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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.

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