Introduction to Sociology

Introduction to Sociology

• Sociology comes from the Latin word "socius" (companion) and the Greek word "logos" (reasoned discourse).
• It is the systematic study of human society.
• Society consists of people living in a defined territory and sharing a way of life.
• Sociology involves examining general patterns in the behaviors of particular people.
• Sociological imagination links personal biographies to broader social contexts.

Sociological Imagination

• Understand the world through the intersection of personal stories and larger social contexts.
• Unemployment can be a personal trouble due to laziness, or a public issue of structural unemployment.
• Economic structures can cause unemployment to be beyond personal solution.

Sociological Debunking

• Sociological wisdom states, "things are not what they seem."
• It involves seeing through the facades of social lives.
• Official information like government statistics helps understand the profile of a city.
• Underlying aspects of social lives are masked.
• Sociologists aim to debunk the social systems they study.

Sociological Perspective and Investigation

• Sociology emerged in the 1800s as a new science for a changing world.
• It arose during massive technological, social, and economic transformations like the Industrial Revolution.
• It rejected earlier traditions and embraced human reasoning and social progress.
• Auguste Comte was the first social thinker to coin the term "sociologie" and applied positivism to studying society.

Three Key Theoretical Approaches in Sociology

• Structural Functional Approach: society as a complex system promoting solidarity and stability.
• It highlights functions of social structures with behaviors limiting and enabling choices.
• Emile Durkheim and Robert Merton are representative figures.
• Manifested functions, laten functions and social dysfunctions are examples.
• Social-Conflict Approach: society as an arena of inequality and power struggle.
• It focuses on inequality and power struggle.
• Feminism and gender-conflict theory and race-conflict theory are variations.
• Karl Marx suggested history is the history of class struggles which ongoing from capitalists and working class.
• Symbolic-Interaction Approach: society as the product of everyday interactions.
• It is a micro-level analysis of society as a shared reality constructed through using symbols.
• Max Weber paid attention to how cultural values shape behaviors.

Three Social Research Methods

• Positivist Sociology: based on systematic observation of social behavior, and the reality of it's own kind.
• Concepts are mental constructs representing the world in simplified form.
• Variables are concepts whose value changes.
• Measurement determines a variable's value in a specific case.
• Operationalizing variables ensures reliable and valid measurement.
• Reliability means consistent results if the study is repeated.
• Validity means the study measures what it intends to.
• Look for causal relationships among dependent and independent variables.
• Correlation signifies variables changing together, but doesn't imply causation.
• Spurious correlation is a false relationship caused by another variable.
• Establishing cause and effect requires demonstrated correlation, independent variable preceding dependent variable, and absent spurious correlation evidence.
• Interpretative Sociology: the study of society, focuses on meanings people assign to their social world.
• Reality is created by everyday interactions and interpretation of the why and what of actions.
• Critical Sociology: focused on the need for social change.

Research Orientations in Sociology

• Positivist Sociology sees society as an orderly system with an objective reality.
• Researchers uses scientific orientation, carefully observes while gathering empirical data.
• The researcher tries to be a neutral observer.
• The corresponding theoretical approach is structural-functional.
• Interpretive Sociology: Society is ongoing interaction, people attach meanings.
• This research seeks for deeper meaning.
• Researchers gather qualitative data, discovering the subjective sense people make.
• The appropriate theory is symbolic-interaction.
• Critical Sociology: Society is patterns of inequality and it is guided by bringing about desired social change.
• The researcher is an activist.
• A corresponding theory is social-conflict.

Research Methods in Sociology

• Sociological research is affected by gender (androcentricity and gender blindness)
• Research ethics aims to do no harm, being fair and disclosing findings.
• Experiments investigate cause and effect method under control.
• To test hypotheses, all affecting factors should be managed.
• Subjects are split into experimental and control groups.
• The Hawthorne effect: change in subject's behavior from awareness of study.
• Survey Research is when subjects respond to series of questions on a questionnaire or interview.
• This involves finding research targets and randomly sampling.
• For Participant Observation, the investigators systematically observe people while joining them.

Social Interaction in Everyday Life

• Definition: ways of thinking, acting, and material objects forming shared life.

The Elements of Culture

• Symbols: meanings recognized by those who share a culture.
• Language: allows people to communicate.
• Values are culturally defined standards that people use to decide what is desirable, good and useful.
• Beliefs are specific thoughts that people hold to be true.
• Norms are rules and expectations guiding behavior and require regulating thoughts and behaviors.

Status - Who We Are in Society

• Status: a social position a person holds.
• Status set: statuses a person holds at a time.
• Ascribed status: by birth and affects likelihood of other statuses.
• Achieved status: by ability and effort.
• Master status: special importance to identity, shapes life.

How Can We Analyse Social Interaction at a Micro-Level?

• Social Construction of Reality: creatively shaping reality through interaction.
• Thomas Theorem states that subjectively interpreted situations cause action.
• Ethnomethodology is study of how people make sense of surroundings.
• It uses social interaction to construct and maintain order.
• One way is to uncover the implicit norm of a rule-breaking situation.
• Erving Goffman and Social Dramaturgy: face-to-face communications.
• One of his classic works highlights presentation of self in daily life.
• He shares ho individuals present themselves in different contexts like actors.

Three Elements to Apply Micro-Sociological Approaches to Understand Everyday Life

• Emotions involving biological and cultural sides of emotion.
• Example: flight attendants and emotional labor.
• Language goes beyond communication.
• Humor produces humor with playing with realities and understanding.

Deviance and Crime

• Deviance is the recognized violation of cultural norms.
• Deviants include rule-breakers and extraordinary people.
• Deviance may not be determined by what people do or choose.
• Some societies consider murder heroic.
• Crime: a category of deviance and breaking the law.
• Social Controls: regulating with informal and formal processes.

Explaining Deviance – 5 Approaches

• Structural functional sees deviance as basic parts of social organizations while symbolic sees it as parts of constructed reality.
• Both macro and micro level approach it differently.
• Biological suggests certain physical traits cause crime.
• Psychological studies abnormalities in personality cause crime.
• Social construction of deviance includes; both biological and psychological approaches overlook social functions, cultural variation and deviants as others describe.
• Also affecting how norms are set and defined.
• Emile Durkheim affirms cultural norms and sets moral boundaries.
• A society needs all these elements - people need to have norms to follow.
• Symbolic Interaction involves how we define a situation.
• Deviance and conformity happen by people responding to situations.
• Stigmas operate and discredit people and cause concealing.
• A basic premise is there is a connection to power and inequality.

Gender and Sexuality

• Sex: biological distinction between females and males.
• Gender: is culture and personal traits of behavior about being male and female.
• Intersexual people have both male and female characteristics.
• Transexual feel opposite gender.
• Sexual Orientation: A person's romand emotional attraction to another person.
• It can be heterosexual(the other two), homosexual (the same), bisexual, or asexual( no attraction)
• Norms for proper sex varies culturally and what is considered taboo.
• Regulation sexuality is functional to the maintence of family and kinship system.

Sociological Theories on Sexuality

• Latent functions of prostitution has theories to explain it.
• Symbolic Interaction happens when constructing and changing the importance of virginity.
• Traditional Views include; religious(sex is holy), biological(men are naturally aggressive), and cultural context.
• Feminist perspective includes heterosexuality and focuses on creating social inequality.
• Heteroxism lables anyone who is queer.

Gender Stratification

• Gender is the personal traits and positions about female and male.
• Gender stratification is the unequal distribution of wealth, power, and privileges.
• It focuses on inequality across all domains: education, politics, etc.

Structural-Functional Approach on Sexuality

• Regulation is the maintenance of gender and family, it helps integrate society.
• Everyday interactions affect eye contact
• It results in multiple dimensions of disadvantages, and inequality.
• Feminism aims for equality in opposition to patiarchy.

Social Stratification

• Social stratification is a system ranking categories in hierarchy.
• Factors like gender, race, education, age affect ranking.
• Social stratification carries from generation to generation in ideology.
• It can be social mobility(a change) and universal while being variable.
• It involves beliefs of ideology.

Class system

• Caste is social stratification bases on ascription or birth.
• Class stratifies both birth and individual.
• It emphasizes personal merit.
• The degree of uniformity and social position describes inequality consistently and depends if one is in a caste or class system.
• Ideology is the cultural beliefs about patterns of inequality.
• Social stratification has theories explaining it with its approach.

Davis-Moore Thesis

• Social stratification benefits social operations and functions.
• Importance should match rewards and incentives.
• The functions of poverty helps fulfill a slight part of approaching this thesis.
• Poverty persists the positive functions to those who are affluent.
• Social conflict examines two major classes under capitalism.

Karl Marx’s Perspective

• Capitalist own the production workers labor for the capitalist.
• Marx predicted tensions between the two classes drive overthrows in capatilism and has not happened due to many new approaches to benefit them.
• Max weber examines class economic wealth and low consistency over a social stratification.
• It explains the importance for what consumers put in to make goods for the marks of social status.

Gerhard Lenski

• He shares that as global technology advances, stratifications happen, for both social and economic differences.

Families

• Families and Kinship are basic organizational aspects.
• Can be found in cooperative groups that care.
• Kinship is a bond based on common ancestry, adoption.
• Marriage is economic, involving sexual activity.

Different Types of Marriage

• Endogamy is marrying continuity, exogamy promotes alliance.
• There is also mono(one spouse), poly(multiple spouses).
• Polygyny(man many wives), polyandry(women with many).
• Extended family is parents, kids, and kin(preindustrial), which is conjugal.
• Patterns of descent can show family over generations.
• patrilineal, matrilieal, and bi lateral exists.

Courtship

• Arranged and vs Romantic.
• Industrialization, children are increasingly seen as pricelss.
• Empty nests requires provison of grandchildren, care etc.
• And have final trasitions between life.
• Family violence against children are major problems.
• Alternative family forms are forming.

Structural Functional Theory

• It can be the backbone, chief of socialisation.
• Social conflict focuses embedded inequalities some of thich contribute class structure properties.
• Interactions and intimacy helps symbolic and community overal
• Marriages and negotiations help family lives

Trends

• trends has future predictions to what macroions will do and remain.

Education

• Definition is to grow social importance, skills, value, and community
• Preindustrial education revolved around family and community,
• Now Formal schooling requires formal instruction.

Structural Function

• It operates and supports stability for functional socieity and has social functions relating.
• Symbolic understanding involves helping create and understand people in everyday.
• People expectation will influence a variety of factors.
• All the ways to describe both are critical

Power

• How the schooling results depending on how they both cause it.

Cultural Capital

• capital varies depending on status to the ability and how its used due to membership and factors.

Higher Education

• It is in high demand
• It increases competition in the university
• Based on a Bourdieu theory its found that three forms of what respondents class may interact or have varying experience.

The Media

• Communication uses all channels to use and connect around the world
• media is significant due to being connected
• It helps to be the internet as well as film due to cultural capital
• Culture in societies require structures which can range and show to affect all factors of being heard

Global Village

• Media helps to make things have quick effects.
• theorizing through social functions show through information as well as the conflicts show issues of the media and its industries.
• Symbolic interactions can cause changes.
• social realism exist in ways that affects everything

Culture and media

People are connected through everything.