Exam I Prep

Week 1

Note: Move in between the micro (personal life) and the macro (history/society)

C. Wright Mills

• Critiqued developed functionalism

Social Imagination → Necessary to understand the wolrd (by Mills)

• Hability to see the link between your life and history (in times of trouble, look at the bigger picture)

• Goal → to understand that the individual life changces are not just the results of one’s actions, but are shapped by the society one is born into

• Mills argue that most people feel trapped in their daily lives bc they don’t understand the larger social forces acting upon them

Private troubles vs. public issues → Key point: when a problem becomes widespread, it can no longer be solved by an individual character. It requires a structural solution!

• Private troubles:

  • Occuer within the character of the individual/immediate social setting

  • E.g. you lost your job bc you were late

• Public issue:

  • Transcend the individual

  • Involves the organization of society as a whole

  • E.g. 15 million people are unemployed bc of a national economic collapse

Institutions & Insitutional Contradiction → According to Mills: Institutions are building blocks of social structure (family, economy, religion, etc.)

• Institution:

  • Set of social roles and norms that organize a specific area of social life

• Institutional contradiction:

  • Occurs when the goals or “logic” of different institutions clash

    • E.g. the family institution encourages people to be home and raise children, but the economic institution demans you work 60 hours a week to survive

    • Contradiction causes stress (private trouble) that is actually a result of the social structure (public issue)

Industrial Revolution → Mills used history to explain the present. The transition to an industrial society changed the human experience:

• There was a shift in roles

  • Peasant → worker; lord → businessman

• Mills argued that you can’t understand the modern worker’s anxiety without understanding the industrial revolution that created the factory system and the modern city

• Urbanization

  • moving from small villages (troubles were local) to massive cities (lives aer dictated by global markets)

Karl Max

Focus on power, economics, and human nature

For the exam view his work thru the lens of Conflict Theory ~ the idea that society is defined by the struggle between those who own the means of production and those who do not (working class vs. CEOs aka. rich)

Human Nature and Labor

• Species-being (Gattungswesen)

  • Max’s term for human essence

  • He believed what makes humans unique is our hability to consciously and creatively transform the world thru labor

  • To marx, we are - man the maker

• Labor

  • Ideally - it should be a source of joy and self-expression

  • we should see ourselves reflected in the things we create

• Wages

  • In a capitalist system - labor is no longer a creative act, it’s a commodity

    • Max argued that wages are kept at the bare minimum needed for survival (subsistence), allowing the owner to keep the “surplus value” (profit)

Alienation (Entfremdung)

Under capitalism → worker is separated from the “species-being”

max’s 4 types of alienation:

1. From the product: You don’t own what you make, the boss does

2. From the process: You don’t control how you work. Work becomes repetitive and meaningless

3. From others: Capitalism turns social relationships into market transactions. Workers compete for jobs rather than cooperating

4. From self: Because your work is forced and not creative, you lose tough with your true human nature

Social Structture: Base and superstructure

Sociological Research Methods

Most research falls into one of these two buckets:

• Quantitative research -

  • Focuses on numbers, statistics and trends

  • Aims for generalizability (aka. applying findings from a small group to a whole population)

    • Surveys, secondary data analysis

• Qualitative research -

  • Focuses on meaning, lived experience, and detail

  • Aims for depth

    • In-depth interviews, participant observation

Specific Methods:

• Surveys - standarized questions given to a large group

  • great for quantitative data but can be shallow

• Participant observation - researcher joins a group to observe them “in the wild”

• In-depth interviews - open ended, one-on-one conversations

  • This is the “gold standard” for qualitative depth

• Historical and content analysis - examining artifacts like old newspapers, movies, or historical documents to see how social trends change over time

The Mechanics of Research (Variables)

Testing a theory → need to break it down into measurable parts

• Variables - any charracteristic that can vary

  • age, race, income

• Independent variables - the cause

  • the thing that you change or that happens first

• Dependent variable - the effect

  • depends on the independent variable (aka. result of it)

• Operationalization

  • Process of turning an abstract concept into a measurable variable

  • e.g. you can’t measure love, so you operationalize it by counting “number of hugs per day”

Sampling: Choosing the Subject

Can’t study everyone, choose a sample

• Population - the entire group of interest

• Sampling frame - the actual list you pull your names from

• Sampling types:

  • Random (probability) sample - everyone has an equal chance of being picked

    • This is the only way to ensure the sample represents the whole population

  • Convenience sample - picking whoever is nearby

    • Fast - but biased

Biases to watch for:

• Nonresponse bias - when people who don’t answer the survey are different from those who do

  • e.g. only angry people respond

• Social desirability bias - when people lie to look good or normal to the researcher

Logic and Pitfalls (the “why”)

• Co-variation - when two variables move together (are correlated)

• Correlation vs. causation - just because two things happen together (correlation) doesn’t mean one caused the other

• Spurious relatioonships - A “false” relationship

  • two things appear related, but a third variable is actually causing both

  • a hidden “lurking” variable that drives two other variables
    

Ethics: The tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

The most important case study for research ethics!!

What happened: from 1932 - 1972, the U.S gov. tracked Black men with syphilis BUT withheld treatment just to see how the disease progressed

• Even after penicillin was discovered as treatment for syphillis

Why is this on my sociology exam?

This led to modern institutional review boards (IRB)

• Highlights the requirements of informed consent and the rule that researchers must “do not harm”

Social Inequality: Race

Race vs. Ethnicity

In sociology, they are different!

• Race - a system of social categorization based on perceived physical characteristics

  • Phenotype. Skin color, hair texture, etc.

  • Often imposed on groups by those in power

• Ethnicity - A group identity based on shared culture, language, religion, or ancestry

  • Often self-identified

The social construction of race

The idea that race is not “natural” → instead it is a human invention

**changes over time + across different cultures

• Evidence: in the U.S., the def of white has changed over time to eventually include irish and italian immigrants who were once considered non-white

• The one-drop rule: Historical U.S. legal principle (common during the Jim Crow era)

  • States that a person with even one-drop of Black ancestry was legally considered Black

  • Used to maintain clear racial boundaries and protect the “purity” of the white race

Scientific Interepretations of Race

Scientific racism - emerged to justify colonalism and slavery

• Eugenics: the pseudo-scientific belief that humans could be “improved” thru selective breeding

  • often used to argue that non-white races were biologically inferior or prone to crime

• Critique: Modern genetics has debunked this

  • There is more genetic variation within any given racial group than there is between two different racial groups

Color-Blind Racism (Eduardo Bonilla-Silva)

Bonilla-silva argues → since the civil right movement, racism has become more subtle

Color-blind racism - ideology that explains contemporary racial inequality

    The outcome of nonracial dynamics (like market forces or cultural preferences)

Four frames of color-blind ideology:

"filters” people use to justify racial inequality w/o osouning “racist”

1. Abstract liberalism

   1. Using ideas like “equal opportunity” or “individual choice” to oppose concrete policies like affirmative action

2. Naturalization

   1. Suggesting that racial patterns are just “natural” occurrences

   2. E.g. People just naturally want to live with their own kind; that’s why neighborhoods are segregated

3. Cultural racism

   1. Attributing racial inequality to the supposed “culture” or “values” of a group rather than structural barriers

   2. E.g. The reason X group struggles is bc they don’t value education enough

4. Minimization of racism

   1. Suggesting that discrimination is no longer a major factor affecting the life chances of people of color

   2. E.g. Racism exists, but it’s not like it used to be; people use it as an excuse

Stereotype Threat and Promise

These concepts deal w how society expectations affect individal performance

• Stereotype threat: Risk of confirming negative sterreotypes ab one’s racial, ethnic, or gender group

  • E.g. When black students are told a test is a measure of “innate intelligence,” they may perform worse due to the anxiety of confirming the stereotype that black people are less intelligent

• Stereotype promise: The “boost” in performance that comes from being associated with a positive stereotype

  • E.g.The stereotype that Asian Americans are “naturally” good at math can lead teachers to give those students more attention and encouragement, resulting in higher actual achievement