SOC 302: Introduction to Sociology, Theory, Methods, and Culture

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering sociological perspectives, levels of analysis, classical theorists, research methodology, and cultural concepts from SOC 302.

Sociology

The scientific and systematic study of groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions, from small and personal groups to very large groups.

Sociologist

Someone concerned with understanding society in a disciplined way by studying patterns in social life and explaining where those patterns originate.

Micro-Level Analysis

An analytical lens focusing on individuals and face-to-face social interaction, including identities, individual experiences, and personal decisions.

Meso-Level Analysis

An analytical lens focusing on groups, organizations, communities, and networks, such as hospitals, medical schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods.

Macro-Level Analysis

An analytical lens focusing on institutions and large-scale social patterns and processes, such as healthcare systems, education, inequality, demographic change, and public policy.

Sociological Imagination

The mental capacity and framework to range from impersonal and remote societal transformations to the most intimate features of the human self, and to see the relations between the two.

Personal Troubles of Milieu

Private matters affecting an individual in their immediate everyday life of which they are personally aware, often assumed to be an individual responsibility to resolve.

Public Issues

Matters that transcend individual lives and involve larger social, institutional, or historical forces affecting many people that cannot be solved by individual choices alone.

Sociological Theory

A broad explanatory framework that acts as an analytical lens to make social patterns visible and explain how and why social phenomena occur.

Analytical Concepts

Targeted ideas and tools within a theoretical toolkit that help sociologists identify, name, and explain specific social processes.

Structural Functionalism

A macro- or mid-level theoretical tradition that views society as a complex system whose parts and institutions work together to maintain stability, order, and functioning of the whole.

Conflict Theory

A macro-level theoretical perspective emphasizing how inequities and resource distribution create social and power differences that dominant groups perpetuate to protect their interests.

Symbolic Interactionism

A micro-level theoretical tradition that examines how individuals interact one-on-one and communicate meanings, symbols, and interpretations in everyday life.

Karl Marx (Theoretical Contribution)

Analyzed industrial capitalism and the exploitation of workers, introducing concepts such as historical materialism, class conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, and alienation.

Émile Durkheim (Theoretical Contribution)

Examined what holds society together during modernization, focusing on the division of labor, social facts, social solidarity, social regulation, integration, and anomie.

Max Weber (Theoretical Contribution)

Explored the rise of efficiency, calculation, and bureaucracy in modern states, proposing concepts such as legitimate authority, social action, status, and the 'iron cage.'

W.E.B. Du Bois (Theoretical Contribution)

Investigated systematic racial inequality and how race shapes identity and social structures, introducing concepts such as 'double consciousness.'

Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead (Theoretical Contribution)

Pioneered symbolic interactionist perspectives on how face-to-face interaction and primary groups shape the self, developing concepts such as the 'looking-glass self,' the 'I' and the 'me,' and role taking.

Scientific Method (in Sociology)

A systematic, empirical approach to developing and testing theories about the social world through six prescribed steps: ask a question, research existing sources, formulate a hypothesis, design and conduct a study, draw conclusions, and report results.

Quantitative Evidence

Information represented numerically, used by researchers to identify patterns, measure frequencies, calculate distributions, and compare variables across populations.

Qualitative Evidence

Detailed, non-numerical information (such as interview transcripts, field notes, or cultural texts) used to examine social meanings, processes, and lived experiences.

Survey

A research method in which standardized questions are administered to a sample of people to measure prevalence, attitudes, beliefs, or relationships between variables.

Population and Sample

The population is the entire group a researcher seeks to understand, whereas the sample is the specific manageable subset of that group actually studied.

Ethnography

A qualitative research method involving sustained immersion in a specific social setting or community to observe and understand its everyday social life and culture.

Content Analysis

A research method that systematically analyzes patterns and messages in existing media, texts, images, or cultural products.

Culture

The shared values, beliefs, norms, language, symbols, artifacts, identities, and memories through which people understand and navigate social life.

Material Culture

The tangible, physical spaces, objects, and artifacts created and used by members of a society to organize social life.

Nonmaterial Culture

The intangible, shared ideas, beliefs, values, norms, language, and symbols that shape social behavior and understanding.

Symbols

Objects, gestures, words, or images that carry recognized, shared meanings among people who belong to a culture.

Values and Beliefs

Values are culturally defined standards of what is good, desirable, and important in an ideal culture; beliefs are tenets or convictions held to be true about how the world operates.

Norms

Shared societal expectations that govern how people are expected to behave, categorized as formal (explicitly written/codified) or informal (unwritten but widely understood).

Breaching Experiment

A sociological exercise that deliberately violates an ordinary social expectation to make visible the unspoken, taken-for-granted norms organizing social interaction.

Sanctions

Mechanisms of social control consisting of positive rewards (approval, awards) or negative punishments (ridicule, fines) that communicate social boundaries in both formal and informal ways.