Sociological Concepts

• Sociology is the systematic study of human society and social interaction, focusing on patterns of behavior and social structures.
• Society is a group of interacting individuals in a definable area who share a culture, and provides security, self, belonging, and direction.
• Culture encompasses shared beliefs, values, and practices influencing behavior.
• Social behavior constitutes actions and interactions among individuals, shaped by societal norms and values.

Sociological Perspectives

• The sociological perspective involves viewing the world through a sociological lens, connecting personal experiences to larger social forces.
• A beginner's mind is an approach to viewing the world without preconceived notions, allowing for fresh insights.
• Sociological imagination connects individual experiences and societal influences, distinguishing between private troubles and public issues.
• Private troubles occur within an individual's character and immediate relations, with resolution lying within the individual.
• Public issues transcend the local environment, with resolution lying in the order and workings of society.

Sociology as a Science

• Science is a systematic enterprise building and organizing knowledge via testable explanations and predictions.
• Sociology qualifies as a science, employing systematic methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis.

Theoretical Frameworks

• Macrosociology studies society by investigating large-scale social structures to determine how it affects the lives of groups and individuals, a top-down approach.
• Microsociology studies society by investigating the interactions between individuals and how those interactions construct larger patterns, processes, and institutions of society.
• The rise of the city and industrialization are major historical factors that led to the development of sociology.
• Dialectic is a process of change involving a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
• Social facts are laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, and cultural rules that exist outside the body and govern life.
• A theory is a systematic set of ideas and statements about the social world that aim to make sense of the social world.
• The three basic theoretical approaches are structural-functionalist, conflict, and symbolic interaction.

Structural-Functionalism

• Level of analysis: Macro-level
• Main tenet: Society is a complex system whose parts work together to promote stability and order.
• Each person and structure fulfills certain functions to meet different needs that contribute to a society's stability and survival.
• Persons with the most talent will be tracked into positions of power.
• Main assumptions: All societies strive for stability, harmony, and dynamic equilibrium.
• Main criticisms: Overemphasis on stability and neglect of social change and conflict.

Conflict Theory

• Level of analysis: Macro-level
• Main tenet: Tension between those in power and those who are being ruled over creates, reifies and alters social order.
• Society is an arena of inequality that generates conflict and change.
• Main assumptions: Social change occurs as a result of conflict between different social groups competing for limited resources, conflict is competition over resources is the cause of all relationships, and social inequality between unequally distributed wealth, power, and prestige.
• Strengths: Allows for rapid societal change and Praxis: practical action taken based on intellectual or theoretical understandings.
• Weaknesses: Conflict theory in its purest form ignores all other types of distinctions between groups. Includes gender-conflict, race-conflict, and queer theory.

Symbolic Interactionism

• Level of analysis: Micro-level
• Main tenet: Interaction and meaning are central to society, and meanings are created through interaction.
• Framework for building theory that sees society as the product of the everyday interactions of individuals.
• Main assumptions: Meanings are negotiated between actors, and society is an ongoing interpretive process.
• Mechanical solidarity involves bonds present in pre-modern societies, based on likeness of goal and belief.
• Organic solidarity involves bonds based on difference, interdependence, and individual rights, and is the basis of Structural Functionalism.
• Solidarity is the degree of integration or unity within a particular society.
• Manifest functions are predicted, while latent functions are unpredicted.
• Functions are positive consequences of social structures on harmony, stability, or evolution.
• Dysfunctions are disturbances to or undesirable consequences of the social system.

Research Methods and Ethics

• Qualitative research works with non-numerical data collected in natural settings.
• Quantitative research uses numerical data collected from primary and secondary sources.
• The scientific method is a standard procedure for acquiring and verifying empirical knowledge.
• An experiment uses a control group to understand the effects of a single stimulus in a controlled environment.
• Sociology uses a modified scientific method because a true experiment is impossible to attain in social sciences

Approaches to Sociological Research

• Positivist sociology studies society based on scientific observation, investigating claims held as self-evident.
• Society functions as a system that can be investigated objectively.
• A concept is a mental construct representing an aspect of the world in a simplified form. Variables are a concept whose value changes from case to case, and measurement is a procedure for determining the value of a variable in a specific case. Statistics are used for reporting large amounts of succinct information.
• Tests of good research: reliability, validity, and avoiding bias.
• Interpretive sociology focuses on discovering the meanings people attach to the social world, learning more by interacting with people to understand the meanings attached to that action.
• This relies on qualitative data to a higher degree than positivistic sociology, while still attempting to be as value-free as possible.
• Correlation is a relationship in which two or more variables change together.
• Causation is the relationship where one variable directly influences a change in another.
• Ethnography: Naturalistic method based on studying people in their environment to understand the meanings they attribute to their activities.

Culture

• Culture encompasses the beliefs and behaviors a group shares, forming basic beliefs and consumptions.
• Ethnocentrism involves judging another culture based on comparisons to one's own cultural norms, promoting the idea of one's own culture as superior and "normal".
• Cultural relativism is the practice of assessing other cultures by their own standards.
• Material culture refers to the objects or belongings of a group of people.
• Symbolic culture reflects the ideas and beliefs of a group, including symbols, languages, values, and norms.
• Core characteristics of culture are symbols, values, and norms.
• Symbols are any social fact that stands for or conveys a meaning which exists outside the realm of physical being.
• Values are standards for discerning what is good and just.
• Norms are rules and guidelines regarding acceptable behaviors.
• Informal norms are implicit and unspoken, while formal norms are officially codified.
• The Saphir-Whorf thesis suggests that language structures thought and limits personal experience.
• Beliefs are specific ideas held to be true based on a value system.
• Folkways are norms without any moral underpinning, loosely enforced and involving common customs.
• Mores embody moral views, with transgressions linked to great condemnation and possible physical altercation.
• Laws are formal codes against certain behaviors.
• Taboos are strongly ingrained norms where contemplated transgression brings about disgust, horror, or revulsion.

Variation in Culture

• Monocultural societies have a single cultural base with no variation in values, beliefs, and norms.
• Multicultural societies allow for more than one cultural base, enacted in policy and formal development of institution.
• Pop culture includes patterns of cultural experiences and in mainstream society, often disseminated via mass media.
• High culture includes patterns of cultural experiences and attitudes that exist in the highest class of society.

Parts of Culture

• Dominant culture consists of the values, norms, and practices of the group of people within society that is more powerful.
• Hegemony involves the acceptance of cultural aspects associated with the group in power by all within a culture.
• Subculture is a group differentiated by its distinctive values, norms, and lifestyles which do not threaten hegemony.
• Counterculture rejects some or all of the larger culture's norms and values.

Cultural Variation

• Ideal culture world view stresses the positives of a cultures and ignores the negatives.
• Real culture world view stresses real norms, values, and patterns of behaviors that exist within a society.
• Innovation is the process of change withing a culture.
• Discoveries involve finding a previously unknown part of society.
• Invention is something new from exiting objects and concepts.
• Cultural Diffusion: Spread of material and non-material culture away from discoverers or inventors to their parties.
• Cultural Leveling: Process by which unique cultures become much like other cultures in the world.

Cultural Imperalism

• Involves the imposition of one culture's beliefs and practices on another though mass media and consumer products rather than military force.
• Cultural Lag: Time between changes in material culture or technology and the resulting changes in the broader culture's relevant norms, values, meanings, and laws.

Test your knowledge of sociological imagination, norms, and cultural relativism. This quiz covers research methods, social issues, and the development of sociological thought. Explore how society influences individual behavior and the role of culture.