Social Environment and Socialization Process Quiz

Sociology: The systematic study of human behavior in social context, focused on the relationship between agency and social structures.
Agency: The capacity of individuals to exercise their own free will.
Social Structures: Relatively stable patterns of social relations, including microstructures (intimate social relations), macrostructures (overarching patterns), and global structures (patterns outside national levels).
Social Structures constrain individuals' agency, but individuals also use their agency to form and change social structures.
Sociological Imagination: The quality of the mind that enables a person to see the connection between personal troubles and social structures.
3 Key Revolutions:
- Scientific Revolution (1550): Encouraged evidence-based conclusions about society.
- Democratic Revolution (1750): Suggested people are responsible for creating and changing society.
- Industrial Revolution (1780): Created new social problems.

Theory: A tentative explanation of some aspect of social life, stating how and why certain facts are related.
4 popular sociological theories in Euro-Canadian sociology:
- Functionalism: Focuses on how society remains stable, with people fulfilling roles based on shared values or preferences.
- Conflict Theory: Focuses on social divisions that impede greater harmony, with social groups having different interests and power.
- Symbolic Interactionism: Focuses on how individuals shape one another's lives through assigned meanings and social interactions.
- Feminist Theory: Focuses on the gendered dimensions of social life and inequality, with gender inequalities emerging from interactions and the patriarchy.

Humans rely on 3 basic ways of knowing: casual observation, tradition, and authority.
Common errors in casual observation: overgeneralization, selective observation, and illogical reasoning.
Scientific thinking involves systematic observation, evidence-based conclusions, and the scientific method.

Quantitative Research:
- Identify a theoretical idea of interest.
- Translate the abstract idea into a testable hypothesis.
- Collect and analyze data.
- Accept or reject the hypothesis based on data analysis.
Qualitative Research:
- Identify a research interest based on concrete experience.
- Collect evidence from one or more cases.
- Analyze cases to identify common patterns and themes.
- Provide an interpretation of the patterns and themes.

Experiments: Artificial situations that isolate hypothesized causes and measure effects.
Surveys: Researchers ask people questions about their knowledge, attitudes, or behavior to test how one or more independent variables affect a dependent variable.

Participant Observation (Ethnography): Researchers take part in the social group being studied and systematically observe what occurs and why.
Unstructured Interviews and Semi-structured Interviews: Researchers use loose, open-ended questions, allowing respondents to answer questions in their own words.

Formal standards for ethical research involving "human subjects" have emerged in the last 50 years.
Three ethical principles informed the development of formal standards: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.
Formal standards include voluntary participation, harm minimization, informed consent, right to privacy, anonymity, and authenticity.

Culture: Shared symbols and their definitions that people create to solve real-life problems.
Culture varies between societies, leading to culture shock.
3 human abilities contribute to the creation of culture: abstraction, cooperation, and production.

Abstraction: The ability to create general concepts that meaningfully organize sensory experience, leading to beliefs.
Cooperation: The capacity to create a complex social life by establishing norms and values.
Production: The ability to create new symbols and meanings, leading to cultural creation.

Norms: Generally accepted ways of doing things, including folkways, mores, laws, and taboos.
Values: Ideas about what is right and wrong, good and bad, desirable and undesirable, beautiful and ugly.### Culture and Social Organization
Culture consists of both non-material (symbols, norms, and intangible elements) and material (tools, technology, and techniques) aspects.
Production leads to social organization, which is the orderly arrangement of social interaction.

Functionalists view culture as contributing to social order, guiding people to support collective goals, and building social bonds and a sense of community.
Conflict theorists see culture as a site of ongoing struggle between groups, with more powerful groups holding the upper hand.
Symbolic interactionists view people as agents of culture, creatively shaping and interpreting it, and choosing how culture influences them.
Feminists believe gender inequalities emerge from culture systems and oppression structures.

Culture provides increasing opportunities to exercise freedom, including cultural diversity and multiculturalism, rights revolutions, globalization, and post-modernity.
Culture also constrains us, putting limits on what we can think and do, through rationalization, consumerism, and cultural capital.

The self emerges from social interaction, with no clear consensus on how much of who we are is based on nature versus nurture.
Socialization is the process by which people learn to function in social life, and our sense of self develops through social interaction.
Key scholars who theorized about the self include Sigmund Freud, Charles Horton Cooley, and George Herbert Mead.

Socialization is a continual, evolutionary process that occurs in three steps: acting on the basis of personal characteristics, responding to the social environment, and adapting to the response.
Socialization is a key outcome of social interaction that emerges from social interactions.

Key agents of socialization include families, schools, peer groups, and mass media, which contribute to primary and secondary socialization.
Families are usually the main agent of primary socialization, but the role of families has declined over time.
Schools instruct students in academic and vocational subjects, as well as a hidden curriculum of obedience to authority and conformity to cultural norms.
Peer groups and mass media also play significant roles in secondary socialization.

Individuals have multiple statuses, which are culturally defined positions or social locations, and can be ascribed or achieved.
Role-playing involves conforming to existing performance expectations, and individuals may face challenges in role-playing due to role strain, role conflict, or a lack of desire to engage in role-playing.