Exam 1 Study Guide

1. Mills and alienation:

• Alienation: an individual’s isolation from his society, his work, and his sense of self

1. History, society, and biography
2. Problem with labeling everything
3. psychological or biological
4. Three questions Mills asks (see PowerPoint)
5. Personal Troubles vs Public Issues
6. Debunking:

• looking beyond the obvious to expose falseness by examining merit,

logic, and evidence.

1. What causes alienation?:

• We can’t see beyond our own personal lives, lack of common values

1. What is sociology?

• Study of groups and group interactions

1. What does sociology study?

• Groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions,

from small and personal groups to very large groups.

1. Social Structure:

• Unequal

1. Seeing the strange in the familiar (Berger):

• Berger believes that Sociologists are able to assume the

obvious about a sociological investigation due to experience except when they

are presented at a familiar scene and they are given an insight that goes

Against what they have seen at similar scenes

1. Sociology’s sister field:

• Anthropology

1. When and why does sociology emerge?:

• developed as an academic and scientific way to study and theorize about

the changes to society brought on by the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth

and the nineteenth century.

• In the 13th century, Ma Tuan-Lin, first to record social dynamics
• 14th century, Khaldun proposed a theory of social conflict
• In the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers developed general principles
• that could be used to explain social life.
• the early 19th century saw great changes with the Industrial Revolution,

increased mobility, and new kinds of employment

• political decisions became public decisions

1. Enlightenment values and ideas
2. Durkheim and suicide:

• found that Protestants were more likely to commit suicide than Catholics.
• focused on social factors that affected suicide
• examined suicide statistics in different police districts to research

differences between Catholic and Protestant communities

• attributed the differences to socio-religious forces rather than to

individual or psychological causes

1. Social integration and solidarity:

• Social Integration: how strongly a person is connected to his or her social group
• Social Solidarity: the social ties that bind a group of people together such

as kinship, shared location, and religion

1. Sui Generis:

• Latin phrase that means "of its/their own kind" or "in a class by itself"

1. Mechanical vs Organic Solidarity:

Mechanical:

• a type of social order maintained by the collective consciousness of a culture

Organic:

- a type of social order based around an acceptance of economic and

social differences

1. Verstehen:

• a German word that means to understand in a deep way

1. Structural Functionalism:

• each part of society functions together to contribute to the functioning

of the whole.

• Macro/Mid level of analysis
• EX: How each organ works to keep your body healthy (or not.)

1. Symbolic Interactionism:

• The way one-on-one interactions and communications behave.
• Level of analysis: Micro
• EX: What’s it mean to be an X?

1. Social Conflict:

• Khaldun proposed a theory of social conflict and provided a comparison of

nomadic and sedentary life, an analysis of political economy, and a study

connecting a tribe’s social cohesion to its capacity for power

1. Micro vs Macro level analysis:

• Macro level - study trends in large groups (societies)
• Micro level - study small groups (Individual interactions)

1. Manifest vs Latent Functions:

Latent:

• Unexpected consequences of social process
• EX: College education; people you meet, events you go to, thing you get

invited too

Manifest:

• Expected consequences of a social process
• EX: College education; AP classes you take for college, internships you
• Take for your future career

1. Dysfunctions:

• Social processes that have undesirable consequences for the operation

of society

• EX: Bad grades, dropping out, not graduating

1. Looking Glass Self:

• our reflection of how we think we appear to others

1. Value-free sociology:

• the ability of researchers to keep their own personal biases and opinions out

of the research

1. Quantitative Vs Qualitative research:

• Quantitative: statistical methods such as surveys with large numbers of participants
• Qualitative: in-depth interviews, focus groups, and/or analysis of content sources

as the source of its data

1. Bias:
2. Sample:

• small, manageable number of subjects that represent the population

1. Participant Observation:

• experience a specific aspect of social life.
• researchers join people and participate in a group’s routine activities

for the purpose of observing them within that context.

1. Scientific Method:

• interpretative framework to increase understanding of societies and social

interactions.

1. Positivism:

• the scientific study of social patterns

1. Theory and Methods:

• Theory: a way to explain different aspects of social interactions
• Paradigms: Philosophical and theoretical frameworks used within a discipline

to formulate theories, generalizations, and the experiments performed in

support them.

1. Empirical data:

• information acquired by scientists through experimentation and observation

1. Surveys:

• collects data from subjects who respond to a series of questions about behaviors

and opinions, often in the form of a questionnaire or an interview.

• allows individuals a level of anonymity in which they can express

personal ideas.

1. Populations:

• a defined group serving as the subject of a study

1. Random Samples:

• a study’s participants being randomly selected to serve as a representation

of a larger population

• Everyone has the same chance to be chosen

1. Experimental Research:

• the testing of a hypothesis under controlled conditions

1. Confidentiality and Anonymity
2. Conflict theory:

• Macro level
• looks at society as a competition for limited resources.

Auguste Comte:

• “Father of Sociology”
• named the scientific study of social patterns positivism
• thought that social scientists could study society using the same scientific methods utilized in natural sciences.
• believed in the potential of social scientists to work toward the betterment of society.
• that once scholars identified the laws that governed society, sociologists could address problems such as poor education and poverty

Karl Marx:

• German philosopher and economist.
• differed from what Comte proposed.
• believed that societies grew and changed as a result of the struggles of different social classes over the means of production.
• predicted that inequalities of capitalism would become so extreme that workers would eventually revolt.
• believed that communism was a more equitable system than capitalism.
• social conflict leads to change in society

Durkheim:

• “Father of Structural Functionalism”
• “People rise to their proper levels in society based on merit.”
• believed that sociologists would study objective social facts → would be possible to determine if a society was “healthy” or “pathological.”