Sociological Imagination PDF

Chapter: 1 - **Adopting the sociological imagination** - Notion that individual lives are shaped by outside forces, such as economic or historical factors - Discovered by C. Wright Mill's (1959) - Our biographies are a product of personal experiences and historical forces - Ch...

Chapter: 1 - **Adopting the sociological imagination** - Notion that individual lives are shaped by outside forces, such as economic or historical factors - Discovered by C. Wright Mill's (1959) - Our biographies are a product of personal experiences and historical forces - Challenges: U.S view that world in terms of individual achievement and failure - Example: "self-made billionaire" might have benefited from the post war economy and programs like "Gi Bill", free college for vets returning home from WWII. - **Sociological imagination** - teaches us that what we think of as "personal troubles", such as paying for college, opioid addiction and child care, are actually "public issues" - **Applying sociological imagination**: Why are young people postponing marriage? - They want to wait until they are "financially ready", a good job which requires a degree, resulting in 4 year college. - Rising housing costs - Greater acceptance of premarital sex - **Basic VS. applied social research** - **Basic Research**: seeks to answer theoretically informed questions or to resolve a fundamental intellectual puzzle about social behavior - Takes place in academia - Uses whichever method investigators believe will best address their inquiry encompassing everything from surveys to ethnography, experiments to material-based methods. - **Applied research**: seeks to answer a question or concrete problem in the real world - Goal: evaluating the effectiveness of a particular program or policy - Example: a school system may employ a social scientist to carry out research exploring whether a new curriculum is linked to improved performance on standardized tests. Chapter: 2 - **Levels of abstraction (macro, meso, micro)** - **Macro level**: the broadest way of thinking about social life, focusing on the structure, composition, and processes of society. - **Example:** institutional theory attempts to describe and explain variations among nations, states, or other large political entities states, governments, population. - **Micro leve**l: the most intimate way of thinking about social life, focusing on face-to-face interaction and small-group processes. - **Example**: children of high academic ability often have less positive academic self- concepts if they are in classrooms with high- achieving and competitive peers than if they are in lower-performing classrooms. - **Meso level**: the middle ground way of thinking about social life, focusing on the physical settings and organization that link individuals to the largersociety (groups, organization, local context). - **Example**: communities with large numbers of Latino's immigrants; residents feel a greater sense of collective efficacy. Chapter 3 - **Zimbardo Stanford Prison Experiment** - Happened in 1971, involved 24 male undergraduates - Prison was built in the basement of stanford university - Half of the subjects were "prisoners" and the other half were "guards". Prisoners picked up at home by police and handcuffed. - Participants signed informed consents forms warning them that their civil rights could be violated - The study was stopped early when the "guards" were unethical because people suffered and others were allowed to inflict pain and humiliation. - **Milgram obedience study** - Stanley Milgram wanted to study how ordinary people could commit atrocities like the Nazis during WWII, in the 1950's - The subjects were to be the "teachers" and they would have to administer electric shocks to "learners" who did not answer questions correctly - "Learners" were pretending - He designed this study to see whether individuals would follow the instructions of authority figures even when they knew it was wrong. - Subjects became distressed and wanted to stop, but were told "the experiment must continue". - More than half of the subjects administered shocks they thought were high intensity and potentially lethal. - After the subjects were told that they didn't hurt anyone. - Less than 1% reported that they regretted taking part in the study. Chapter: 4 - **Absolute VS. Relative Measure** - Absolute standard: the same threshold applies to everyone regardless of context - Example: whether a person has food, clothing, and shelter. \- Relative Standard: an individual is compared to what is typical in a population - Example: whether a person falls below the average income level - **The absolute standard and relative standard of measuring poverty** - Absolute: a specific assessment of income and assets that applies to all people regardless of context - Example: we can define the poor as people who lack basic necessities, such as shelter and food - Relative: identifying the poor by how deprived they are relative to the rest of a society. - Example: someone is labeled poor if she has much less than those around her regardless of how much she has overall. - **Conceptualization:** precisely defining ideas and turning them into variables (type of definition). - **Operationalization:** is the process of identifying a plan for the concrete and systematic measurement of a variable. Two steps: (1)converting a conceptual definition into an operational definition that sets the parameters for measurements,(2) using the operational definition to collect data. Chapter: 5 - **Internal Validity of a study**: refers to the degree to which a study establishes a causal effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable. - Experimental designs tend to be the most internally valid method and can establish causality. - **Internal Validity of the measures**: is the degree to which the measures truly and accurately capture concepts. (works best with operationalization) - Dimensions of internal validity of the measures: face validity, criterion-related validity, concurrent validity, predictive validity, content validity, and construct validity. - **External validity:** A dimension of validity concerning the degree to which the results of a study can generalize beyond the study. - **How representative is the group being studied?** - If only men take a survey on the effects of mental health on parenting behavior (low in external validity), we cannot be sure if the study is about parenting and fathering. - Changing study to fathers rather than parents. - **How "real" is the study?** - Most commonly asked about experiments - Recruiting people to come into labs is difficult - Experiments don't have the large samples often used in survey research. - People might be self-conscious knowing that they are being observed - Experiments lose external validity because we do not know if the same results would emerge outside the lab. - **Linking internal and external validity:** - **Team leader experiment:** - Experimental group: verbally abusive, results showed that work stress was higher - Control group: had a team leader who was impersonal but professional - The experiment captured a causal effect which leads to internal validity overall. In experiment we fine, face validity, content validity, predictive, and low construct validity. - Verbal abuse in a short lab experiment is not the same as having an abusive boss at work, suggesting that low external validity is low. As well as a group of 18-19 year-old college students might not be the best sample group. Chapter: 6 - **Benefits of probability sampling:** - **Terms:** - Probability sample - Nonprobability sample - Stratified samples - Systematic samples - Simple random samples - Cluster samples - Binge drinking study - **Benefits of non representative samples:** - Alzheimer's disease study - David Snowdom, 1980's, 678 catholic nuns - Why nuns? - They were much older than the average American woman, healthier lifestyles, more likely to survive to a very old age. - Nuns have similar lifestyles to one another, (lived together, share a diet, physical environment) - By choosing a group that lived together, researchers were able to gather higher-quality information. - Example: nuns had to write an essay and the more complex the sentences used in the nun's essay when she was a young adult, the less likely she was to develop Alzheimer\'s.