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• The sociological imagination helps make the familiar unfamiliar.

Sociological Imagination

• C. Wright Mills states it compels looking at the world like an outsider.
• It helps consider questions you might ask if you were an alien dropped into the U.S. today.
• Important for making the familiar unfamiliar.

Troubles vs Issues

• Personal troubles and the public issues are important to consider.
• Many issues possess both personal and social dimensions.

History and Biography

• It situates the stages of one's life within particular historical moments.
• Mills asks to recognize the relationships that exist between personal troubles and public issues, and biography and history.

Sociological Research Methods

• The rules of the game are always changing.
• Looks for cause and effect relationships.
• Focuses on the research questions, and various research methods - quantitative and qualitative
• Theory plays a key role.

Probabilistic Theories

• Sociologists develop them regarding social action.
• They describe patterns that are likely but not inevitable.
• They explain and foresee scenarios given particular social conditions.
• People who identify with a religion report being happier than those who do not.

Sociological Investigation

• They investigate social processes using empirical research.
• This involves gathering and analyzing data to answer questions about social worlds.
• A research question consists of queries that can be answered empirically.

Research Questions

• Gathering and empirically analyzing data can help respond to questions.

Research Methods

• It is a study design.
• It allows for systematically studying the social world, which makes conclusions more reliable.
• Each method has strengths and limitations.
• Using different methods build knowledge of a single topic by providing divergent but complementing views.

Quantitative Research Methods

• These are tools of sociological inquiry.
• They involve examining numerical data with mathematics.

Variables

• Observable characteristics that have more than one possible answer or value.
• Determined by the subject's unit of analysis.

Independent & Dependent Variables

• They exist when there is co-variation.
• Independent variable (X) causes a change.
• Dependent variable (Y) is affected by the independent variable.
• It answers "who" and "what" questions.

Quantitative Methods

• Experiments and standardized surveys are examples of this.

Field Experiments

• Devah Pager's field experiment allowed her to help answer a longstanding question regarding people with prison records and the likelihood of them being employed.
• It also asked about criminal records mattering differently for white and black job applicants.
• The field experiment allowed her to focus on the effect of a criminal record during the job application process.

Experiments

• They control the environment to isolate the effect of one item.
• They are strong at making causal claims.
• In reality, people are never influenced by just one social factor at a time
• Some topics cannot be studied ethically using experiments
• Strengths = Making causal Claims - but in reality, we are never only influence by one social factor
• Cant ethically study some topics with experiments.

Surveys

• Subjects respond to a set of questions.
• Strengths include them being relatively quick and cheap, can be done online, by phone, in person, or by mail, and you can get lots of data from many people from them.
• Weaknesses include it possibly being hard to get people to respond.
• Wording issues can lead to generalizability issues.
• Generalizability is the extent to which data are applicable to the entire population from which the sample is from.
• Random samples allow generalizability of a population, where the researcher understands how many members there are and every member has an equal chance of being chosen.

Qualitative Research Methods

• These are tools of sociological inquiry.
• They involve careful consideration of the meaning of non-numerical data.
• They are best for answering why and how questions.
• Participant observation, in-depth interviewing, and historical and content analysis are all examples.

Participant Observation

• The researcher directly observes and participates in the social world they are studying.
• Strengths include getting detailed information about how people act in a certain context, and developing a personal understanding of what it feels like to take part in that social world.
• Weaknesses include it being time-consuming and expensive, only being able to study a small number of people, meaning findings may only apply to one field that was on site.

In Depth Interviewing

• It elicits information through semi-structures, open-ended, probing conversations
• Strengths = Getting detailed accounts of understanding, recollections, feelings, and why and how certain happenings occurred
• Weaknesses = Researchers only get access to individual respondents points of View

Historic and Content Analysis

• It uses existing artifacts produced by people.
• Strengths include showing how a topic is present in a culture and studying issues in the past through historical records.
• Weaknesses include not being able to control the nature or quality of the data available, and difficulty knowing intentions of content creators or how content was received by audiences.

Qualitative Research

• It still contributes to theory even if it can't be generalized to a population.
• Using multiple studies with different methods can help scholars get a fuller picture of reality.

Theories

• Empirically based explanations and predictions about relationships between social facts.
• They let interpretation of facts or explain why things happen the way they do.
• Help predict what might happen in the future.

Sociological Theories

• Sociologists analyze data to develop systematic understandings and propositions or theories about social processes.
• The explanations of social phenomena are scientific, meaning they are falsifiable and make predictions that can be proven wrong.
• Sociologist advance theories of society by bringing new data to bear on existing understandings to further elaborate social processes or the conditions under which particular phenomena occur.

Social Structure

• What is social structure?
• Organizing, Enduring, Invisible, Salient - can know they exist by observation after seeing the affects
• Boundaries that people confront as they make decisions about their individual and collective actions.
• It comprises the rules and resources that guide behavior.

Elements of Social Structure

• Status represents a person's or group's socially determined positions within a large group or society.
  • Ascribed: Assigned to a person by society
  • Achieved: results at least in part from a person's efforts
• Roles are a a set of expectations concerning behavior and attitudes of people who occupy a particular social status.
• Groups encompass two or more people with similar values and expectations who interact with one another on a regular basis.
• Networks are a series of social relationships that link a person directly to other individuals and indirectly to even more people.
• Institutions are the central domains of social life that guide behaviors and meet basic social needs like families,, healthcare, education and religion

Individual Agency & Social structure

• Agency is the capacity to act given the structural rules and resources that impact behaviors.
  • Agency = the choices that individuals make and the actions they ultimately take
• Identity, or individuals definition of who they are. Individuals may draw on multiple dimensions of status and group affiliation in constructing and identity.

Each of these can:

• Impose rules on us that constrain our behavior
• Provides us with resources to help us do things we could not do otherwise.
• Structure of Opportunity includes the distribution of resources and opportunities across society, which shapes the choices individuals make.
• Social Reproduction is where the structures of modern societies tend to reproduce themselves from one generation to the next.
• Reflexivity occurs when evaluating one's position in the social world, the rules expected to follow, and the resources at disposal or can acquire.
• Social structures reproduce themselves only when

Culture

• Culture encompasses "[t]he shared ways of a human social group...[that] includes the ways of thinking, understanding, and feeling that have been gained through common experience in social groups and are passed on from one generation to another".
• There is nonmaterial (symbolic) culture that encompasses values, beliefs, behaviors, and social.
• Material culture is part of the constructed environment that has symbolic components.

Cultural Understanding

• We acquire them via socialization - he process by which we become culturally competent in our various social environments.
  • Norms are the shared expectations for behavior.

Cultural Change

• How does it occur?
• Via collective processes of adaptation to new realities.
• It is most likely to occur during unsettled times.
• "Unsettled times": determining the right way to do things requires deep reflection on our beliefs, values, and behaviors

Capital

• Sociologists love using the metaphor.
• Examples include:
  • Economic capital
  • Human capital
  • Social capital
  • Cultural Capital

Cultural Capital

• Symbolic resources that communicate one's social status.
• Objectified: things
• Institutional: organizational endorsements
• Embodied: the body and its capacities
• Finding a fit involves
• Feeling that particular mix of cultural capital matches social context

Deviance

• Behavior violates social norms and can change over time, vary between social groups or settings, and often is category specific.

Stigma

• An attribute of an individual or group that is deeply discrediting + disgrace or embarrassment that is (or could become) public + turns a person into something "not quite human".
  • Stigma is a negative label that changes other's behavior and alter that persons concept of self identidy
• An individual can acquire a negative social label that changes others behaviors and alter that person's self-concept and identity.
• More than a stereotype (widely-shared perceptions about the personal characteristics, tendencies, or abilities of individual members of a particular group).
• All stigmas are related to some stereotype, but not all stereotypes are stigmas.
• More than just a difference, it causes disgrace or embarrassment.

Types of Stigma

• Abominations of the body, blemishes of individual character, and tribal stigmas.
• Blemishes include: mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, unemployment, suicide attempts, and radical political behavior.
• Tribal are transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family like race/nation/religion

When Stigma Occurs

• When classifying or categorizing people.
• It exists when an individual is different from others viewed as deeply discredited or negative.

Stigmatization

• What is stigmatized varies category dependent - Certain qualities deemed suitable for one sector = bad in another

• The discredited is a type of person is whose stigma is obvious and has continuous tension during encounters + managing social contacts in order to minimize any negative emotions or judgement

• The discreditable possess stigmas that are not so obvious that they are constantly trying to manage that information by hiding such trait

Normal's Reactions to the Stigmatized

• Most don't outwardly react when the individual is discredited by is careful of attention
• Other Examples include
• Dismissiveness/Rudeness/Avoidance and exclusion""Two-facedness"/ and Ridicule
• Reactions that are the most severe occur when the stigma is a clear and unarguable blemish such as being homeless/ or weight/ imprisoned
• Anxiety related to info management social status+ low confidence in oneself + and limited access to resources
• Stigma is a result from social rejection / self-isolation
• "Normals" reactions to stigma = trying to fix it/ the way it can be possible to the stigma
• In terms of overcompensations
• Joining groups with others who struggles with similar or the same stigmas

Race & ethnicity

• IF a stigma is not readily evident- the stigmatized can pass it a normal.

• Can cause an individual to feel immense stress due to the the amount of pressure

• Personal relationships/ informational connectedness

• Shapes/ constrains the opportunities for passing

• The more connected they are to the individual- the more ridicule/ discredit that may occur that is caused by the stigma

• Goffman is on is un-stigmatized male circa America (p.128)

• The typical stereotype consist of being: married, white, fully employed, young, father, heterosexuals

Deviance

• Is a normalcy concept

• A social fabrication/A real social fact

• Race produces real long lasting effects for these considered dark or white

• Is determined based off context in history or social

• Belongs to ideas meaning a language

• Race is recreated by humans via creation/resistance toward/ reproduction of classified race

• Race includes traits like facial features and skin

• Ancestry plays a integral part in how you are classified

• Social and historical context = place specific. + time-specific

• Race ideology framework of how actors is justified by

• The result of race = divide the world along the line of being natural and can take form for both the scientific/ social.

• In the case of the racial order individuals racialized white received material benefits that they use or preserve during the manifold of whiteness

• The racial categories that is naturalized = believed divide across world arbitary