Term
| What is the sociological perspective? |
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Definition
| Understanding human behavior by plaving it within its broader social context. |
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Term
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Definition
| A group of people who share a culture and a territory. |
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Term
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Definition
| The group memberships that people have because of their location in history and society (ex, "How would identifying as a male or female change your ideas about who you are?") |
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Term
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Definition
| The application of systematic methods to obtain knowledge and the knowledge obtained by these methods. |
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Term
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Definition
| The study of society and human behavior |
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Term
| What are natural sciences? |
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Definition
| The intellectual and academic disciplines designed to comprehend, explain, and predict events in our natural environments. Ex: biology, geology, chemistry, and physics |
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Term
| What is the definition of social sciences? |
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Definition
| The intellectual and academic disciplines designed to understand the social world objectively by means of controlled and repeated observations. |
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Term
| What are the five divisions of social science? |
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Definition
- Anthropology (study of culture)
- Economics (study of production and distribution of material goods and services of a society)
- Political science (focuses on politics and government)
- Psychology (study of processes that occur within the individual)
- Sociology (overlaps the other social sciences)
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Term
| What are the three goals of science? |
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Definition
- To explain why something happens
- To make generalizations (statements that go beyond the individual case and are applied to broader groups or situations; they are found by observing patterns)
- To predict, i.e. to specify in the light of current knowledge what will happen in the future
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Term
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Definition
| Things that "everyone knows" are true. Sociologists move beyond this with their research to confirm or contradict commonsense notions about social life. |
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Term
When in history did sociology emerge?
What three events set the stage for its emergence? |
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Definition
Mid 1800's, when social observers began to use scientific methods to test their ideas
- Social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution (switch from agriculture to factory work conditions bred discontent)
- Social Upheaval of Revolutions (American & French--swept away existing social orders and tradition)
- Imperialism (because Europeans had conqured so many parts of the world, they were exposed to other ways of life, and wondered why cultures differed)
This all led to a questioning of traditional answers that the development of the scientific method.
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Term
| In sociology, what is the scientific method? |
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Definition
| The use of objective, systematic observations to test theories. |
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Term
| What is positivism and who came up with it? |
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Definition
| The application of the scientific approach in the real world; Auguste Comte ("Father of Sociology") |
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