Today's Class: Some Major Points

0) recapping last time: people have different motives, e.g., for being in this class, which means we can have different fundamental explanations of why people do what they do, and from that, different views of how society holds together

These fundamental orientations are : rational action/choices; rule- or norm-following; based on choices or imitation of others; structural conflict with others

Thinking sociologically means:

--coming to understand that there are structural patterns to social life that may defy common sense, or are not obvious to the naked eye

e.g. comparing different sorts of organizations; they have similar dynamics despite different official purposes (“Bureaucracy killed people in New Orleans”—a statement about how recurrent features of large social orgns can have profound consequences)

e.g. Gwen Stefani’s party (the aerial view of a party)

e.g. who you marry (take a look at yourself in the mirror; homophily)

--there are group-level processes (e.g. decision-making, ways of talking) of which we are barely aware

--e.g. naming conventions

--e.g. styles of intimacy

--in short, turn a critical eye on social life (Berger reading)

Today:

1) Ways of doing sociology:

a) detached observation (e.g. Benedict; e.g. Gibson)

b) participant-observation (e.g. Duneier on the sidewalk; Zablocki on communes, Lichterman on environmental and religious outreach groups)

c) experimentation (e.g. Asch)

d) quantitative analysis/statistics, including survey research

2) Problems encountered in doing sociology:

--spurious causality: e.g. ham radio operators. [A does not cause B, nor does B cause A, but both are caused by some other unmeasured factor]

--phrasing of research questions

--measurement

--inaccuracy of responses

--the problem of self-aware subjects

--interpretation of results: glass half-empty/glass half-full problem

--identifying the relevant comparisons --making the correct classifications

--moving from the facts to an

explanation of them is always perilous

3) Then what is scientific about social science?

--uses sophisticated and precise

methods for describing and

explaining why and how social things work and social outcomes arise

--research directed explicitly to

building theoretical knowledge

--substantive focus on group

processes and large-scale patterns, not just describing individual action

--research that is transparent about methods

--making arguments that will prompt and promote public debate

4) Significance of André Michel Guerry's crime data (or Durkheim’s suicide data)

--observing aggregate patterns of individual choices/actions

--thus there are evidently social forces at work channelling individual action

--contemporary example: naming kids

5) Given problems with gathering reliable data, we need: "unobtrusive measures"

--to avoid deflecting people's behavior away from its typical patterns

--contemporary example: studying garbage