Sociology

Positivism creator

Auguste Comte

Social imagination creator

C. Wright Mills

Social facts

Durkheim laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, rituals, and all cultural rules that govern social life.

Dramaturgical analysis

Erving Goffman Using theater as an analogy for social interaction and recognized that people's interactions showed patterns of cultural scripts

Function

Alfred Radcliff-Brown -part it played in social life as a while, and therefore the contribution it makes to social stability

Conflict Theory

Karl Marx looks at society as a competition for limited resources Macro-level

Symbolic interactionism

Mead micro-level theory that focuses on the relationship among individuals within a society

Figuration creator

Norbert Elias

Meta-analysis

Rotton-Kelly full moon's effect on behavior

Hypothesis

a testable proposition

Theory

a way to explain different aspects of social interactions

Social imagination

an awareness of the relationship between a person's behavior and experience and the wider culture that shaped the person's choices and perceptions.

Reification

an error of treating an abstract concept as though it has a real, material existence

Macro-level

analysis look at trends among and between large groups and society

Manifest functions

are the consequences of a social process that are sought or anticipated

Social Facts

are the laws, moral, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and all of the culture rules that govern social life, that may contribute to these changes in the family

Latent functions

are the unsought consequences of a social process

Grand theories

attempt to explain large-scale relationships and answer fundamental questions

Max Weber

believed it was difficult to use standard scientific methods to accurately predict the behavior of groups, but rather argued that influence of culture on human behavior had to be taken account.

Karl Marx

believed that societies grew and changed as a result of the struggles of different social classes over the means of production, believed capitalism would collapse and give rise to communism

Indepedent variable

cause of change

Survey

collect data from sujects who respond to a series of questions about behaviors and opinions

Operational definition

define the concept in terms of the physical or concrete steps it takes to objectively measure it

Capitalism

economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of good and the means to produce them

Communism

economic system under which there is no private or corporate ownership, everything is communally and distributed as needed

Emile Durkheim

established sociology as a formal academic discipline by establishing the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux. -people rise to their proper levels in society based on merit -Suicide

Random sample

every person in population has the same chance of being chosen for the study

Empirical evidence

evidence comes from direct experience, scientifically gathered data, or experimentation

Constructivism

extension of symbolic interaction theory which proposes that reality is what humans cognitively construct it to be

Auguste Comte

fathers of sociology, important role in developing sociology

George Herbert Mead

focused on the ways in which the mind and the self were developed as a result of social processes

Culture

group's shared practices, values, and beliefs

Reliability

how likely the results are to be replicated

validity

how well the study measures what it was designed to measure

Case Study

in depth analysis of a single event, situation, or individual

Society

is a group of people who live in a defined geographic area, who interact with one another, and who share a common culture

Sociology

is the study of groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions, from small and personal groups to very large groups

Sample

manageable number of subjects who represent a larger population

Ethnography

observation of the social perspective and cultural values of an entire social setting

Interview

one on one convo

Generalized others

organized and generalized attitude of a social group, coined by Mead

Hawthorne Effect

people change their behavior because they know they are being watched as part of a study

Population

people who are the focus of study

Transferable skills

people whose knowledge and education can be applied in a variety of settings and whose skills will contribute to various tasks

Paradigms

philosophical and theoretical frameworks used within a discipline to formulate theories, generalizations, and the experiment

Figuration

process of simultaneously analyzing the behavior of individuals and the society that shapes that behavior

Herbert Spencer

published The Study of Sociology, favored a form of government that allowed market forces to control capitalism -Survival of the Fittest -Functionalism -Social Institutions

Participant observation

researchers join people and participate in the group's activities for the purpose of observing

Literature review

review of existing similar studies

Functionalism

sees society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of the individuals in the society

Dysfunctions

social process that have undesirable consequences for the operation of society

Social solidarity

social ties within a group

Significant others

specific individuals that impacted a person;s life coined by Mead

Dynamic equilibrium

state in which all parts work together to maintain stability

Micro-level

study of small groups and individual interactions

Positivism

study of social patterns via scientific methods

Harriet Martineau

the first woman sociologist, pointed out faults with free enterprise systems in which workers were exploited and impoverished while business owners became waelthy

Dependent variable

the thing that is changed

Anti-positivism

the view that social researchers should strive for subjectivity as they worked to represent social process, cultural norms, and societal values

Interpretive framework

to understand social worlds from the point of view of the participants

Georg Simmel

took an anti-positivism stance and addressed topics such as social conflict, the function of money, individual identity in city life, and fear of outsiders.

Qualitative sociology

understand human behavior through interviews, focus groups, analysis of sources

Verstehen

understand in a deep way, attempt to understand from insider's pov

Quantitative sociology

uses statistical methods ie. surverys

Mary Wollstonecraft

women's condition in society, first feminist thinker

Ibn Khaldun

world's first sociologist; wrote about foundation for both modern sociology and economics, theory of social conflict, comparison of nomadic and sedentary life, political economy, and tribe cohesion to capacity of power