sociology

Understanding human behavior by placing it within its broader social context.

People who share a culture and a territory.

The group memberships that people have because of their location in history and society.

The application of systematic methods to obtain knowledge and the knowledge obtained by those methods.

The intellectual and academic disciplines designed to comprehend, explain, and predict events in our natural environment.

The intellectual and academic disciplines designed to understand the social world objectively by means of controlled and repeated observations.

A statement that goes beyond the individual case and is applied to a broader group or situation.

Recurring characteristics or events.

Those things that “everyone knows” are true.

The use of objective, systematic observations to test theories.

The application of the scientific approach to the social world.

The scientific study of society and human behavior.

Marx’s term for the struggle between capitalists and workers.

Marx’s term for capitalists, those who own the means of production.

Marx’s term for the exploited class, the mass of workers who do not own the means of production.

The degree to which members of a group or a society feel united by shared values and other social bonds; also known as social cohesion.

The view that a sociologist’s personal values or biases should not influence social research.

The standards by which people define what is desirable or undesirable, good or bad, beautiful or ugly.

Value neutrality in research.

The repetition of a study in order to test its findings.

A German word used by Weber that is perhaps is best understood as “to have insight into someone’s situation”

The meanings that people give their own behavior.

Durkheim’s term for a group’s patterns of behavior.

Sociological research for the purpose of making discoveries about life in human groups, not for making changes in those groups.

The use of sociology to solve problems-from the micro level of classroom interaction and family relationships to the macro level of crime and pollution.

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 one another.

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 one another.

A theoretical framework in which society is viewed as composed of various parts, each with a function that, when fulfilled, contributes to societies equilibrium; also known as functionalism and structural functionalism.

A theoretical framework in which society is viewed as composed of groups that are competing for scarce resources.

An examination of large scale patterns of society.

An examination of small scale patterns of society; such as how the members of a group interact.

What people do when they are in one another’s presence; includes communications at a distance.

Communications without words through gestures, use of space, silence, and so on.

The extensive interconnections among nations due to the expansion of capitalism.