Key Concepts in Sociology

Understanding human behavior by placing it within its broader social context.

People who share a culture and a territory.

The group memberships that people have because of their location in history and society.

<p>The application of systematic methods to obtain knowledge and the knowledge obtained by those methods.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Intellectual and academic disciplines designed to explain and predict events in our natural environment.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Intellectual and academic disciplines designed to understand the social world objectively by means of controlled and repeated observations.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A statement that goes beyond the individual case and is applied to a broader group or situation.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Recurring characteristics or events.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Those things that 'everyone knows' are true.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Using objective, systematic observations to test theories.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The application of the scientific approach to the social world.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The scientific study of society and human behavior.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The founder of sociology.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The second founder of sociology; coined the term 'survival of the fittest' and his views came to be known as social Darwinism.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Marx's term for the struggle between capitalists and workers.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Marx's term for the exploited class, the mass of workers who do not own the means of production.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The degree to which members of a group or a society feel united by shared values and other social bonds; also known as social cohesion.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The view that a sociologist's personal values or biases should not influence social research.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The standards by which people define what is desirable or undesirable, good or bad, beautiful or ugly.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Total neutrality.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Repeating a study in order to test its findings.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A German word used by Weber that is perhaps best understood as 'to have insight into someone's situation.'</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The meanings that people give their own behavior.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Durkheim's term for a group's patterns of behavior.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Sociological research whose purpose is to make discoveries about life in human groups, not to make changes in those groups.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The use of sociology to solve problems from the micro level of family relationships to the macro level of crime and pollution.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A general statement about how some parts of the world fit together and how they work; an explanation of how two or more facts are related to one another.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A theoretical perspective in which society is viewed as composed of symbols that people use to establish meaning, develop their views of the world, and communicate with one another.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A theoretical framework in which society is viewed as composed of various parts, each with a function that, when fulfilled, contributes to society's equilibrium.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A theoretical framework in which society is viewed as composed of groups that are competing for scarce resources.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>An examination of large-scale patterns of society.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>An examination of small-scale patterns of society.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>What people do when they are in one another's presence.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Communication without words through gestures, use of space, silence, and so on.</p> Signup and view all the answers