Introduction TO Sociology PDF

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INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 8/28/12 Instructor: Sarah Hanks Sociology is the (scientific) study of societies, social groups, social life, and social interactions. Antrho is the study of man, its origins etc. Psych is the mental aspect of it, behaviors etc. Soc is the in between- we have a little more political lean than some things and we have statistics, but what we ’re looking at is social interactions. Why do we do what we do? Why is the classroom faced this way? Why when we walk into an elevator do we face a certain way? Social groups- why do we have subgroups that intermingle? Why are there tattoos, who gets them? We deconstruct race- why do we have black and white? Who gets defined as what? Tiger Woods is an eighth African American yet we define him as black- why? Etc. -We don’t speak about the soc of religion 8/30/12 What is sociology? Scientific study of social life- social interactions social groups etc. Mixed up with antrho-study of man, psych-study of mind, soc-study of social groups social life. We tend to usually study our own culture. We have a little overlap with psych. We meet up a little more with social psychology. That’s the study of why do we consider certain people attractive and not? Ie mind process of how we view attraction, etc. -Study the social, usually our own culture, we study everything from the extreme taboo to the extremely mundane. Huge range of topics. We render the familiar strange and the strange familiar. We look at things and see what role does it play? What does it mean? -Bystander theory- sociology proved that the more people around, the less likely someone is to help. Concept of crowd behavior → when you’re alone you might feel the pressure to do something. You realize your relationship with that person much more directly. C. Wright Mills-Sociological Imagination- it’s a quality of mind. It’s a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world. The biggest factors/building blocks is distinguishing two things: 1.Personal troubles of milieu-environment, state of being, your context → those things that we experience, that we are limited by our own perspective. We tend to not want to see beyond of milieu, we have our bubble our culture our context. It’s about the individual and the immediate relations. This is diff than number two 2.The public issues of social structure →those matters that transcend the local environment. -Usually people remain in the class they were born into. If you ’re born middle class, you tend to stay middle class. This is what we will identify later as a social fact, a larger social issue, something that transcends the individual. -this is where we find our social location- that’s how our job income gender, all of these big factors affect our ideas and behavior. The social political economic factors

that guide our choices, there is interplay/relationship between these. Mills calls this biography, and history. You have to be able to pinpoint where you fall in these larger patterns- that’s to have a social imagination. The ability to say, are my experiences the experiences of a lot of people? To see how these larger patterns relate to us, not that we go against them or agree with them, just that there ’s a relationship. Ex: the fact that Hanks is a younger female affects the way that we talk to her and she talks to us. It shapes our relationship and we interact with each other. The fact that she ’s white and from the south affects her body language. Etc. There are these larger patterns and we can say where we meet them and where we don ’t. Once you have the social imagination, it gives us way of connecting our social location to our social experiences. Once you can see where you are, recognize your social location, hopefully then you can recognize the social patterns. Once we step back, we can also question what we take as normal- what do we take as every day, as natural, or normal? To my parents, gangs wouldn ’t make sense; why would they make sense? And that’s what we’re told- they’re dangerous! But to put that in question, well what is behind that? -Why are we not stealing each other ’s stuff? Why are we just sitting here not beating each other up? We take this as natural- we take this all as normal. But why is this the case? Why are things this way? We take it for granted. Elevator exampleeveryone automatically faces the back- why? We take that as natural. We even have social ways of mitigating that we know we just did something “Weird” or wrong- like facing the wrong way in the elevator and saying “oh” or “oops!” All of those are natural- why? There is structure vs. agency- if we said there are these larger patterns and we recognize where we fit into them, does that mean we’re determined by them? ie because I’m a middle class woman does that mean ill end up in x, can I change things? Or do we live by patterns? And if you can ’t change them, then how did the society change? We aren’t carbon copies of our parents- things change. We do have some agency- our ability to have choice. The q is- am I determined by the social structure? By these larger patterns? Social structure- ways people and groups are related to one another. It’s those structured patterns, those regularities and behaviors and relationships. As sociologists, different theorists go one way and one go another. We tend to not be so extreme anymore. One guy said we were all sheep, the media feeds us x and we eat it up! He felt we were pre-determined. Another guy felt no one was determining anything for him- he had free choice. Yes, but do we get to make life from nothing? Start from scratch? We tend to say yes and no in sociology. We can recognize that we can construct society, but are also constructed by society. Our behaviors are made up of those patterns but we make those patterns. There has to be room for change, for agency. How much is a debate amongst sociologists. We can ’t make up life from scratch, there are some patterns. Yet we do exhibit agency. The fact we ’re here right now is an example of that. We also have agency on how we experience these classes. -the social structure is always changing as well. If we ’re made up of these patterns, how does change happen? Typically, we ’d argue slowly. We can see these patterns happening in individuals behaviors, and if we look at history, we can see these patterns happening, but then there was a little breakout and things changed, ie civil

rights movement. There is possibility for change. The idea is that we can slowly change it. -Examples: smoking, living together before marriage, what we consider crimes, etc, all of these things slowly changed over time. Also, how we define rape. It used to be a husband couldn’t rape his wife. How we see science and religion changed. We can also look globally. Patterns that happen in America, NY, NJ, in comparison to patterns from other countries or states. How much has American patterns affected other countries patterns? Like our music, how has that affected other countries music? -We can see sociological patterns with crime- like shooting in columbine to batman shooting. -Robin Kelly- wrote about the history of the afro and traced what it meant over time. Ie 40’s it was females in the art society, then 60’s it was men associated with black panthers, etc. →so many patterns changes over time Mental Panic: when you find someone or something to put the blame on 9/4/12 What does and doesn’t get studied by sociologists? Research Ethics: There are a lot of ethical concerns that come up when dealing with sociology-dealing with people. Like plagiarism and lying. IRB-institutional review boards→committees for the protection of human subjects. If any school receives federal funding, they have to have an IRB board. Before you do any research with a human being you have to do an online training that takes 30 min and pass the test and then you have to do all of these forms and get them all approved—like consent forms. It can be a very long process. This committee is designed to protect people 1. Informed Consent- the participants in a study should know they’re part of a study. That involves letting them know “we’re asking you X amount of q’s and doing X with them.” 1. Ex : Humphries experiment- the people had no idea they were part of an experiment 1. There are some ways to get around it and conduct research without getting consent for certain reasons IE conducting research in a nightclub b. Risk- by participating in a risk, you should not face greater risk than you face every day. You should not be able to be harmed for being a part of this study. i.

“Vulnerable population”- children or minors, prisoners, fetus’s, pregnant women, and the cognitively impaired. 1. If you are studying this population, it’s much more challenging to get consent. With this population. It changes some of the research you can do.

Tuskegee experiment-basically stopped when it came out to press. The main reason was racism. Our government not only let people die, but caused people to die. (see homework for details of experiment) as much as we learned about syphilis, we learned more about how we do, or don’t do, research on people. 3. Privacy, anonymity, and confidentiality- the individual should get to determine what is known about them and what isn’t known about them. We have to protect the people we study. The researcher protects their researchers through this. 3. Misrepresentation-In most cases you're not supposed to misrepresent yourself. With Humphries, he misrep’d himself when he showed up to their homes because they didn’t know the real study he was conducting. He misrepresented who he was. Your experiements should have back up explanation for what you are trying to achieve -it’s important we have these, people need to be protected. If you were to do a research study... 1. You have to select a topic. 2. You have to define the problem. This means thinking about what you want to learn about the topic. 3. You must review the literature. Background research and ask who are they studying, how many people, where, how do they define the situation. 4. Formulate a hypothesis- a statement of expected outcome, what you expect to find with this background knowledge and this topic 1. Operational definitions- How we’re defining a variable, or the way we’re measuring it. Ex a kidnap, how do you define a kidnap? How long does the child have to be away for? Does a 17 yr old count as a child? 1. Deductive reasoning- when you have a theory and from that you build up a hypothesis 2. Inductive reasoning- where you gather all your data and from it you’re able to deduce your theory b. Choose a method-what is most useful for your topic? c. Collect the data d. Analyze the results e. Share the results- write it or publish it or do something with it Abstract- sums up the whole article in short. Typically have an introduction, and its usually the first two steps; the selection of topic and definition of problem. Then, it goes on to literature review or background review IE previous research which corresponds to step three, in addition to why you have to address it after all of these other people wrote about it too. Next is method or methodology which can be

a paragraph to pages which explains why they did it and what they're study actually was and why they did it that way IE why did you chose this campus to do your research? Then they explain the finding and the results. Usually where they say “..this happened..” and they might analyze it or there might be a separate section but eventually will go into discussing the problem and asking- this is what happened, was it what we expected? Was it more or less? Next is the conclusion where they say this is what we found and why it was or wasn ’t great, recommendations of future experiments, etc. →that’s the jist of an academic article Research Methods: it can become beurocratic and difficult. How do we actually do sociology? All methods have strengths and weaknesses and frequently we used them in combinations, rarely do you use one method at a time. 1. Survey- this is when we gather data by asking people questions. We don’t survey all people-that’s called a census-usually you want a particular population. There are a few different types of samples- a. random samples-everyone in your study had the same likelihood of being in your study. All people had the same likelihood, ie you took a list of names, assigned numbers to everyone, plugged it into a computer and used those. This is scientifically random. Also called a stratified random sample-when you’re trying to control for something particular. IE if you’re doing a study about Queens College, you’d take students from Queens. There are many technical ways for how many people need to be included in random samples. Ex, 10 students on campus won’t give you an accurate answer to your study. -You have to ask neutral questions: self-administered or interviewed. Selfadministered is lower cost, but you risk people saying “forget it, I’m not filling it out,” or people doing it quickly. The conditions under which they answer could be anything. Whoever interviews the person can affect the answers you get. Ex sexual behaviors- a male vs. a female interviewing can change things, the answers would be different. You can also build a sense of rapport- a sense of trust and a relationship. These can be unstructured or structured. It becomes a little tricky. 1. Strengths- you can gain a lot of data easily 2. Weaknesses too -Asking biased questions: EX: “Should the US forbid public speeches against democracy? Should the US allow public speeches against democracy?” → the word forbid intimidated people. They were more hesitant to select forbid and the answers didn’t make sense. You’d assume everyone who said yes to forbidding it said no to allowing it, but it didn’t work out properly because not everyone who said they shouldn’t allow it was willing to say they should forbid it. Wording makes a difference!! -It makes a difference who MADE the survey. That will affect the wording. If you list biased choices, that will change the outcome of the study. “Do you think something it okay, or do you HATE it?” Most will not choose HATE.

-Sometimes, undesirable results are disregarded. That affects research! You can also misunderstand the subject’s world. Meaning, you can ask someone something that is easily offensive that you don’t know offends them. Cultural differences, religion differences, etc, can affect the answers you’ll get -Analyze the data correctly! 2. Ethnography-participant observation. The researcher participates in the study while they’re being studied. You observe things and take “field notes” and those provide the descriptive data. You couldn’t do an ethnography study of the US, there are too many people and too many factors. This is usually used with small people and small numbers and reads as a story. You have to justify your presence, and they have to trust you and be willing to cooperate. Brotherton- a white male from England who used to be a “hooligan.” He studied Puerto Rican drug dealers. He built up a rapport with them and that’s how he got involved. You basically hang out with them. They still need to give you consent and this still has to go through the IRB but this is a more personal way of doing research because you first hand see it. They’re willing to let you into their lives. a. Strengths-get really good, detailed information. Very interesting theories gets extrapolated out of these things. If it’s working well, it reads like a book. b. Weaknesses-can ’t really generalize the data -Heavily dependent on how well you can write. Also there is a risk in getting involved. There tends to be that moral grey area. Also, how much the researcher shakes the data they get from what they ’re getting. 3. Case Studies- the researcher focuses on a specific event, individual, situation. EX: on columbine, the single thing. 4. Secondary analysis-when you use data that has already been collected → this makes research easy. Plus, you ’ve got the data done! Weakness- you’re depending on someone else’s data completely. What if they got it wrong? It’s someone else’s survey. 5. Analysis of Documents- Depending entirely on what is in front of you. Doesn’t show what’s between the lines. 6.Experiments- When you use a control and an experimental group and have an independent and a dependent variable. The experimental group is a group of subjects exposed to an independent variable. The control group is not exposed to that independent variable. The independent variable is the one that stays independent; it doesn’t depend on the dependent variable rather it CAUSES change. The dependent variable is the one that varies or changes. -Correlation- relationship between both variables, but not necessarily a causation “The more frequently people fly, the less often they watch television” →That doesn’t mean the more you fly, you’ll stop watching tv

There’s a hidden/independent variable →wealth, income, social cost→the more money you make the more often you fly -Controlled experiment-Conducted in a laboratory that allows a researcher to manipulate the independent variable -Field experiment-done “out in the field” 

Hawthorne Effect- based off of a study done where workers were observed by a company for efficiency. They dimmed the lights and brightened the lights, altered the AC, etc. When the lights were brighter, they worked harder. When they were lowered, people worked just as hard. WHY? They knew they were being studied! They knew they were being watched and therefore they kept doing what they had to do. The experiment didn’t show much because they know.

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There are strengths to experiments because you can isolate specific variables but we don’t do it much because of the weaknesses. Humans are complex beings, and it’s very difficult to just find groups. Sociologically it’s not very easy so we don’t use experiments frequently.

7. Unobtrusive Measures- When people don’t know they’re being studied. However, it’s limited in how you can get proof for it. It’s nice because you don’t get the Hawthorne affect, people don’t change the way they are because they don’t know their being studied. However, it has its faults. You can’t ask them anything! You just watch. 8. Statistics- a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation, of data. KEY TERMS: 

Mean- average, take all the numbers, add them up, and divide by how many numbers

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Median- the middle number

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Mode- most common number, number that occurs the most often o

We fetishize them, take them as facts. We tend not to think very critically about the data of statistics. We just take the data. However, we do have bad stats. Some data isn’t even remotely correct.

-Number Laundering-someone guesses a number as a fact and others just accept it as a fact because it just goes around and around. You hear a number, take it as a fact, and pass it around. It can even be poorly worded, but people will still accept it as a fact. (Example-“since 1950, the number of children killed by guns has doubled.” Someone will switch that to say, “Since 1950, every year the number of children killed by guns has doubled.” That’s a HUGE

difference!!) →But since it is numbers, people hesitate to question it. Someone might think that you are challenging the idea behind it -People create statistics. We pass it around. You have to look at who produced it. What does it mean? Why didn’t they look at this variable, or that? Stats have huge strengths. It’s very important to know rough numbers of things- how many people are killed each year. But, it is still created by humans and therefore we have to look at it critically. It also doesn’t give us a “why.” Often stat is paired with another method to answer the aspect of why. “...so, this relationship happened... ” well why? Other methods are brought in to answer that. -The method you choose is going to depend on your interest, your subject, your research training. Sometimes they may be combined. 9/11/12 Zenes- take one sociological concept and fully explore it within one of the themes, freshman to college, pop culture, occupy wall street movement, exa...