sociology 101 Oxford College
Terms
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- Culture
- integrated pattern of thinking, understanding, communicating and evaluating that makes up peoples way of life.
- Social structure
- the pattern of relationships, positions, and numbers of people that provide the “skeleton of social organization for a population.
- Sociological imagination-
- the ability to understand why we do the things we do and the social forces that influence these actions.
- Sociology
- the study of the ways in which human life is socially organized
- Science
- a systematic way of observing nature, interpreting what we see objectively, searching for relationships of cause and effect and organizing knowledge through theory.
- Power
- the capacity of any one social actor to determine the course of events of the structure of social organization through coercion or manipulation.
- Empirical observation
- the organization of sensory information into scientific data by processes of abstraction, interpretation, and replication.
- Logical analysis
- the development of theory by identifying distinct units of analysis and relationships among them.
- Theory
- a systematic attempt to explain how 2 or more phenomena are related.
- Verstehen
- Weber's term for an empathetic understanding of what people are thinking and feeling.
- Social facts
- enduring properties of social life that shape or constrain the actions individual can take.
- Capitalists
- members of the bourgeoisie. Capital is property that can be used to produce further wealth.
- Bourgeoisie
- the social class in a capitalist industrialized society that owns and controls the means of production.
- Proletariat
- the members of a capitalist industrialized society who have not control over the means of production. (the workers).
- Social solidarity
- the condition that results when underlying social forces bind people together.
- Organic solidarity
- interdependence among a group of people that is based on an intricate division of labor.
- Mechanical solidarity
- solidarity that is based on common beliefs, values and customs.
- Anomie
- disruption in the rules and understanding that guide and integrate social life and give individuals a sense of their place in it.
- Status groups
- groups based on race, religion, personal tastes and other non-economic factors which help establish a social hierarchy.
- Symbolic interactionism
- an approach to human behavior as constructed in interaction and interpreted through culture, stressing the collective attribution of meaning to social life.
- Double consciousness
- a mismatch between one’s image of oneself and the identity ascribed to them by society.
- Hypothesis
- a tentative statement that predicts how two or more variables affect, or are correlate to one another.
- Data
- facts, stats, study results, and other info that is collected and used to construct theories.
- Indicator
- something that can be clearly measured as an approximation of some other, more complex variable
- Operational definition
- the set of clearly measurable indicators that will represent one of the variables in an analysis.
- Egoistic suicide
- Durkheim’s term for suicide that results from social isolation and individualism.
- Anomic suicide
- Durkheim’s term for suicide that results from a condition of social normlessness know as anomie.
- Fatalistic suicide
- taking one’s life to avoid what seems to be and inevitably bleak future if one goes on living.
- Altruistic suicide
- Durkheim’s term for suicide that results firm extreme commitment to a group of community.
- Validity
- the degree to which scientific study measures what it attempts to measure
- Reliability
- the degree to which a study yields the same results when repeated by the original or other researchers.
- Function
- the contribution any social relationship, position, organization, value, or other aspect of society makes to a longer social system.
- Spurious correlation
- a correlation between two variables that has no meaningful casual bias.
- Correlation coefficient
- a decimal number between zero and one that is used to indicate the strength of a correlation.
- Quantitative research
- research that relies on statistical analysis of data.
- Functional integration
- each part of society is influenced by and dependent on its relationship to the others.
- Qualitative research
- research that depends on primarily on verbal descriptions, firsthand observations, or pictures to study particular cases in depth
- Sample
- a limited number of people from the population being studied who are representative of that population.
- Random sample
- in a survey, a method used to draw a sample in such away that every member of the population being studied has an equal chance of being selected.
- Social action
- voluntary behavior taken by individuals or groups in order to promote change.
- Population
- in a survey, the total number of people who share a characteristic.
- Survey
- a research method using questionnaires and/or interviews to learn how people thing, feel, or act. (validity, reliability = random= good survey)
- Interview
- a conversation in which a researcher asks a series of questions or discusses a topic with another person.
- Experiment
- a research method in which subjects are exposed to a specially designed situation that allows researchers to control the factors that may affect the hypothetical cause and effect relationships among variables they are studying.
- Ethnographies
- studies in which researchers observe people in their everyday settings, usually over and extended period of time.
- Content analysis
- a research method that provides a way to systematically organize and summarize both the manifest and latent content of communication.
- Cross-cultural research
- studies that describe social patterns in societies other than the researcher’s own.
- Globalization
- the process by which the peoples of the world are being drawn into closer relationships with one another.
- Historical studies
- sociological research on past events, previous ways of life or patterns of change over time.