Sociology Chapter 1
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34 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Sociological perspective | understanding human behavior by placing it within its broader social context |
| Society | people who share a culture and a territory |
| Social location | the group memberships that people have because of their location in history and society |
| Science | the application of systematic methods to obtain knowledge and the knowledge obtained by those methods |
| Natural sciences | the intellectual and academic disciplines designed to comprehend, explain and predict events in our natural environments |
| Social sciences | the intellectual and academic disciplines designed to understand the social world objectively by the means of controlled and repeated observations |
| Generalization | a statement that goes beyond the individual case and is applied to a broader group or situation |
| Patterns | recurring characteristics or events |
| Common sense | those things that "everyone knows" are true |
| Scientific method | using objective, systematic observations to test theories |
| Positivism | the application of the scientific approach to the social world |
| Sociology | the scientific study of society and human behavior |
| Class conflict | Marx's term for the struggle between capitalists and workers |
| Bourgeoisie | Marx's term for capitalists, those who own the means of production |
| Proletariat | Marx's term for the exploited class, the mass of workers who do not own the means of production |
| Social integration | the degree to which people feel a part of social groups |
| Value free | the view that a sociologist's personal values or biases would not influence social research |
| Objectivity | total neutrality |
| Replication | repeating a study in order to test its findings |
| Verstehen | a German word used by Weber that is perhaps best understood as "to have insight into someone's situation" |
| Subjective meanings | the meanings that people give their own behavior |
| Social facts | Durkehim's term for a group's patterns of behavior |
| Basic/pure sociology | sociological research whose purpose is to make discoveries about life in human groups, not to make changes in those groups |
| Applied sociology | the use of sociology to solve problems- from the micro level of family relationships to the macro level of crime and pollution |
| Theory | a general statement about how some parts of the world fit together and how they work; an explanation of how two or more facts are related to another |
| Symbolic interactionism | a theoretical perspective in which society is viewed as composed of symbols that people use to establish meaning, develop their views of the world, and communicate with another |
| Functional analysis | a theoretical framework in which society is viewed as composed of various parts, each with a function that, when fulfilled, contributes to society's equilibrium; also known as functionalism and structural functionalism |
| Conflict theory | a theoretical framework in which society is viewed as composed of groups that are competing for scarce resources |
| Macro-level analysis | an examination of large-scale patterns of society |
| Micro-level analysis | an examination of small-scale patterns of society |
| Social interaction | what people do when they are in one another's presence |
| Nonverbal interaction | communication without words through gestures, use of space, silence, and so on |
| Globalization | the extensive interconnections among nations due to the expansion of capitalism |
| Globalization of capitalism | capitalism (investing to make profits within a rational system) becoming the globe's dominant economic system |
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