Introduction to Social Sciences - ENSAI 1st Year

A set of vocabulary flashcards covering key terms and concepts from the Introduction to Social Sciences notes.

Social sciences

Disciplines that study human societies and social interactions, aiming to produce scientific knowledge about social life, its structures, and its regularities.

Holism

An approach that emphasizes social groups, institutions, and collective structures rather than reducing phenomena to individuals.

Methodological individualism

An approach that explains social phenomena through individuals’ actions and motives, challenging pure holism.

Social fact

Durkheim's concept: ways of acting, thinking, or feeling external to the individual that exert coercive power over behaviour.

Sociology

Science that studies the social and society, aims to understand social action and explain its development through interpretation; uses ideal types.

Ideal types

Abstract models used to compare real social phenomena and to structure analysis.

Auguste Comte

Founder of sociology; promoted positivist science of society.

Positivism

Philosophy that seeks to discover general laws of social life through empirical observation and scientific methods.

Frédéric Le Play

19th-century social observer who produced monographs of working-class families to document social life.

Émile Durkheim

Pioneer who defined social facts and advanced the idea of sociology as a science with a comparative method.

Max Weber

Sociologist who defined sociology as understanding social action through interpretation and by using ideal types and rationality types.

Pierre Bourdieu

French sociologist who emphasized revealing hidden structures of domination and the public role of sociology.

Bernard Lahire

Sociologist who argues that understanding should not excuse social action; sociology can challenge social norms.

Public sociology

Sociology that engages the public, creating dialogue between sociologists and wider audiences; Burawoy’s typology.

Policy sociology

Applied sociology used to inform policy decisions for a client.

Scholarly sociology

Pure, theory-driven sociology focused on research programs.

Critical sociology

Sociology that reflects on how science is produced and questions normative foundations.

Three steps of the sociological method

1) Break with common sense; 2) Build a model and define a problem; 3) Verify with empirical data.

The social

Concept of social life as rules and constraints that shape individuals and as meanings attached to behavior.

The society

Complex network of human relationships and interactions; society exists because individuals compose it.

Questionnaire

Survey instrument that can be self-administered or interviewer-administered; includes open/closed questions and may use Likert scales.

Administrative data

Data collected by public administrations or organizations (e.g., employment files, census), often enhanced by big data; require anonymization and security.

Interview

Data collection method featuring a dialogue with a respondent, informative or biographical.

Semi-structured interview

Interviews that blend guided questions with open-ended exploration, often used in ethnography.

Ethnography

Qualitative method involving in-depth fieldwork and immersion to understand social practices from participants’ perspective.

Observation

Systematic watching and recording of social practices; can be non-participant or participant observation.

Content analysis

Method of analyzing texts or discourses by coding and identifying patterns.

Network analysis

Method studying relationships among actors or organizations by mapping interactions.

Quantification

Process of turning social reality into numerical data, i.e., producing data in numerical form.

Descriptive statistics

Describe a population or sample; values are directly interpretable and summarize data.

Inferential statistics

Use of sample data to make inferences about a larger population via probability-based rules.

Econometrics

Statistical methods applied to economic problems to explain and predict trends, usually linked to theory.

Regression

Statistical technique to estimate the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables.

Axiological neutrality

Weber’s idea that science should be value-neutral; the scientific process should separate facts from values.

Objectivation

Process by which social facts are treated as things that can be observed and measured in a systematic way.

Social action

Weber’s concept of actions that are oriented toward meaning and interpreted by others.