in the data - horizontally or vertically
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Mean, Median, Mode
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Mean: add up all values and divide by the number of cases
Median: the number in the middle of a set of numbers Mode: the number that occurs most frequently in the set of numbers |
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Quantitative research
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Data that is easily expressed in numbers
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Qualitative research
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Focuses on objective nature of behavior and its meaning (or quality)
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The literature review
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Secondary research - the first stage of research to review existing literature on a topic
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Survey
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A series of questions asked of a number of people
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Self-administered questionnaire
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To give people a list of questions on paper and ask them to write their own answers
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