Soc test 1

What is sociology?

Study of society and human inter-connectedness

* based on observation that humans live together
* observes characteristics of collectivities
* analyzes societies by looking at the structure of collectivity.

Division of labour

* Different collectivity members have different tasks based on what role they have
* differs for each system of categorization

What makes human societies unique

humans rely on the works of people from thousands and hundreds of years ago for everyday tasks (i.e. playing works from beethoven in an orchestral performance)

Sociological Imagination

Relationship between the individual and the society they are in

What does the sociological imagination do?

* connects personal moments to the totality of our environments and societies
* emphasizes the co-constitution of individual and society

What is the relationship between humans and society?

Co-constitutional. Humans makes societies, societies make humans.

Social forces

Societal level mechanisms that influence the character of individuals and their life trajectories.

Ideology

Social force that influences us to perceive the world in particular ways, and to make judgements (choices about how to behave)

Subjective vs. Objective

Mind; Physical Reality

Structure

How the social world is organized to elicit particular patterns of behaviour

What do social forces do

Social forces like ideology and structure provide possible explanations for how society influences individuals.

Societal Reproduction

When individuals behave in a way that is consistent with the ideologies and structure within which they are embedded, their resultant behaviour reproduces both ideology and structure.

What is an empirical discipline?

Sociology is an empirical discipline because it does not say how things *should be* but rather observes and explains how things currently are

Empirical investigation

Practice of putting away personal beliefs to analyze what is empirically true.

Research Question

What the project sets out to answer, researcher does not know the answer

Microsystem

Personal, Individual, psychological factors

Mesosystem

Group, organizational, relational factors, community, health agency, school

Macrosystem

Collective, historical, structural factors

quantitative data

numerical info, stats, or translating social reality into measurable variables

Original Survey

* traditional way to collect quant data
* questionnaire

Variables

variables are measurements of some phenomenon that has more than one value or score

Operationalization

Involves researchers specifying how variables will measure what they are designed to measure

Independant variable

Variable that is hypothesized to have some effect.

Dependant variable

variable that is hypothesized to be influenced by the independent variable.

Spurious Relationship

Two variables linked to each other but not linked because one causes the each other.

Population

The universe of cases that the research question is relevant to. Defined by research question/project.

Sample

A subset of a population that is investigated empirically.

Generalizability

The extent to which observations about a sample can be reasonable assumed to represent a population.

Random Sampling

(Ideal) Each individual in the population has an equal probability of being selected for study

Representative Sampling

The sample is a reproduction of the population along particular demographic characteristics

Convenient Sampling

People are sampled based on their availability

Snowball Sampling

People that have been sampled introduce the researcher to other possible study participants

Secondary Analysis

Analyzing existing data in a novel way

Data Scraping

Using computer algorithms to generate data about people’s online behaviour.

Quantitative Content Analysis

Study of what people produce

Nominal Variables

Numbers are used to represent different conditions, but the phenomenon is not quantitative (Race, Marital Status)

Ordinal Variables

Different values of the variables can be ranked but there is no way to measure the precise different between ranked values (Likert scales, class, pain)

Ratio Variables

Differences between values are measurable, and there exists a real zero (number of siblings, income)

Descriptive Statistics

Stats that tell us about the distribution of one variable

Central tendency

measures of central tendency attempt to give a quick picture of the content of one variable.

Proportion

Tells us the % of a variable that falls into one particular variable value (number between 0 and 1)

Mode

Variable value that is the most common, or has the highest count (calculated for all levels of variables)

Median

The value that separates the sample into two equal halves (cannot be calculated for nominal level variable)

Mean

Average Value (only for ratio)

Normal Curve

Mean=Median=Mode

Symmetrical Sides

Asymptotic tail

Positive Skew

Mode < Median < Mean

Negative Skew

Mode > Median > Mean

Outliers

Extreme cases where variable value is very off from the majority

Inferential Stats

Measure the relationship between two or more variables

Cross-Tab

Useful for calculating the relationship between two variables when at least one is nominal/categorical

Bivariate stats

measure the relationship between two variables

Correlation Coefficient

Measures the relationship between two ratio level variables (number between -1 and 1)

Positive Correlation

V1 goes up = V2 goes up

Negative Correlation

V1 goes up = V2 goes down

Perfect positive correlation

1

Perfect negative correlation

\-1

Multivariate statistics

describe the effect of several independent variables at once on some dependent variable

Qualitative Research

Interpretive prose

weaknesses: not generalizable

strength: limit of what you can observe is not imposed by the limits of the data collection (don’t have anticipate what questions you’ll need the answer to)

Saturation

Occurs when researcher determines that further data collection is unlikely to yield new info

Ethnography

The researcher embeds themself in the social milieu that they wish to study.

Inductive codes

Codes are developed from the data

Deductive codes

Codes are developed in advance

Qualitiative coding

searching the text for salient themes or codes