Objectives:
1. The sociological perspective is the study of how people act in different cultures and the things that impact them within that culture. This also looks at the different acts that are allowed or acceptable within different cultures. Sociology contributes to our understanding of human behavior through the teaching that our culture and society is not the only one and each aspect of our lives varies from culture to culture.
2. Sociology emerged as a science in the middle of the 19th century in Europe due to the idea that the scientific method be applied to studying societies in order to find answers to the question of what holds society together.
3. Many contributions were made to sociology by a number of people. Aguste Comte is proclaimed to be the “founder of sociology” and many of his ideas have now been disproved. Herbert Spencer invented the term “survival of the fittest”, this was then known as social Darwinism because he claimed that society evolved. Karl Marx believed class conflict was one of society’s biggest issues. His goal was to make the classes equal to each other, but this was mistakenly turned into communism. Emile Durkheim did a study resulting with the idea that social integration is a prominent factor on individuals. Lastly, Max Weber showed how religion impacts the orientation of one’s life.
4. Rigidly defined sex roles affected women’s involvement in early sociology because women had less rights than men. Women had to be feminine in every action they did and could not do anything masculine or it would be considered unacceptable. For example, Harriet Martineau used her research on different societies to write a book Society in America, but it was hardly read because the author was a women.
5. Sociological analysis is analyzing some part of society and typically publishing the findings. Social reform creates controversy as to if sociology needs to be used to help others and make society a better place to live. Applied sociology meets in-between these two and uses sociology to solve problems.
6. Symbolic interactionism is social life created by the symbols in our lives. Functional analysis focuses on relationships within different parts of society and how they benefit or hurt society. Conflict theory shows the struggles between more powerful groups and weaker groups.
7. Micro-level analysis is focused smaller groups or relationships, this is used by symbolic interactionism. Macro-level is examining relations from a larger scale, this is used by functional analysis and conflict theory.
8. Common sense is an inadequate source of knowledge about human behavior because common sense is not reliable information until you have tested the information to be true.
9. The eight steps in the research model are select a topic, define the problem, review the literature, formulate a hypothesis, choose a research method, collect the data, analyze the results, and share the results.
10. When researching through surveys, a selection of people are asked a series of questions. Participant observation is when a researcher is on the site of where the research is being done. In secondary analysis, the researcher analyzes someone else’s data. Many different types of documents and records are analyzed by researchers.