Sociology

values

the belief system that shape sociologists views of perspectives on the world we study

causality

the belief that one factor or phenomenon is leading to changes in another, that can't be substantiated with the data accessible to us. social scietists try to figure out what causes what

Bourgeoise

focused on money factory owners, own means of production, new middle class, powerful class...own the ways to create wealth**

Proletariat

focused on working people who work in the factories, rest of us, don't own anything, they knock on doors and say can we work

eric klinenberg

"going solo" identified patterns of single adults, 10% of population were single and they were usually men (1950) 21st century, 28%, increasing numbers of women conducted 300 interviews with single people, found they were more social than married people found out society assumptions were wrong, single people weren't awkward and unsocial, more social than married people

Industrialization***

***Forget all your problems just work hard. If you work hard you get more money. • Middle class society: Not rich not poor • Getting away from farms because it's slow, natural disasters can destroy it easily. • Never mattered how you got the money, just be successful

Coercion:

being forced to do something or else you get fired. If you get fired you cant pay bills. Student are "forced" to be at school. How are we being coerced to be here? We pay for school and we pay for the classes. If we don't go to school they take our money, we don't get money back. If we don't do what we're told we don't pay bills, don't have money for food, etc. Society forces people t do things otherwise they will be at the bottom.

stereotypes

beliefs about members of a group that are usually false, or at least exaggerated, but are the basis of assumptions made about individual members of the group

Prison and Society

A lot of people entering and exiting prisons US has largest prison population 25% of all prisoners 700,000 people enter and exit the US prison every year 2/3 of released prisoners will be rearrested within 3 years Ideal is people learn their lesson and come out of prison a different person, but a large amount is actually going back to prison. One of the most important ways to prevent it, is for the prisoners who get out, find good employment, but many cant because they are a felon. Sociologist say this is an issue and there is a pattern, and they are looking for causes of the problems. When they can identify cause they can identify solutions.

differences from middle ages to scientific revolution

AUTHORITY Middle ages: authority scientific revolution: observation HUMAN NATURE Middle ages: unchanging scientific revolution: blank slate, tabula rasa (john locke) ECONOMY middle ages: agriculture scientific revolution: industrial revolution SOCIETY middle ages: feudalism scientific revolution: class system

longitudinal data

collected over a long period of time to address questions more productively

Devah Pager "The Mark of a Criminal Record" (2003) Stage 1 of her study

Audit study: False background Two young black men, two young white men. 4 men in total. (one black one white had criminal record, while the other didn't). Drug felony spent 18 months in prison and was released a month ago 350 jobs (entry level jobs, don't need experience, just needed to graduate high school) response rate was 58% Entry level jobs are the easiest to get into 150 audits for white, 200 audits for blacks African americans needed more audits because they received few call backs in the first place, she needed to compensate to make sure to get more clear and precise data. She needed to make sure she was pin pointing what she needed Wanted to see how race effected Milwaukee, one of the most segregated in the US

sociology (foundational discipline) credited to

Auguste Comte

social movement***

collective action aimed at bringing about some kind of change in society

who coined the term Sociological Imagination

C. Wright Mills

View of Social Change Conflict theorists

Change takes place all the time and can have positive consequences Sociologist say social change is a positive thing, for instance this classroom would not look the same in 1950 especially by gender, and thats because there wouldn't be women in this class and a girl wouldn't be a professor, but social change occurred and now theres more equality between men and women in the US. Social change is necessary

Steps in Sociological Research(8)

Choosing and Issue Defining the Problem Reviewing the Literature Developing a hypothesis Designing a Project Collecting Data Analyzing the Data Reporting the Findings

Sociologist Richard Arum

Created a project that involved 2,000 students as they progressed through 24 diverse college universities. Wanted to see how many students left college to work, live with friends, move in with partners, or go back with parents students had different college experiences and learning outcomes some had good paying jobs straight out of college while 24% went back living w/ parents What explains the different outcomes? Maria: Good student, AP, studied 20 hours per week, studied abroad, had good expectations from teachers, worked and earned 38,000 per year, improvement on tests Robert: Bad student, distracted by friends, no AP, bad SAT, 30,000 in debt, live with parents, no improvement on tests Questions: How do students' lives before college shape their experience in college?...Did Maria's parents have high expectations? Did Robert's parents teach him to value friends more? How does the social organization of college life shape students' experiences?... Did Maria have more success because of the college context that encouraged engagement? Did Robert fail to succeed because he lacked support from academic context? Does the experience of college benefit everyone equally? Did Maria have a wealth advantage which allowed her to be the mo re privileged individual? Or did the advantages get reversed based on how they spend their time in college? Does the new technology have something to do with it?

What effects the way individuals develop?

DIFFERENT CONTEXTS

"The Mark of a Criminal Record" (2003) written by who?

Devah Pager

social theorists

Different thinkers have social theories. They try to see how and why it works It helps to connect different social facts and social theory explains how and why those social facts are connected Example: Students filed into class and we did it because we have been socialized since we were littler kids to sit down and listen to the teacher. Analogy: Going to the store; you go to the store and theres many departments in the store. You're in the produced markets, or the bakery, social theorists try to take a birds eye view of why is the produced place where it is, why are the dairy products placed at the back of the grocery store, why are the floral things in the front. All the good smelling things and colorful things in the front? Why are the things that we need in the back? Because safeway and walmart is trying to make money. They make people look at other things that they don't need before buying the things they do need. Society is built in a certain way

Different contexts with examples

FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES CONTEXT... What family we are born into... ex: Our families teach us the basic rules of society (religious, ethic identities...how we act in public, interactions with people) ex: The neighborhood and community we grow up in, safe neighborhood/bad neighborhood lead to stress and victim of crime ex: encouraging family members and friends makes us ambitious and confident ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS CONTEXT ex: The schools we attend the organizations we join occupations we enter ex: These influence how successful we can be in the end. The connections we form can get us good jobs...schools, organizations etc also create our identity, it shows who we are as a person

Macro-level of analysis: Structural Functionalist

Having an expansive point of view or large point of view, taking an expansive few of society

Father of conflict theory and communism: Karl Marx (1818-1883)

He changed the way people saw the world people who are anti communist , still see the world in the view of marx because he shaped the way we saw the external world we need to see economy as important in our lives if 50% of people were unemployed that would have a dramatic effect on groups of people, but prior to marx people weren't asking those questions, they were focusing on other things...people now began to say wait we need to focus on these kinds of things Why is marx important to sociologist? He was living in the 1800's in german states, jewish, parents converted to christianity, he began to live in a time in europe when there was big change between feudalism and capitalism. Marx was kicked out of german states and he went to Manchester. His friend owned factory in Manchester. That's when capitalism started to spring up. People went to Manchester to work for the factories. But Marx started to see something... Began to see patterns.. at peak in industrial revolution, if they were working class adults had life span of 17 years. Mid upper class had an average life of 38 years. This was caused by living conditions, pollution, diseases, no public sanitation, people crowded into tenements. People and children live in unsafe conditions. Some people can't pay for health care, there was no health care unless you were at the very upper ends of social system. Marx saw people were dying so how could capitalism be a good thing? He questioned this Conflict Theorist: when you have inequality, the people in power are going to exploit those who don't have power Marx: two major classes that developed in capitalism... Bourgeoise(money) vs Proletariat(work) unstable and unequal relationship but people were so focused on capitalism and said we're free we're working, but marx says yeah but thats just so we work harder. If jared own a factory, they own everything, they have all overarching power. Marx: our false consciousness... if we work hard we will get to their point...people have the power to shape the unequal relationships Do people have unequal forms of power? People who make laws don't make things they do illegal Inherant Conflict

Devah Pager "The Mark of a Criminal Record" (2003) stage 2 of her study

comparing what they thought versus what they did the audit, what they would actually do versus what they said they would do they surveyed the employers to see would they actually hire someone with a criminal record, whether white or black They called and said what would you do and 60% said they said they would, but many of them did not call back. 61.9% of employers who took survey said they would be more likely to be considering of hiring with that kind of offense 61.7 said they would be very likely to

The Stanford Prison Experiment about/what he wanted to know/hypothesis (1971)

Helping to change the focus from very individualist focus to connecting us to broader society US is highly individualistic: everyone is their own independent entity, american dream, give accolades to people who do well individually, people who aren't doing well is individualistic. How do smaller settings shape our behavior prison guards were abusing the prisoners He wanted to know is it just that there were certain prison guards that were bad people? or is it the environment, can you be put in a brutal environment and even if you're the most kind person in the world, can you be seduced to act brutally? Were these prison guards just bad people, or were the prison environments just forcing people to act in a bad way So his hypothesis is that the apple barrel could effect people's behavior. Hypothesis: He would say when people are stable and when they get put in a brutal environment, they could be seduced to doing brutal activity, she setting somehow shaped our behavior

Major Sociological Perspective

How sociologist give meaning to all of this data that is out there...

Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

How we communicate with language or bodies...no verbal communication

social integration

If you become unemployed, do you have a group that can help you and that you can rely on. Do you have people to rely on or are you the type of person who says, "This is my responsibility and I have to deal with it on my own." How closely woven are you in the society or are you distant and have to do it on your own? People who are less socially integrated committed suicide more because if you cant rely on anyone you become really stressed out and you're alone. If you had someone to talk to they could help.

What was the social context that made people interested in this knew knowledge? (2)

Industrialization: the growth of factories and large-scale good production urbanization: the growth of cities

Limits to Devah Pagers study

It was only in one city and she knew that so she did try to compensate for that, because there were so little call backs for blacks, she had to use more blacks she replicated the same exact thing in new york city, and the results were the same new york is a predominately a non-white city, so that is interesting no study is going to be full proof, but there are other studies that are better than others she did good because she set up an experiment with people, in experiments its easier to establish causality. these social scietists try to figure out what causes what (causality)...how do you establish what causes what, what type of causality was pager trying to establish with her experiment? what kind of connection was she trying to make? Race effecting their job opportunity, and if they have a criminal record. If the crimincal record compounded with race, if that was the outcome to employment, she's trying to establish a form of causality

theoretical traditions

conceptual frameworks that sociologists use to imagine an make sense of the world

what is the Heart of sociology project

Learning how to ask the important questions and to think hard about how to probe for answers.

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) : structural functionalist 4 fathers of sociology

Living in a time fear of jewish people He was interested in morality, he was interested in us as people, good and evil, but he changed track and became a sociologist. He began to think about sociology more when one of his friends in college committed suicide and at the time in the late 1800 the common explanation to why someone would commit suicide is no matter what in society there will be a group of people who are not well adjusted and because of lack of adjustment they kill themselves, it's not outside forces its because they are not adapted No matter what society or what group there will always be the same number of people committing suicide because there will always be a couple people who will compete He believes that there was social forces that would influence a person to kill themselves so what he did was he wrote a book "suicide" 1897, he compares rates of suicide amongst different groups. He compared suicides rates between employed and unemployed individuals because he was trying to prove that outside factors could influence people to commit suicide. He found higher suicide rates in the unemployed He also found that single individuals committed more suicide than married people Protestants vs Catholics and Jews: Higher suicide rate was Protestants Difference between Protestant and Catholics: They are both christians Protestant revolution: People paid for salvation Protestants: Lutherans Protestant: idea of individualism, the individual had the responsibility of reading the bible, one person would have their own interpretation of the bible. Economic sense: I am working hard to be successful and my sign of working hard shows god that I'm good and I should go to heaven. Catholics and Jews: Are more collectivist, strong emphasis on the group. He tried to come up with a theory and thought that it has to be because of Social Integration

Mommy/Baby Prisons by who?

Lynne Haney

View of Social Order Structural Functionalist

Maintained through cooperation and agreement Student and teachers agree to be in school. Students believe that we are here because we want to be successful

How do we gather data about an issue?

Methodology:

social individuals

connected to other people in a variety of different ways

View of individual: Symbolic Interactionists

People manipulate symbols and create social worlds through interaction

View of the individual Conflict theorists: how are they shaped?

People shaped by power, coercion, and authority

The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) study by who?

Philip Zimbardo

View of Social Change Structural Functionalist

Predictable Teacher knows we will be here at 11:30, its predictable

Mommy/Baby Prisons

Researchers seem hopeful and optimistic about mommy and baby prisons because they think that one way to end the pain of incarceration and to stop the familial cycle of imprisonment was the keep women and children together, even if it meant for the children to be in prison Lynne didn't like the idea at first, but then started looking at the bigger picture and thought that maybe it was a good idea after all Moved to California and located her work into the facility and joined prison life (ethnographers) Lived in the prisons for over three years and observed many different moms and their children She went to group sessions, mothering classes, went to staff meetings, went to strategy sessions, and taught inmates creative writing By the end of her research she was very integrated that she had keys to the prison The longer she was there, the more she was convinced that it was a brutal place Kids seemed fine, three meals a day, education, healthcare, other kids to play with. Lived in prison well. Mothers were not okay Prison stripped them from all parental authority They were always ordered around and told what to do and where to go suffered from loss of privacy, never had one on one time with their kids (not allowed) mothers became extremely anxious and some collapsed of being under pressure

View of Social Order: Symbolic Interactionists

Shared understanding of everyday behavior, expectation

Why are the steps you take to gather data important?

So it is systematic, so we know there is logic to it. We aren't randomly gathering information. There is a plan to what you are doing to gather your data. You get accurate findings You have to have a well planned out methodology so that you have accurate data. You have to make sure it is valid. validates what you say and what you are doing

Social Theory: two kinds

Social Theorists and Structural Functionalist

Conflict Perspective

Structural functionalism is how society works together, but conflict perspectivist say no.

View of Social Change: Symbolic Interactionists

Symbolic interactionist say people obey and disobey laws based on past experiences, illuminate how unconscious biased play into social change to occuring, they are key in understanding biased gender race

Methodology:

Talking about steps you are taking to gather data

Dependent Variable

Variable/Factor that you expect to change The number of call backs is what she was measuring, depending on criminal record and race trying to establish if someone looks for a job and has a criminal record, or if criminal record does effect employment

cross sectional

data that is collected at one point in time

Correlation and example

The same thing happening over and over, there is a relationship between two variables, but it hasn't been established that one causes the other Example of correlation: on those days when there is an increase in sales with ice cream there are also increase of people drowning. If we think about causality, well then the purchase of ice cream causes, drowning, so do not buy ice cream, but we know there isn't causality, why? Because there is another factor at work, which is heat. We have to identity other factors that cause different events

who are conflict theorists and what do they think

Think that Society is rather based on constant tension and struggle between groups Conflict theorists thinks society is not nice and is not harmonious Take a Macro level view (Macro is big picture) They are very focused on inequality, capitalism(based on private profit and private property), and stratification

Independent Variable

Those factors that we expect to stand alone and not change in a study Ex: The independent variable is going to get a job with a criminal record and whether you are black or white. That does not change

conclusion of "The Mark of a Criminal Record"

Trying to identify a pattern Employers are unconscious of their stereotypes. Meaning they don't think they are being racist by hiring a white over a black.

empirical generalizability

apply conclusions from their findings to a larger population

what did Devah pager find?

White male who have jail time is still more likely to have a call back than an african american with no jail time.

Feudalism:

You are born into a class: Peasants, kings etc

society

a large group of people who live in the same area and participate in a common culture

society

a large group of people who live in the same area and participate in common culture

theoretical generalizability

apply conclusions from their findings to larger sociological processes

Capitalism

a rise in class system. It was going to bring freedom because people could move up and down in classes

surveys

asking standardized questions of large groups of people usually used when looking at patterns in behavior

eric klinenberg

author of chapter 5 culture media communication he did a study on single people and married people today increase industrialzed places us sweeten saying that we have assumptions about single people being really lonely and weird and based on studies he found that single people were involved in volunteer clubs than married people using him of how sociologists go beyond assumptions

norms

basic rules of society that help us know what is and is not appropriate to do in any situation

extended case method

a way of doing ethnography that emphasizes it contribution to social theory

interdisciplinary research***

an increasingly central part of learning about any topic in the social sciences

fieldwork

anthropologists...people who often carry out their research in foreign cultures

discrimination

any behavior, practice, or policy that harms, excludes, or disadvantages individuals on the basis of their group membership

thick descriptions

detailed descriptions of the ways they make sense of their lives, written from the perspectives of those people themselves

positivism

distancing ourselves from what we study, using universal standards to advance truth claims, determining cause and effect, and generalizing from part to whole

random sampling

everyone and/or everything has an equal chance of being selected for studying

research memo

extended versions of research notes organized analytically allows researchers to work through their findings and the evidence that supports them

What is capitalism

focus is private property and profit.

View of the individual Structural Functionalist

fulfill rolls to allow society to work more stabile people socialized to perform functions Teacher: has been socialized to provide a function. What is her function? To instruct students to be successful. Parents have a function to keep their children safe and raise them well.

Manifest Functions: Structural Functionalist

get an education and do well. There is a function or a purpose for students to be in class. There is a benefit to society for students being here, but what is it? Everyone is serving a function because we will hopefully all make good money and be good citizens, making society continue to function

interpretivism

goal is to understand how people give meaning to social life, objects, and processes-how they make sense of social reality and navigate social interaction

Unions***

group of people saying heres a picture showing what the problem is, capitalism(leaders get money and power), religious people (trying to control you), military(trying to hold you down, so these rich people can sit around.) Trying to make it sounds like the poor, the low, the workers, are being taken adv. of. It's poor vs. rich. Poor works while the rich sit around: called communist thinking.

Unions:

group of people saying heres a picture showing what the problem is, capitalism(leaders get money and power), religious people (trying to control you), military(trying to hold you down, so these rich people can sit around.) Trying to make it sounds like the poor, the low, the workers, are being taken adv. of. It's poor vs. rich. Poor works while the rich sit around: called communist thinking.

The Stanford Prison Experiment Actual Experiment and findings

guards started making fun of genitals Prisoners were sitting in beds, not doing anything guards went against the prisoners prisoners were woken up in middle of night, guards made them clean toilets in the middle of the nights, and forced to stand up, do exercises, other harassing things prisoner asked to leave, but Phillip said he would tell guards not to harass and just to report back to what other prisoners would do he went back and told others that they're never getting out prisoner started faking to be crazy, but then he became accessibly disturbed and very stressed so they let him go guards take frustration out on prisoners a new prisoner rebelled was there an effect in that small prison? yes Findings: even emotionally stable people can have unstable behavior based on setting, social setting does effect our behavior no matter who we are. Once they are put in a certain situation like prison guard, they act like the high power than those of the prisoners. How do we understand human behavior, that person is good, that person is bad, but is it a complex understanding of how they act and who they are as a person

Sociology is fundamentally concerned with what?

how individuals are influenced by society.

goals of society

identify patterns objectively access information look beyond assumptions

social hierarchy

important social relationships that provide individuals and groups with different kinds of status, in which some individuals and groups are elevated above others

Social context:

individuals lives unfold in context meaning... (infant example)... We could predict more accurately on the success of one babies life if we new the context, which would be childs immediate family, parents level of education, wealth and income, the neighborhood and community they will grow up in, the education the child gets, if the child attends churches or clubs, the type of employments, the country he/she was born into, the period in time they were born.

demographic data

information on the size, structure, or distribution, of the population

individuality

likes, dislikes, our interests and skills

institutions

longstanding and important practices (marriage, family, education, economic markets) and organizations that regulate those practices (the government, the military, schools, religion) provide the frameworks of our daily lives.

historical research

look at records and documents to understand how people, places, or things worked in the past

informed consent

making participation voluntary

comparative-historical perspective

method of analysis examining a social phenomenon over time or in different places

Industrialization

new technologies made it possible for factories to be created people who farm start moving to factories city life altered how politics was practiced, how work was done, how families were organized industrial economies had bigger problems than agricultural economies: high levels of poverty, early factories paid poorly, living in cities was expensive, cities were polluted, this was before public sanitation and public health, diseases, infant mortality, early death, crime/violence was more common, protest unpleasant conditions. Industrialization led to unions because it was now possible for dozens or hundreds of people to discuss problems.

quantitative research

research that relies on statistical analysis of data Helps identify patterns because we see numbers and trends. It's cold hard numbers that show us important patterns But what we can use along with this, is qualitative analysis, because we can see the numbers and patters, but it doesn't tell us why. Why is it happening? You see the trends, but you don't get the why

data coding

organizing the data according to key categories and concepts

social theory

overarching frame works that suggest certain assumptions and assertions about the way the world works

respondent

participant in the study

units of analysis***

pieces of a topic that a researcher bites off when she or he studies it they affect what type of aspects we see with our topic

urban area ***

population density of at least 1,000 people per sq mile surrounding areas w/ overall density of at least 500 people per sq mile

role

positions within an institution or organization that come with specific rules or expectations about how to behave

Theda Skocpol's Study "States and Social Revolutions"

provides an example of how historical sociologists now tend to think that a wider range of factors are needed to account for particular outcomes

qualitative research

research that relies on words, observations, or pictures as data Research that is based on words, impressions, and observations You can get impressions of people ad their motivations Ex: 300 interviews Has been questioned more because the idea is based on impression, which is subjected to bias, so we don't know if people are saying facts or if they just want to seem impressive. it can give us insight on how people work How and why people do the things that they do Researchers rely on both quantitative and qualitative research because they can work and interlock together

Structural Funtionalist

see society as everything we do has purpose how society works together Stable: They see society like a machine*****. A machine works and does the same thing each time.

code of ethics

set of guidelines that outline what is considered moral and acceptable behavior

SOCIOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF SOCIAL CONTEXTS SOCIAL INTERACTION

social interaction is governed by a set of norms the violation of norms of behavior will cause problems if you are disrespectful that is violating the norms Society developed a set of norms that are socialized into our brain. This means that there are a set of rules that aren't written down, but we know them. Example: If a class is long and boring, you don't yell at the teacher and say rude words, you keep your mouth shut because you know there will be consequences. When you don't follow norms you could be embarrassed or sanctioned for failures

Characteristics of symbolic Interactionist Perspective: The office

society is always there, society is shaping us all the time If someone says something and another person rolls their eyes, that would mean that person doesn't care what the other has to say. How you know that's what it means is because society has taught us that it is disrespectful

ethnographers

sociologist/people who enter the everyday lives of those they study in hopes of understanding how they navigate and give meaning to their worlds.

access

sociologists have problem with access as some points ex: access to a large and diverse enough population don't have documents that are complete and representative enough hard to have access with respondents with the characteristics they are looking for

hypothesis

tentative prediction we have about what we are going to discover before we begin the research

sociological imagination

the capacity to think systematically about how many things we experience as personal problems c right mills the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society Sociological imagination helps us to ask hard questions and seek answers about the social world we inhabit Sociological imagination requires one to ask deeper and more meaningful questions. It is our ability to ask hard questions instead of settling for the easily available answers. We can't assume that we know the income of an individual by their race.

social structure

the flip side of social interaction, external forces

urbanization ***

the growth of cities

Industrialization

the growth of factories and large-scale good production

globalization

the increased flow of goods, money, ideas, and people across national boarders

sociology

the study of societies and the social worlds that individuals inhabit within them faces the challenge of trying to uncover and analyze the patterns that lie beneath the surface of these social world. for individual lives.

social networks

the ties between people, groups, and organizations, work

social interaction

the way people act together, how they modify and alter the way they behave in front of others

Micro-Level analysis: how does society create meaning in interactions?

they focus on symbols, face to face interactions, and non-verbal communication communication is gendered

representative sampling

they make sure that the characteristics of their sample reflect those of the total population they are studying

institutional review boards

to help researchers foresee any potential dangers and to safeguard the ethical standards of their work, these boards operate at most universities and are required at all universities that receive research funds from the government boards review proposals before any work can begin

cross national comparisons

typically have their goals explaining differences between countries, such as understanding why some outcome is observed in one country but not another

data displays

visual images of the patterns forming in the data visual summaries of what has been found

reliability

want to know whether, if they used, the same measurement technique in an additional study, they would end up with similar results

Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

wanted to know why capitalism as an economic system was thriving in some parts of Europe, but not in others Ex: Some parts in germany were more economically advanced than others Advanced Regions: areas where Protestants were dominant Catholics and Protestants produced uneven map of religious influence. Catholicism= southern europe Protestants= northern europe Few countries like, Germany= divided regionally, protestants controlled one part, catholics controlled other US = protestant dominance why protestantism might have been associated with the early rise of capitalism relationship between views of key figures in the history of protestantism (Martin Luther King, JohnCalvin, Benjamin Franklin) Concluded: being economically successful was a way of demonstrating your worthiness to god, whereas consuming whatever you have was a sign that you were not one of the select who would be sent to heaven.

research methods

ways of systematically studying these questions

Symbolic Interactionists say...

we constantly do things to create a specific impression , no one showed up to class in pajamas, interaction is socially influenced, shaped by influences outside of you Shared understanding of behavior: if sarah stands on table, she could do it, but she will suffer consequences and embarase herself

epistemology

what we think we can know about the world

experiments

when sociologists create artificial situations that enable them to watch how people respond to them

casual inference

when sociologists need to know if it is likely that one thing is caused by another

probability sampling

when they select their samples to mirror a larger population and to reflect its characteristics and/or dynamics achieved by random sampling

operationalize

when they spell out the operations and techniques to be used to assess key concepts and its when sociologists decide how to measure variables (the things that are being studied)

data analysis

when we interpret the information we've collected and look for patterns across it

Erving Goffman(1922-1982): The Dramaturgical Self (1959)

when we think of drama we think of play acting, watching people act like they are what they are not we constantly play like we are something, we are actors on a stage whether you're at school or work or with best friend, you're going to act differently based on the social context we dress differently, talk different, based on social setting we engaged in dramaturgical self his theory with social interactionist is we are constantly trying to create an impression like an actor we act differently around friends than with family because you're in a different social context it's unconscious for you to act differently around certain people, it just happens, its socialized in us, you've been taught to do act differently in different situations you're the same person, but there are certain social acceptions in certain situations

validity

whether the measurement a researcher uses is actually accurate

how do We use sociological imagination everyday

while walking in a mall or concert we make educated guesses about the kind of person people are by what they are wearing and how they talk. We can tell if they are wealthier by what they are wearing and we can listen to how they speak to identify if they are educated. We are can identify sometimes their age and ethnicities. When we watch people and think about where they are from etc. we are engaging sociological imagination. We are using what we learned from society to make educated guesses about individuals around us. Our guesses are good however, depending on how well our sociological imagination is and if we look beyond the assumptions and stereotypes. When we see some kind of widely shared assumption as incorrect, that often triggers our sociological imaginations. We start to question and observe things around us and that is the first step of sociological imagination