Chapter 1-3 Sociology Review
Terms
- Sociology: The study of human social life, groups, origins, and relationships in society. It
examines how memberships in a group shapes our experiences of the world
- Examine actions and responses to detect general patterns of human behaviour
- Culture: group shared practices, values, beliefs, norms, and artifacts
- Society: group of people, whose members interact and reside in a definable area and
share a culture
- Reification: which abstract concepts, complex processes or mutable solation relation
come to be thought as things. For example: When people say “Society” cause an
individual to do something
- Sociological perspective: Studying groups without bias or opinion to allow us to see how
society is (society and individuals are inseparable)
- Critical sociology: uses rigorous scientific analysis as a basis to change society (conlfict
theory)
- Social facts: serve one or more functions within a society (laws, customs, morality,
money)
- Anomie: lack of norms that give clear direction and purpose to individuals actions -
rioting, protesting
- Social solidarity: social ties that binda group together
- Interpretive sociology: explains human behaviour in terms of the meanings individuals
attribute to it - discover their beliefs, values, because individual act on their own
understanding of situations (led to ethnography, etc)
- Social actions: actions to which individuals attach subjective meaning
- Positivist sociology: Focuses on generating types of knowledge useful for controlling
social life (positivism - relies on translating human phenomena into quantifiable units of
measurement)
- Function: biological and social needs of individuals, who make up society
- Social group: provides 1st experiences of socializations
,- Moral development: refers to the way people learn what society is considered to be
“good” and “bad”
- Gender schema: images of gender differences that enable them to make decisions about
appropriate styles of play and behaviour
- Causation: correlation between ind/dep variables, indep variable must be prior to dep,no
confounding variable
- Casual observation: observations without any systematic process for observing, assessing
accuracy of what we observed
- Selective observation: only see patterns we want to see or assume the only patterns we
experience
- Ethnography: extended observation of the social perspectives and cultural values of an
entire social setting
Chapter 1: Introduction to Sociology
● Explain how major societal changes in Europe shaped the development of Sociology
as a scientific discipline
- Can be traced to 17/16 century and became popular in the 18th to 19th century
- Ancient Greeks provided foundations of sociology through distinction they drew between
nature and law/customs
- Socretes/Platos/Aristotle: believed that the idea form of human community comes from
ethical dilemmas of difference between human nature and norms
- The development of science provided more knowledge for sociology to move beyond
earlier morals, philosophical beliefs, etc on human conditions
- Social changes in europe: political changes, technology development, social order that
defined modern society
- Disenchantment of the world: god/spirits defined the natural and social word as a
chanceless, cyclical creation
- Age of Enlightenment:intellectual movement that challenged existing ideas regarding the
power, authority, and government role of the church
- Rationalism: a concept created by Plato stating that laws that governed the truth of
reasons and ideas
, - Empiricism: concept created by Aristotle stated that knowledge must be acquired through
observation and experience
- Scientific revolution and the introduction to the scientific method: Strong emphasis on
positivism as way to study the natural world and social phenomena by applying scientific
methods (Auguste Comte)
● Distinguish between micro-, macro-, and global-level sociology
- Micro: focuses on the ways people interact face to face or in small groups (small scale)
- Question: How do group members allocate tasks?
- Approach: Symbolic interaction
- Macro: Deals with institutions, class dynamic, gender/race relations
- Question: how has the decline of unions shape the employment race?
- Approaches: functionalism, conflict theory, and feminist theory
- Global level: Global issues and social processes associate with these issues
- Question: roles of the world in alleviating gender bias based on violence in developing
countries
● Explain the tenets of the sociological imagination
- Was created by C.Wright Mills
- Approach on exploring social structure in which phenomena is embedded
- Being an objective observer who is able to move away from personal value, judgments,
and biases
- Persons trouble of milieu - public issues of social structure
- Looking at society in a new way, linking your personal issues to the great society
- Example: private issues like being depressed or overweight can be purely personal in
nature
● Discuss the bidirectional relationship between social structure and the individual
- Cultural patterns and social forces put pressure on people to select one choice over
another
- Social structures: when general patterns persist through time and become habitual or
routinized at micro levels or institutionalized at macro/global of interactions
- social structures organizes individuals of a society
Terms
- Sociology: The study of human social life, groups, origins, and relationships in society. It
examines how memberships in a group shapes our experiences of the world
- Examine actions and responses to detect general patterns of human behaviour
- Culture: group shared practices, values, beliefs, norms, and artifacts
- Society: group of people, whose members interact and reside in a definable area and
share a culture
- Reification: which abstract concepts, complex processes or mutable solation relation
come to be thought as things. For example: When people say “Society” cause an
individual to do something
- Sociological perspective: Studying groups without bias or opinion to allow us to see how
society is (society and individuals are inseparable)
- Critical sociology: uses rigorous scientific analysis as a basis to change society (conlfict
theory)
- Social facts: serve one or more functions within a society (laws, customs, morality,
money)
- Anomie: lack of norms that give clear direction and purpose to individuals actions -
rioting, protesting
- Social solidarity: social ties that binda group together
- Interpretive sociology: explains human behaviour in terms of the meanings individuals
attribute to it - discover their beliefs, values, because individual act on their own
understanding of situations (led to ethnography, etc)
- Social actions: actions to which individuals attach subjective meaning
- Positivist sociology: Focuses on generating types of knowledge useful for controlling
social life (positivism - relies on translating human phenomena into quantifiable units of
measurement)
- Function: biological and social needs of individuals, who make up society
- Social group: provides 1st experiences of socializations
,- Moral development: refers to the way people learn what society is considered to be
“good” and “bad”
- Gender schema: images of gender differences that enable them to make decisions about
appropriate styles of play and behaviour
- Causation: correlation between ind/dep variables, indep variable must be prior to dep,no
confounding variable
- Casual observation: observations without any systematic process for observing, assessing
accuracy of what we observed
- Selective observation: only see patterns we want to see or assume the only patterns we
experience
- Ethnography: extended observation of the social perspectives and cultural values of an
entire social setting
Chapter 1: Introduction to Sociology
● Explain how major societal changes in Europe shaped the development of Sociology
as a scientific discipline
- Can be traced to 17/16 century and became popular in the 18th to 19th century
- Ancient Greeks provided foundations of sociology through distinction they drew between
nature and law/customs
- Socretes/Platos/Aristotle: believed that the idea form of human community comes from
ethical dilemmas of difference between human nature and norms
- The development of science provided more knowledge for sociology to move beyond
earlier morals, philosophical beliefs, etc on human conditions
- Social changes in europe: political changes, technology development, social order that
defined modern society
- Disenchantment of the world: god/spirits defined the natural and social word as a
chanceless, cyclical creation
- Age of Enlightenment:intellectual movement that challenged existing ideas regarding the
power, authority, and government role of the church
- Rationalism: a concept created by Plato stating that laws that governed the truth of
reasons and ideas
, - Empiricism: concept created by Aristotle stated that knowledge must be acquired through
observation and experience
- Scientific revolution and the introduction to the scientific method: Strong emphasis on
positivism as way to study the natural world and social phenomena by applying scientific
methods (Auguste Comte)
● Distinguish between micro-, macro-, and global-level sociology
- Micro: focuses on the ways people interact face to face or in small groups (small scale)
- Question: How do group members allocate tasks?
- Approach: Symbolic interaction
- Macro: Deals with institutions, class dynamic, gender/race relations
- Question: how has the decline of unions shape the employment race?
- Approaches: functionalism, conflict theory, and feminist theory
- Global level: Global issues and social processes associate with these issues
- Question: roles of the world in alleviating gender bias based on violence in developing
countries
● Explain the tenets of the sociological imagination
- Was created by C.Wright Mills
- Approach on exploring social structure in which phenomena is embedded
- Being an objective observer who is able to move away from personal value, judgments,
and biases
- Persons trouble of milieu - public issues of social structure
- Looking at society in a new way, linking your personal issues to the great society
- Example: private issues like being depressed or overweight can be purely personal in
nature
● Discuss the bidirectional relationship between social structure and the individual
- Cultural patterns and social forces put pressure on people to select one choice over
another
- Social structures: when general patterns persist through time and become habitual or
routinized at micro levels or institutionalized at macro/global of interactions
- social structures organizes individuals of a society
