Show College–Level Sociology Curriculum For Introduction to Sociology Prepared by the American Sociological Association Task Force on a College Level Introduction to Sociology Course The Course * Summary Course Outline * Course Narrative The Course Purpose: The College-Level Sociology course is designed to introduce students to the sociological study of society. Sociology focuses on the systematic understanding of social interaction, social organization, social institutions, and social change. Major themes in sociological thinking include the interplay between the individual and society, how society is both stable and changing, the causes and consequences of social inequality, and the social construction of human life. Understanding sociology helps discover and explain social patterns and see how such patterns change over time and in different settings. By making vivid the social basis of everyday life, sociology also develops critical thinking by revealing the social structures and processes that shape diverse forms of human life. Overall Goals: · Show the relevance and reality of structural factors in social life · Place an issue in a larger context (identify systemic elements; identify stakeholders; list unintended consequences) · Describe, explain, and predict aspects of social problems · Debunk individualistic explanations of behavior and identify social patterns · Recognize the difference between dispositional and sociological explanations · Recognize the difference between empirical and normative statements · Identify and offer explanations for social inequality · Analyze labor force issues · Perform a content analysis of texts or news to identify possible sources of bias · Critique the media · Transform a topic of interest into a researchable, sociological question · Describe the elements of the scientific method in the social sciences · Understand basic elements of an ethical code of conduct for social scientists · Unpack the “causal nexus”, e.g., correlation, time order, elimination of alternative explanations · Interpret descriptive statistics · Evaluate the methodological processes and limits of research (e.g., bias, generalizability) · Critically assess web sites and electronic resources · Set up a data table properly and read and interpret a table correctly · Distinguish levels of analysis · Posit intervening factors and spurious relationships in social life · Show awareness of probabilities and contingencies · Recognize that counterfactual anecdotes do not invalidate sociology · Understand the intersection of biography and history · Take the role of the other · Describe various career trajectories for sociologists at different degree levels; where sociologists work and what they do · Position personal life choices and chances in a demographic context · Compare and contrast one’s own context with those in other parts of the U.S. and the world · Describe the tension between generalization and stereotyping; social forces and determinism · Appreciate the role of human agency in social change Summary Course Outline I. The Sociological Perspective II. Research Methods
Course Narrative I. The Sociological Perspective II. Research Methods I. The Sociological Perspective  Specific topics include: the definition of sociology as an empirical discipline, careers that persons prepared in sociology may undertake, the central concepts of social interaction and relationships, social structure, social contexts, and social change, the significance of diversity and human variation (such as in race, gender, age, and social and economic class), and the debunking character of sociology. The first two units of the course introduce students to the dynamic interplay between theory and the logic of the scientific method in sociology. Learners will become aware of the core theoretical perspectives and the process of developing theory. They will recognize that sociology is a science: it is a creative and, simultaneously, disciplined activity with a bit of serendipity! The history of sociology is grounded in social and ideological changes in Western Europe and America, specifically the Enlightenment and American pragmatism. Contributions of classical sociological theorists such as Durkheim, Marx, and Weber are examined in combination with major scholars prominent in the emergence of American sociology. Sociological theory attempts to explain in a coherent manner the varieties of societal organization and of social behaviors. Students should understand that though it is posed at an abstract level, sociological theory is continually being refined as it is made to confront empirical reality. Students should become familiar with the major sociological approaches --functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, exchange theory, and feminist theory -- to the explanation of social life. Beginning with the question “What makes society possible?” students should be introduced to approaches that explain the formation of groups, their behaviors, the nature of social organization, and attendant variations. With functionalism (Durkheim, Parsons), students should be aware of the analogy of society to an organism, the assumption of consensus that underlies social life, and ways that society organizes itself to sanction deviance so that it may return to equilibrium. Students should also be aware of the criticisms of functionalism regarding its difficulty in dealing with social change. Conflict theory (Marx, Weber) introduces students to the notion that societal stability may come from stable power relations rather than from an underlying consensus. Students should become aware of the multiplicity of conflicting interests in society as well as how changes in resources may, among other factors, lead to major social change. The difficulty of conflict theory in predicting precisely where the fissures in a given society are and when they may erupt is a recurring criticism. Symbolic interactionism (Blumer, Goffman) focuses the student’s attention on how human interaction creates rules and meanings that then structure further interactions. An inductive, qualitative approach to the understanding of individual and group interaction in a variety of contexts is the common orientation of symbolic interactionists. Students should understand that symbolic interactionism’s social-psychological focus often prevents its understanding of the larger structural contexts in which its actors operate. Exchange theory (Blau, Homans, Coleman) brings issues of rational choice to the fore. Students should understand the ways in which relationships of trust and power may develop as people pursue their self-interest. The degree to which exchange theory is relevant largely to interactions among individuals (rather than groups) and is contextually based in the larger culture should be understood. Feminist theory (Gilman, Rossi, Millett) focuses on the ways that gender systems structure our daily interactions as well as larger systems of power in society. Many feminist theorists focus not only on how patriarchal societies are set up in ways that disadvantage women but on how the effects of patriarchy articulate with other systems of domination, such as class- and race-based domination. From theories of sexual politics to sociobiology to economic and materialist approaches, feminist theory provides a variety of perspectives on relations of power in society. Feminist theories differ radically in how they incorporate other approaches to the study of social life. II. Research Methods
Coverage includes both qualitative and quantitative research, basic and applied research contexts as well as review of different methodologies, including survey research, interviewing, participant observation, content analysis, historical and comparative research. Basic concepts of statistical analysis are also included, along with discussion of probability and measurement. In addition, the course will examine the questions of ethics in research and the role of values in sociological analysis. The scientific method operates in an ethical context. As such, it does not permit the sociologist to conceal or ignore information that fails to support the hypothesis. It also requires that sociological researchers safeguard the human subjects who are a part of their research. Also included is the use of the internet in research, with a focus on judging the reliability and validity of information found on the internet. Students will learn how hypotheses are formulated using concepts and relevant sociological theory. For example, a sociologist might develop the hypothesis, “The rate of juvenile delinquency in a neighborhood is inversely related to the predominant social class of the neighborhood.” The root of this hypothesis lies in one or more key sociological theories. To put this hypothesis more concretely, the rate of juvenile delinquency will be higher in low-status neighborhoods and it will be lower in high-status neighborhoods. The rate of juvenile delinquency can be measured from publicly available information on juvenile convictions and census data on the number of teenagers in a neighborhood. The rate of juvenile delinquency is a variable, because its value will differ from place to place. Students will learn how a concept such as “social class” is often not easy to measure, and so sociologists must “operationalize” the variable, which means to designate a measurable indicator that approximates the concept. So, for example, a sociologist might measure social class or status with the variables annual income and occupational prestige. In testing this hypothesis, the sociologist is expecting that neighborhoods with more high income and high occupational prestige residents will have lower juvenile delinquency rates, while neighborhoods with more low income and low occupational prestige residents will have higher rates. Hypotheses are often tested using a sample of the population of interest. Students will learn how sociologists have developed careful techniques for drawing mathematically accurate samples of the population. Administering a questionnaire to a sample of the population is much less expensive and more accurate than trying to question everyone within a population. In developing explanations, students will learn how sociologists are careful to distinguish the types of variables they are investigating. In general, a dependent variable is the variable being studied. An independent variable is a variable believed to vary with the dependent variable; the independent variable is often relatively fixed (such as one’s gender), or it occurred earlier than the dependent variable (such as childhood experience). In the example in the preceding paragraph, the dependent variable is juvenile delinquency rate, and the independent variables are family income and the occupational prestige of workers in the family. Notice, however, that high parental income may be associated with a low juvenile delinquency rate, but it does not necessarily cause a low juvenile delinquency rate. Instead, the relationship may be mediated in various ways. For example, wealthier parents may be able to provide more activities for their teens, or they may be able to hire better lawyers if their teens do get into trouble. Drawing on theoretical foundations, students will learn that to assess a causal relationship between variables, it is necessary 1) to establish the time order of the variables (with the independent variable coming before the dependent variable), 2) to establish that the variables are correlated, and 3) to rule out any competing hypotheses. Suppose, for example, that a researcher finds that ice cream consumption is inversely related to juvenile delinquency rates. This finding does not prove that ice cream prevents juvenile delinquency. Instead, this hypothesis may be misspecified because the wrong independent variable has been named. Perhaps parents with higher income can buy more ice cream, so that higher income co-varies positively with more ice cream and also co-varies negatively with the juvenile delinquency rate. Students will learn that sociologists collect their data through a number of research methods. One of the most common is the social survey, in which a sample of people respond to a questionnaire that is administered on paper, in a personal interview, by telephone, or over the internet. Sociologists may also engage in a participant observation, in which they become part of a group they seek to understand. Some sociologists, like psychologists, conduct experiments, while others rely principally on historical or archival data to test their hypotheses. The choice of data collection methods depends upon the kind of data that are needed to test a hypothesis. Some hypotheses may be tested through multiple methods. Students will learn how sociologists tabulate their data using statistical methods, some of which are highly sophisticated. It is common to report measures of central tendency for each variable, for example, the mean or median values. It is also common to report a measure of the spread from the mean, such as the standard deviation or interquartile range. Measures of association indicate whether and/or how closely two variables are related to each other. A measure of association such as chi-square can show if the relationship of two variables might have happened by chance or if it is a significant relationship; it is also possible to calculate the strength of an association through the use of a correlation coefficient. When sociologists measure one variable taking into account the effect of a second variable, they are said to “control” for the second variable, and multivariate statistics are sophisticated means to control simultaneously for the effects of many independent variables. Students of sociology will learn how to assess the adequacy of research reported in newspapers, websites, and other places. In general, it is important to be able to tell how the research was done, whether competing hypotheses were adequately examined, and whether the appropriate variables were controlled. Studies that contain little information about how the data were collected and analyzed – in particular, studies that cannot be done again by another researcher – are suspect. III. Culture
This section begins by looking at culture in small groups, with examples from classic social psychological experiments of how group pressures can influence (and thus shape culturally) such phenomena as beliefs about the natural world (for example, assessments of the length of a line) or deeply held moral values (for example, against inflicting pain). Small groups both produce culture (as in minimal-group experiments, where randomly assigned groups create elaborate beliefs about themselves and others based on trivial cues) and reflect it (as in research experiments demonstrating how cultural stereotypes shape the interpretation of behavior of members of a task group). Examples are considered that show how culture arises from situational contexts, how it changes, and how it influences human behavior. A particularly important aspect of culture deals with the social construction of individuality and the modern “self.” This section focuses on this issue because it is related to one of the greatest challenges facing teachers of introductory sociology: the challenge of convincing students that social environments have causal force and that not everything can be explained by reference to individual choices, human error, personal heroism, or moral deficiencies. In part, people everywhere tend to favor such interpretations, but especially so in Europe and the Americas. At least from the Reformation and the Enlightenment onward, the western cultural tradition has placed a strong emphasis on the autonomy of the individual as a moral actor with organized preferences and goals and a coherent personality and system of values. Social psychologists have discovered that this emphasis leads people to favor interpretations of events and behaviors that highlight the coherence of the individual personality and the causal force of individual choice and action --- even when experiments are rigged to make outcomes random, or evidence of individual inconsistency is abundant. The tendency of people to overestimate the causal importance of individual choice and to minimize the effects of environmental constraint is so strong that psychologists have coined a special term, “the fundamental attribution error,” to describe it. The next part of this section describes various elements of culture that sociologists study. Just as students of “social structure” break down their topic into more elementary units in order to study it, students of “culture” address different kinds of cultural “stuff” in their research. Some elements of culture are so deeply institutionalized and so much a part of elementary socialization that they shape the very ways in which people think: examples include mental models (pre-conscious scripts and schemas that structure perception and action), or categorical schemes that people use to divide up the world and sort people and things into categories. Other elements of culture – especially norms, values, or moral tenets – can be more readily articulated and serve as yardsticks for evaluating oneself and others. Still other aspects of culture, like rituals and language, are performative, embedding meaning in human action. Sociologists inherited the notion of culture from anthropologists who studied relatively small-scale, structurally simple, societies where most people shared similar beliefs and participated in the same rituals. At first, sociologists, too, viewed culture as a source of societal unity and cohesion, a kind of social “glue” that held groups and nations together. More recently, sociologists who study culture have focused on the ways in which group and national cultures may be varied and inconsistent. Rather than seeing culture as a source of constraint and unity, they view culture as a source of creativity and innovation, a “toolkit” of ideas, resources, and ways of seeing that people deploy in varied ways. This change reflects some developments in scholarship: for example, new work in social and cognitive psychology that suggests that people’s beliefs are less consistent and more complex than we had previously thought, as well as research in sociology on phenomena (for example, the rapid emergence in many places of religious or ideological or artistic countercultures) that call into question the traditional view. The change also reflects developments in the real world, especially multiculturalism and globalization. With respect to multiculturalism, a dramatic increase in transnational migration has men and women raised in many places and in many cultural traditions living side by side throughout the world. Meanwhile, the emergence of global media of communications has rendered the voices, ideas, music and art of people from every continent and civilization nearly as available as those from one’s own village or metropolis. In such a world, sociologists increasingly must ask not “what is these people’s culture?” but rather, “how do these people balance and navigate among the variety of cultures with which they come into daily contact”? This section of the course enables the instructor to explore with students the ways in which different aspects of culture serve, at different times and in different ways, as sources of cohesion, as springboards for innovation or creativity, or as bases of social conflict. IV. Socialization
V. Social Organization and Social Networks
This section begins with some basic ideas. Statuses are the more or less formally acknowledged positions that constitute any social system, and roles represent the stereotyped behaviors that go with those statuses. Because many roles fit with other roles into complementary relationships, they constitute basic building blocks of larger collectivities. Institutions are larger complexes of purposive activity, oriented around particular tasks that most societies share: for example, educating the young, providing religious services, or coordinating trade in goods and services. In between are social networks, an increasingly prominent concept in all the social sciences. This section will introduce these ideas and illustrate ways in which sociologists use them to analyze concrete social groups and societies. (Because “social networks” may be less familiar than the other terms to many teachers, we provide more detail in the outline, calling attention to research showing how robust social networks help people get desirable jobs and how social network analysis has cast light on the HIV epidemic.) A central idea in the study of social organization since Durkheim has been the notion that as groups and societies increase in scale, the tasks of fulfilling basic and not-so-basic social needs become ever more challenging. Over the long haul, the challenges associated with increases in scale (the population of a tribe or community, the number of employees of a business) lead to increasing differentiation as people, groups, and role systems specialize around particular tasks or functions. As societies go through this process, we see the emergence of specialized institutions. We also see changes in the basis of social solidarity, from systems in which most people share strong identities and values to ones in which cohesion comes as much from cooperation in a complex division of labor as from shared culture. In the largest-scale and most complex societies – those that include millions of people within modern nation-states – the challenges of providing the necessities of life and maintaining political order require truly extraordinary feats of coordination. The rest of the section examines the social technologies available to people in complex societies for collective activities. In pre-modern societies, the fundamental basis of social organization is kinship, and kinship remains an important basis of organization and solidarity in contemporary societies, as well. But it has been supplemented, as Max Weber wrote, by bureaucracies, a form of organization that solves some of the problems of coordination and effectiveness that vexed the earliest large-scale societies. This section describes the key characteristics of bureaucracy as a form of organization, contrasting it to pre-modern conditions and considering both its strengths and its disadvantages. It also describes the variety of ways in which people have modified conventional bureaucracies to match specific cultural values or to adapt to rapid environmental change. Even modern societies, however, rely only partially on bureaucracies. A second important form comprises different kinds of economic markets, in which large-scale activity is organized through exchanges directed by prices. Although Max Weber pioneered the sociological study of markets (placing them alongside bureaucracy as powerful modern forms of organization), many sociologists left the study of markets to economists, until returning to it with new interest and energy with the renewal of “economic sociology” in the 1980s. Unlike contemporary economists, whose approach to markets is almost always abstract and mathematical, sociologists use a variety of approaches and tools – ethnographic and historical as well as mathematical-- to study markets, in all their variety, as ways of organizing production and trade. Finally, informal social networks based on different forms of interpersonal trust, remain a central part of the social organization of modern societies. Some networks lubricate the operation of bureaucracies and markets. Examples of these are the informal ties that bind members of some successful small-business associations, or that produce the “social capital” evident in effective local governments or social movements. In other cases, informal social networks--- for example, the ones that bind together organized crime families or international terrorist organizations--- may pose grave economic and political threats to the societies in which they operate. VI. Social Inequalities
Several questions are discussed, including "Why is there inequality?" What are the different dimensions of inequality? What different explanations of inequality are there? Why does inequality persist?" Inequality both within the United States and globally are examined, along with discussion of the impact that inequality has (its impact on access to the information economy, health care, the environment, and patterns of wealth and income differentials, for example). A. Social Class B. Race and Ethnicity C. Gender D. Age VII. Deviance and Conformity
Students should understand that when terms such as “mentally ill,” “juvenile delinquents,” or “criminals” are applied to individuals who have violated some usual ways of behaving, agents of social control are labeling them. The specific behaviors that are characterized in these ways are historically variable and who gets so labeled is dependent on the characteristics of the person (say, their race, class, and gender). Thus, alcohol purveyors were “criminals” during Prohibition (between 1920 and 1933) but not at other times. Also, individuals from subordinate social groups are more likely to be labeled as “criminal” than those from dominant groups, for example. Students will understand how having power in a society is related to the capacity to label behaviors or individuals as deviant. The course will examine how, after a person is labeled as deviant, the organization of the judicial or youth welfare system ensures that the deviant is publicly judged and, if found guilty or wanting, ultimately punished. The course will examine the various sanctioning rituals that reinforce the social order, and analyze their relationship to the interests of dominant groups. In this context, students should explore empirically patterns of crime, arrest rates, and prison sentences as well as patterns of “mental illness” or “juvenile delinquency.” They will be able to say how such rates vary by race, class, and gender. VIII. Social Institutions
A. Families B. Education C. Religion D. Economy and Work E. Government: Power and Authority F. Media and Culture G. Health Care IX. Social Change
A. Population, Urbanization and the Environment B. Collective Behavior and Social Movements C. Causes and Consequences of Social Change D. Theories of Social Change Why sociology is important as a field of study?Sociology provides critical insight and perspective to the solution of social problems. Sociology has changed our outlook with regard to the problems of crime, its causes and consequences. Sociology is of great importance to the understanding of international problems.
What is the main focus of sociology quizlet?What is the main focus of sociology? society and social behavior by focusing on cultures, organizations, groups and other social institutions.
What are the main fields of sociology?the branches of sociology.. Historical Sociology. Historical sociology combines the terms: 'history' and 'sociology'. ... . Sociology of Knowledge. ... . Criminology. ... . Sociology of Religion. ... . Sociology of Economy. ... . Rural Sociology. ... . Urban Sociology. ... . Political Sociology.. |
