Sociology

Theoritical perspective

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 In the most general sense, a theory is a
framework that can be used to
comprehend and explain events.
 In every science, theories serve to
organize and explain events going on
around us.
 A sociological theory is a set of principles
and definitions that tell how societies
operate and how people in them relate to
one another and respond to the
environment.

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Definitions
 Theory: a framework that can be used to
comprehend & explain events.
 Sociological theory: a set of principles &
definitions that tell how societies operate
& how people relate to one another &
respond to the environment.
 Function: The contribution of a part to the
order & stability within the larger system.

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 Three theories dominate the
discipline of sociology:
 the functionalist,
 the conflict, and

 the symbolic interactionist

perspectives.

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The Functionalist Perspective
 We turn first to an overview of the
functionalist perspective.
 The central questions that functionalists
ask are,
 ”Why does a particular arrangement
exist?” and
 “What are the consequences of this
arragement for society?”
 Functionalists focus on questions related
to order and stability in society.

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 They define society as a system of
interrelated, interdependent parts.
 To illustrate this vision, early
functionalists used the human body as an
analogy for society.
 The human body is composed of parts
that include bones, cartilage, ligaments,
muscles, a brain, a spinal cord, nerves,
hormoes, blood, blood vessels, a heart, a
spleen, kidneys, lungs, and chemicals, all
of which work together in impressive
harmony.

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 Each body part functions in a unique way
to maintain the entire body, but it cannot
be separated from other body parts that it
affects and that in turn help it function.
 Society, like the human body, is made up
of parts, such as schools, automobiles
and other modes of transportation,
sports, medicine, bodily adornments such
as tattoos, funeral rites, ways of greeting
people, religious rituals, laws, language,
household appliances, and tools.

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 Like the various body parts, each of the society’s
parts functions to maintain a larger system.
 Funcutionalists consider a function to be the
contribution of a part to order and stability within
the larger system.
 Consider sports teams- whether they be Little
League, grade school, high school, college, city,
Olympic, or professional teams. Sports teams
function to draw people together who are often
extremely different from one another economically,
culturally, linguistically, politically, religiously, and
in other ways.
 Loyalty to a sports sense of belonging to the school,
a company, a city, or a country associated with it.

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 In the most controversial form of this perspective,
functionalists argue that all parts of society –even
those that seem not to serve a purpose, such as
poverty, crime, illegal immigration, and drug
addiction– contribute in some way to the larger
system’s stability.
 Functionalists maintain that a part would cease to
exist if it did not serve some function.
 Thus they strive to identify how any parts – even
seemingly problematic ones—contribute to the
stability of the larger society.

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Functions of poverty
 Herbert Gans (1972) argues in his classic analysis
of the functions of poverty.
 He asked; “Why does poverty exist?” he
answered that poverty performs as:
 The poor have no choice but to take on the
unskilled, dangerous, temporary, dead-end,
undignified, menial work of society at low pay.
 Hospitals, hotels, restaurants, factories and farms
draw their employees from a large pool of
workers who are forced to work at minimum or
below-minimum wages.
 This hiring policy keeps the costs of their services
reasonable and increases the employer’s profits.

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 Affluent persons contract out & pay low wages for
many time-consuming activities, such as
housecleaning, yard work and child care. This
practice gives them time for other, more
“important” activities.
 The poor often volunteer for over-the-counter &
prescription drug tests. Most new drugs, ranging
from AIDS vaccines to cat allergy medicine, must
eventually be tried on healty subjects to
determine their potential side effects (for
example, rashes, headaches, vomiting,
constipation, drowsiness) & appropriate dosages.
 Money motivates subjects to volunteer.

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 Because payment is relatively low,
however, the tests attract a
disproportionate share of low-income,
unemployed, or underemployed people as
subjects.
 The occupations of some middle-class
workers—police officers, psychologists,
social workers, border patrol guards, & so
on—exist to serve the needs or to monitor
the behavior of poor people.

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 Poor people purchase goods & services
that otherwise would go unused.
 Day-old bread, used cars, and
secondhand clothes are purchased by or
donated to the poor.
 In the realm of services, the labor of
many less competent professionals
(teachers, doctors, lawyers), who would
not be hired in more affluent areas, is
absorbed by low-income communities.

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Critique of Functionalism
 As you may have realized by now, the
functionalist perspective has a number of
shortcomings.
 First, critics argue that the functionalist
perspective is by nature conservative in
that it defends existing arrangements.
 In other words, when functionalists
identify how a problematic part of society
such as poverty contributes to the
system’s stability, by definition they are
justifying its existence and legitimating
the status quo.

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 Functionalists, reject this criticism, claiming
that they are not justifying poverty’s
existence, but rather simply illustrating
why such controversial practices or “parts”
continue to exist despite efforts to change
or eliminate them.
 Second, critics take issue with the
functionalist claim that “parts” exist
because they serve a fuction.
 Critics argue that a part may not serve any
function when it is first introduced.

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The conflict perspective
 In contrast to functionalists, who
emphasize order & stability, conflict
theorist focus on conflict as an inevitable
fact of social life & as the most important
agent for social change.
 Conflict can take many forms, including
physical confrontation, manipulation,
disagreement, dominance, tention,
hostility, & direct competititon.
 In any society, dominant & subordinate
groups compete for scarce & valued
resources (access to material wealth,
education, health care, well-paying jobs,
etc)
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 Those who gain control of these resources
strive to protect their own interests
against the resistance of others.
 Conflict theorists ask this basic question:
 Who benefits from a particular pattern or
social arrangement and at whose
expence?
 In answering this question, they strive to
identy
 (1) dominant & subordinate groups, &
 (2)practices that dominant groups have
established, consciously or unconsciously,
to promote & protect their interests.
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 Conflict theoriss draw their inspirations
from Karl Marx, who focused on class
conflict.
 Marx maintained that two major social
classes exist & that class membership is
determined by relationship to the means
of production.
 The more powerful class is the
bourgeoisie, or the owners of the means
of production & the purchasers of labor.

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Definitions
 Means of production: the land, machinery,
buildings, tools, and other technologies needed to
produce and distribute goods and services.
 Bourgeoisie: the owners of the means of
production (land, machinery, buildings, tools) who
purchase labor.
 Proletariat: A ess powerful class composed of
workers who own nothing of the production
process & who sell their labor to the bourgeoisie.
 Facade of legitimacy: an explanation that
members in dominant groups give to justify their
actions.

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The Bourgeoisie
 Motivated by a desire for profit, need constantly to
expand markets for their products.
 In an effort to increase profits, they search for ways
to make the production process more efficient and
less dependent on human labor (using machines,
robots, and automation, for example), and they
strive to find the cheapest labor & raw materials.
 This need for profit spread “the bourgeoisie over the
whole surgace of the globe. It must nestle
everywhere, settle everywhere, establish
connections everywhere.” (Marx, 1888)
 Marx: “the bourgeoisie has created more massive &
more colossal productive forces than have all
preceding generations together.”

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The proletariat
 The less powerful class, the proletariat, consists
of the workers who own nothing of the production
process except their labor.
 The bourgeoisie view the proletariat’s labor no
differently than they see machines or raw
materials.
 Mechanization combined ith the specialization of
labor leaves the worker with no skills, according
to Marx; the worker is an appendage of the
machine, and it is only the most simple, most
monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that
is required of him.
 As a result, workers produce goods that have no
individual character and no sentimental value to
either the worker or the consumer.
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 Conflict exists between the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat, because those who
own the means of production exploit
workers by stealing the value of their
labor.
 They do so by paying workers only a
fraction of the profits they make from the
workers’ labor and by pushing workers to
increase output.
 Increased output without a
commensurate pay raise shrinks wages to
an even smaller fraction of the profit.

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Facade of legitimacy
 The capitalists’ exploitation of the
proletariat is disguised by a facade of
legitimacy—an explanation that members
in dominan groups give to justify their
actions.
 On close analysis, however, these
explanations are based on “misleading
arguments, incomplete analyses,
unsupported assertions, and implausible
premises” that ultimately support the
interests of the dominant group.

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 To illustrate, consider that the bourgeoisie’s
exploitation of the proletariat is justified by the
explanation that members of the proletariat are
free to take their labor elsewhere if they are not
satisfied with their working conditions, salary, or
benefits.
 On the most basic level, employers have
considerably more leverage over workers than
workers enjoy demands or do not produce—or if
business is slow or in need of restructuring—
employers can fire or lay off their workers.
 Workers have no comparable leverage against
unreliable and overdemanding employers.

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 The most common methods of
justifying exploitative practices are;
 1. blaming the victims by proposing
that character flaws impede their
chances of success and
 2. emphasizing that the less
successful benefit from the system
established by the powerful.

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The symbolic interactionist perspective
 In contrast to functionalists, who ask how parts
contribute to order and stability, and to conflict
theorists, who ask who benefits from a particular
social arrangement, symbolic interactionists ask,
how do people define reality?
 In particular, they focus on how people make
sense of the world, on how they experience and
define what they and others are doing, and on
how they influence and are influenced by others.
 These theorists argue that something very
important is overlooked if an analysis does not
consider these issues.

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 Symbolic interactionists are concerned
with how the selfdevelops, how people
attach meanings to their own and other
people’s actions, how people learn these
meanings, and how meanings evolve.
 Consequently, they focus on people and
their relationships with one another.
 Symbolic interactionists maintain that we
learn meanings from others, that we
organize our lives around those
meanings, and that meanings are subject
to change.

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 According to symbolic interactionists,
symbols play a central role in social
interaction, situations in which two people
communicate, interpret and respond to
each other’s words and actions.
 A symbol is any kind of physical
phenomenon—a word, object, color,
sound, feling, odor, movement, taste—to
which people assign a name, meaning, or
value.

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 Meaning or value, however, is not
evident from the physical
phenomenon alone.
 This deceptively simple idea
suggests that people construct
meaning—that is, they decide what
something means.

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 Table page 49

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RESEARCH METHODS
IN THE CONTEXT OF THE
INFORMATION EXPLOSION

 The information explosion

 The scientific method
 Defining the topic for investigation
 Reviewing the literature
 İdentifying & defining core concepts
 Choosing a research design & data gathering strategies
 Analyzing the data & drawing conclusions

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 Research is a fact-gathering & fact-
explaining enterprise governed by strict
rules.
 Research methods are the various
techniques that sociologists and other
investigators use to formulate meaningful
research questions and to collect,
analyze, and interpet facts in ways that
allow other researchers to check their
results.

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 We need to possess a working knowledge
of research medhods even if e do not plan
to become sociologists or to do research
of our own.
 One important reason is connected with a
relatively new global phenomenon—the
information explosion.
 This term describes the unprecedented
increase in the volume of informatıon
made possible by the development of the
computer & telecommunications.

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 In addition to coping with large
quantities of information, we have
to consider ints quality as well.
 Most of what we hear, read, and
see has bee created by others.
 Consequently, we can never be sure
that information is accurate.

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The scientific method
 Sociologists are guided by the scientific
method when they investigate human
behavior; in this sense they are scientists.
 The Scientific method is an approach to data
collection that relies on two assumptions:
 (1) knowledge about the world is acquired
through observation,
 (2) the truth of the knowledge is confirmed
by verification—that is, by others making the
same observations.

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 Research collect data that they and
others can see, hear, taste, touch,
and smell (that is, observe through
the senses).
 They must report the process by
which they make their obsrvations
and present conclusions so that
interested parties can duplicate or
critique that process.

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 If observations can not be dublicated, or
if repeating the study yields results that
differ substantially from those of he
original study, we consider the study to
be suspect.
 Findings endure as long as they can
withstand continued reexamination and
duplication by the scientific community.
 When researchers know that others are
critiquing and checking their work, it
works to reinforce careful, thoughtful,
honest, and conscientious behavior.

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 Moreover, this “checking” encourages
researchers to maintain objectivity—that
is, not to let personal and subjective
views about the topic influence their
observations or the outcome of the
research.
 Because of continued reexamination and
revision, research is both a process and a
dialogue.
 It is a process because findings and
conclusions are never considered final.

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 Research is a carefully planned,
multistep, fact-gathering, and fact-
explaining enterprise tht involves a
number of interdependent steps:
 1. choosing the topic for
investigation/deciding on the
research question
 2. reviewing the literature
 3. Identifying core concepts

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 4. choosing a research design, forming
hypotheses, and collecting data
 5. Analyzing the data
 6. Drawing conclusions
 Researhers do not always follow these six
steps in sequence, however.
 Sometimes they do not define the topic
(step 1) until they have familiarized
themselves with the literature (step2).

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 Sometimes an opportunity arises to
gather information (step4), and a
project is defined to fit that
opportunity (step 1).
 Although the six steps need not be
followed in sequence, all must be
completed at some point to ensure
the quality of the project.

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 In the sections that follow, we will
examine each stage individually,
making reference to a variety of
research projects comparing people
living in the US with people living in
Japan on some attribute,
documenting some supposedly
unique qualities about Japanese
society, and investigating the US.-
Japan trade deficit.

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The method of data collection
 Describes the procedures used to gher
relevant data.
 Researchers must decide who or what
they are going to study. The most
common “thing” social scientists study is
individuals,
 But, they may also decide to study traces,
documents, territories, households, small
groups or individuals.

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Traces
 Traces are materials or other
evidence that yield information
about human activity,
 such as the items that people throw
away, the number of lights on in a
house, or changes in water
pressure.

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Documents
 Documents are written or printed
materials, such as magazines,
books, calendars, graffiti, birth
certificates and traffic tickets.

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Territories
 Territories are settings that have
borders or that are set aside for
particular activities.
 Examples include countries, states,
counties, cities, streets,
neighborhoods, classrooms, and
buildings.

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Households
 Households include all related and
unrelated persons who share the
same dwelling.

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Small Groups
 Small groups are defined as two to
about twenty people who interact
with one another in meaningful
ways.
 Examples include father-child pairs,
doctor-patient pairs, families, sports
teams, cihcles of friends, and
committees

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Populations & samples
 Because of time constraints alone,
researchers annot study entire
populations—the total number of
individuals, traces, documents,
territories, households, or groups
that could be studied.
 Instead, they study a sample, or a
portion of the cases from a larger
population.

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Samples
 A sample should be a random sample,
with every case in the population having
an equal chance of being selected.
 The classic, if inefficient, way of selecting
a random sample is to assign every case
a number, place the cards or slips of
paper on which the numbers are written
into a container, thoroughly mix the cards
and pull out one card at a time ntil the
desired sample size is achieved.

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representative sample
 Rather than follow this tedious system,
most of today’s researchers use computer
programs to generate their samples.
 If every case has an equal chance of
becoming part of the sample, than
theoretically the sample should be a
representative sample—that is, one with
the same distribution of characteristics
(such as age, gender, and ethnic
composition) as the population from
which it is selected.

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Sampling frame
 Obtaining a random sample is not as easy as it
might appear.
 For one thing, researchers must begin with a
sampling frame—a complete list of every case in
the population—and each member of the
population must have an equal chance of being
selected.
 Securing such a complete list can be difficult.
Campus & city telephone directories are easy to
acquire, but lists of, for example, US citizens,
adopted childen in the US etc are more difficult to
obtain. Almost all lists omit some people (such as
persons with unlisted numbers, members too new
to be listed) and include some people who no
longer belong (such as individuals who hae moved,
died, or dropped out).

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 What is important is that the researcher
consider the extent to which the list is
incomplete and update it before drawing a
sample.
 Even if the list is complete, the researcher
also must think of the cost and time
required o take random samples and
consider the problems of inducing all
sampled persons to participate.

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Nonrandom samples
 Researchers sometimes select
nonrandom samples to study people
ho they know are not representative
of the larger population but who are
easily accessible
 For example, they often use high
school and college students as a
sample because they are a captive
audience.

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 Some resarchers may choose
nonrepresentative samples for other
important reasons:
 little
is known about them,
 They have special characteristics

 Their experiences clarify important

social issues.

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Data gathering methods
 In addition to identifying who or what is
to be studied, the design must include a
plan for collecting information.
 Researchers can choose from a variety of
data-gathering methods, including self-
admisinistered questionnaires, interviews,
observations, and secondary sources.

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 Self-administered questionnaire is a set of
questions given (or mailed) to
respondents, who read the instructions
and fill in the answers themselves.
 The questions may require respondents to
write out answers (open-ended) or to
select from a list of responses the one
that best reflects their answer (forced
choice).
 This method of data collection is probably
most common.

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 The questionnaires found in magazines or books,
displayed on tables or racks in service-oriented
establishments (hospitals, garages, restaurants,
groceries, physicians’ offices), and mailed to
households are all self-administered
questionnaires
 This medhod of data collection has a number of
advantages.
 No interviewers are needed to ask respondents
questions: the questionnaires can be given o
large numbers of people at one-time; and an
interviewer’s facial expressions or body language
cannot influence respondents, so they feel more
free to give unpopular or controversial responses.

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 Self-administered questionnaires pose
some problems, however. Respondents
can misundertand or skip over some
questions.
 Often questionnaires are mailed, set out
on a table or counter, or published in a
magazine or newspaper.
 Researcher must than wonder whether
the people who volunteer or choose to fill
out questionnaire have different opinions
than those who ignore the survey.

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 The results of a questionnaire
depend not only on respondent’s
decisions to fill it out, answer
questions conscientiously and
honestly, and return it, but also on
the quality of the survey questions
asked and a host of other
considerations.

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Interviews
 Face-to-face or telephone conversations
between an interviewer and a respondent
in which the interviewer asks and records
the respondent’s answers.
 Structured interview: An interview in
which the wording and sequence of
questions are set in advance and cannot
be changed during the interview.
 Unstructured interview: an interview in
which the question-answer sequnce is
spontaneous, open-ended, and flexible.

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Observation
 A research technique involving watching,
listening to and recording behavior and
conversations as they happen.
 Observation techniques are especially
useful for:
 Studying behavior as it occurs.
 Learning things that cannot be surveyed easily
 Acquiring the viewpoint of the persons under
observation.

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Observation
 Observation can take two forms:
 Participant observation: a research
technique in which researchers
iteract directly with study
participants.
 Nonparticipant observation: consists
of detached watching and listening
in which the researcher does not
interact with the study participants.

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Thanks for attending the your..

 ALLAH bless you for what you have

done!!
 See you…

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