Welcome to Introduction to Sociology with Professor “A”. Hopefully, at this point you’re a bit familiar with the online classroom layout. Throughout the semester if you ever need any assistance, just send me a message and I’ll be happy to help you. I’m going to go through the slides and talk about some of the key ideas that maybe need a little clarification. So, why do we bother studying the social world? Well…what we do in Sociology is try to look for patterns of behavior. We’re careful not say “cause”, (that certain behaviors cause certain reactions) because cause implies an Always. What we look for in Sociology are general patterns and likelihoods; things that are likely to happen. You could go about your day hoping that if you extend your hand out, people will shake it, but for every 9 people that shake back, there will be one person that doesn’t. They may be from a different society and have no idea what that means, or they might just say “No, I don’t do that because of germs”. What ever the reason, people break patterns all the time. If we can predict what most people will do in certain social situation, that is very useful information. It can help us tackle Society’s problems, but it can also give us a better understanding of the social world around us. Grab this technical definition of Sociology, but put simply, Sociology is the study of social behavior. We look at the external world; meaning all the forces out side of us and really groups; groups of all sizes and how they influence our behavior. As we see here, and as I mentioned, we study groups of all sizes; the smallest being a Dyad. A dyad is any 2-person group (a romantic couple, a pair of best friends, a parent and child, a boss and employee). If you think about it, you probably belong to several Dyads. Up from Dyad is the small group (a family, a group of friends, a class of students, a team of co-workers). Up from there are large groups (all members of a race, all members of a major religion, all members from a political party). And up from there are Nations (society itself), it’s a little different that country. Country is more of a geographic term. Sometimes several smaller countries make up a nation or society. A society generally has its own economy and its own political structure. The ultimate group being the Global Society (the global community, everyone in the whole world). Sociologists generally specialize in small everyday groups, large groups in societies or global issues, but we can look at any social phenomenon from any of the different group sizes. For example, if I am studying victims of crime, and I specialize in small groups, I might spend time with people that have been victimized, find out exactly what happened to them, get vivid accounts, and then create very detailed descriptions of their experiences. If I specialize in entire societies or even global issues, then I might send out nationwide survey or even a global survey to as many people as possible. I’m going to get limited information, but from many people. So, both of these specializations in small groups or large groups add to our overall understanding. So, what do we mean by groups. Well, as we see here groups have structure they have commonality, they have some sort of bond. People are aware that they are part of a group. You see again the smallest group the Dyad. Up from there we add one person and it becomes a Triad. Sociologists pay close attention in the transition from a Dyad to Triad because only the Dyad is capable of pure one on one balance. If you think of the Dyads like romantic relationships you may say “I don't know Professor A, they don't seem too balanced to me. In my relationship, I call all the shots”, right? And maybe you do or maybe your partner lets you think that you do. But that potential for pure balance is there. Once we add a third person we never get it back. And then the more people we add the more it shifts. That's why we say that the biggest change in group dynamics goes from the Dyad to the Triad; that this makes more of a difference than going from 100 people to 200 people are going from a billion people to 7 billion people. Plus, once we have the Triad, or larger, but once we have the triad we have for the first time the possibility of a Coalition. A coalition is simply a subgroup and it's possible in the triad or larger. In the case of a Triad, it becomes a two against one scenario. Two my best friends Jason and Doug were roommates for years and then I would come around and Doug and I generally have the exact same interests and tend to make the same plans which usually involves let's go out and get some drinks. And Jason is much more “Come on guys let's stay home and watch Netflix”. Doug and I always say “Sorry Jason. Get ready. You're outnumbered two against one”. And in that case, we have a coalition. And again, it's in a triad or larger. So, if you think of a work group, for example, there are some days where some of the co-workers prefer each other and other days where they prefer other co-workers, just different coalitions, they can change from time to time. But the first time a coalition is possible is in the Triad. Characteristics of groups: recurrent social patterns and/or behavior shared experiences. This is all very simple it just means that groups have bonds, they have history, and they structure. People within groups start to take their roles. If you think about the groups you belong to, maybe your group of friends, one person is probably more of the organizer (sends out the text message “Hey everybody this is what we're doing this weekend”). Right? If your family is anything like mine, we all count on our one cousin to make her famous desserts and it becomes a concern every family gathering. Everyone asks her “You’re making dessert right. Just checking”. So, this is all that we mean. We have behavioral expectations of people that we regularly interact with and shared experiences. That just means history. There's a past. If your friends and family are anything like mine half the time is spent reminiscing, about good times and bad times, but all of them bond the group. That simply just means there are common understandings, you do this and I'll do that. Sometimes leaders happen in groups. It might be situational. It might be more official like a work group where a boss is in charge of a group of employees. We distinguish between the Group in Sociology and the Crowd. Crowd is a key term. crowd is just a mass of people. They don't have the structure that a group has. That's why we say you know the mall during the holiday season is crowded. The sports stadium when the teams are in the playoffs; crowded. They have the same general purpose you know, attend the event buy things, but they don't have the structure, the history, or the bonds that a group has. Underlying assumptions of Sociology: People are social beings, we crave being around other people, we’re born helpless so we're dependent on other people for survival, and then as we age, we need people to varying degrees. Right? Even the loner that says, “I don't need anybody. I go it alone”. Well….. someone had to change their diapers somewhere along the way. Even now, if they say that as an adult they're a loner, they still need interaction from time to time. Then of course you have the other extreme that always wants to be in groups. You know, the person that can't even go the bathroom by themselves like, “Please come with me!”. Right? But, we all fall somewhere along the spectrum. We spend most of our lives in groups. We're born into a group. We're born into the family, whatever form it takes. Whether it's two parents, a single parent, even being raised by another relative or even if we grow up in an orphanage, there's a family like structure that develops, and they start to teach us things. They really start to teach us our humanity. All of the things that we now take for granted. About age 4 or 5 we go to school often the first time, its more groups and more learning. We go to school for years and years and years and some of us never leave. But, more groups, more learning. Along the way, in order to get money, we get jobs: more groups, more learning. So, by the time we reach retirement age, if we do retire, it's important that we continue to spend our life in groups. We've done it for so long at that point. We need it and we do find that seniors that continue to regularly interact with groups have a better overall quality of life. Interactions are reciprocal. That just means there's a give and take. We add something to the groups we belong to and we get something from them. In the case of a work group, I might add my skill and my labor and in return I get a paycheck. Sometimes it's just in our emotional groups, like our friends and family. You know, we add our amazing personalities and in return we get fun times, happy memories, emotional support. Conflict and change are inevitable. Even the best of friends, the most loving of families, sometimes they want to kill each other and that is normal as long as the members don't actually act on it. We see all groups have certain organizing characteristics, again, the structure of a group, which separates it from the crowd. So far you might be saying, “OK Professor A, this seems to make sense but how is this different from what I already know?”. Well, sociology is a science. We rely on scientific theory and scientific research. And therefore, we put it to the test. We say, “let's see if things are actually this way”. In doing so, we oftentimes challenge what people think of as common sense to be nonsense. We see common sense based on what we think of as logic, our own past experiences, and unfortunately, even stereotypes. A lot of common sense is really put there by other social forces like perhaps the media or politics. So, for example, based on what we see in the media, many Americans have the belief that our public schools are dangerous war zones and I need to get my kid a bullet proof vest to send them to public school. Well in actuality when we look at the data, we see that American public schools are actually one of the safest places to be. Yes, we have had some terrible tragedies but they're actually pretty few and far between, overall. When they do happen, the media jumps all over them. It's inescapable and we hear about it constantly, so we tend to think it's a lot more common than it actually is. American children are much more in danger at home with their families. So just an example of how we put it to the test: let's use data to see if things are actually this way. This is another example looking at the global status of women. Still a long way to go. We see women earn less than men. There's a global salary gap. Women own only 1 percent of the world's property. That's a teeny tiny amount. They are more likely to be in poverty and be illiterate. Education is still a luxury in many societies. So, if a family must choose between sending a son or a daughter, they're actually much more likely to send the son. Poverty, definitely lots of social factors there. In some societies, for example, that practice polygamy multiple marriage partners, if something should happen to the husband meaning he passes away only the first wife gets the inheritance and culturally the other wives are forbidden to remarry. So that can give them a life sentence of poverty. So still, globally, a long way to go. In sociology, we develop a unique way of seeing and a unique way thinking. The way of seeing was developed by a guy with a great first name, Peter Berger. There are two major ways of seeing with the sociological perspective: seeing the general in the particular and seeing the strange in the familiar. Seeing the general in particular, like I said, we study groups of all sizes, but it would be pretty impossible to study everyone in the whole world. So, we rely on the particular or specific people that we have access to, to make them more, larger general connections. Just as a simple example, if you're in an actual classroom setting and I was lecturing, if you were to look around the classroom you would see that most of your classmates are taking notes in some way. Therefore, you make the larger connection that overall most American college students take notes in class and you would be correct. So, in that case you use the particular people you had access to, your classmates, to make the larger more general connection. My favorite part of the perspective is seeing the strange in the familiar. Seeing the strange and the familiar really challenges us to not take things for granted. If we see things over and over again, we might start to become desensitized to them. Sociology is a discipline of people studying people, so it can be very easy to think, “I know this. I already got this”. When we really look though, we can identify some strange new patterns. One of my first research assignments as a junior in sociology, was to go out into the social world and watch people. So I had to go to an amusement park and guess which one I went to? Yes. The Happiest Place on Earth, that quickly became pretty unhappy for me. But I had to go to Disneyland and just position myself in some different areas in the park and try to note what happens. I really wasn't excited about the assignment because at that point I hadn't been to Disneyland plenty of times. I was born and raised in Southern California and I actually oftentimes had a pass to Disneyland. So, I really wasn't thrilled about having to go somewhere that I normally liked, to do some work. When I sat in different places around the park, I actually noticed some interesting things that I never picked up on before. I noticed the pattern that people thought they were a lot more anonymous than they really are. In such a high traffic crowded environment, people often seemed to think that other people shielded them from views and from embarrassing behaviors. I'm sitting there watching and I saw some nose pickers just flat out in the middle of the day, digging up in their noses. I saw some parents hitting their kids when they didn't think anyone was looking. Of course, other parents didn't care who was looking and still at their kids. The workers were really interesting; I saw a lot of workers making faces behind the guest backs and more than several dyads of workers I caught making out with each other and I was pretty blown away. Does Mickey know all this is happening in his park? That’s not part of the Disney magic but anyway, it really taught me to value the sociological perspective. He challenges us to use a skill he calls debunking. To debunk is to get behind or to uncover social truths. We actually did a bit of debunking just a couple slides ago and I was talking about how sociology challenges common sense and the example of what we see in the media is not always true or the way things actually are. There’s a couple more examples on this slide. Crime and Punishment: Person A and Person B commit exactly the same crime, A gets a lighter sentence, B gets a more severe sentence. Well, any of their social characteristics could be used against them. Sort of the obvious one, unfortunately, that we've come to in our society is race. But it could be class, rich or poor. It could be sex, could be sexuality, could be age, can be health and disability status. Even what religion they belong to can have an impact on what sentence they get. So, clearly not applied equally and we'll talk more about crime when we get to the crime and deviance module. The counterparts to seeing with the sociological perspective, is thinking with a sociological imagination. Developed by C. Wright Mills, we see here a willingness to recognize relationship between individual experiences and public issues thinking with the sociological imagination is actually connecting the social level to the individual level and seeing their mutual influence and their mutual dependence on one another. There is an example here someone losing their job at a factory. Imagine this happens to you; most Americans to take this very personally. How could this happen to me? I don't understand, I was a model employee. I was the first one to arrive, the last one to leave. How could this happen to me? Not really caring or noting that the whole factory closedown and laid off pretty much everybody. But then you start to realize, come to think of it, my whole division got laid off, and my sister that was a factor worker is looking for work, my neighbor that worked at a factory is also out of a job. Maybe there is something bigger going on? And our economy has changed. A lot of our factories have closed down and have been moved overseas because the goal of American manufacturers is always profit and labor costs are cheaper in other countries. But they still sell the same products to us, in the United States, thereby increasing their profits. Oooohhhh, interesting, right!?!? This is connecting something larger at the social level to something that happened to an individual person Homelessness, take homelessness for example, we have a tendency to blame the individual. If we see somebody homeless at the side of the road, many Americans will say things like "why is that person so lazy" and "why don't they get up and get a job" or "how could they have messed up so badly to let that happen"? Well, you see here, what if they were a factory worker? What if they were a factory worker for 40 years got the job before they graduated high school because at time didn't need a diploma, they had it comfortable living while working and we're still 10 years away from retirement but the factory was moved to a different country. They tried to find other factory work, but all those factories laid people off too. Again, something bigger. It is not necessarily that the individual messed up totally. In fact, when we combine the sociological perspective and do a little debunking, we find recent times, since our economy took a dive, the average American, if they miss just two paychecks, they are in serious financial trouble So it's a much closer reality than in previous generations. Mills says that chipping away at these social problems at the individual level also is problematic because it doesn't really do anything. Again, that one homeless person I see, if I offered to loan them money for deposit on an apartment and set them up with a new job, that helps that one person but doesn't do anything for the larger issue of homelessness. No. So Mills says we need to think with the sociological imagination because if we're going to do anything about our larger social issues, we have to attack these things at the larger social level. Alright, just a couple of key words here that we will see over and over again throughout the semester Objective; to be objective is to be as unbiased as possible. Now our values and beliefs, our interests will guide the kinds of topics we want to investigate in sociology but when we're actually doing sociological research we have to as neutral as possible. We see here an example: if I'm doing a study of different religious practices, I simply report on what I find on the practices of different groups. I say "group A are members of this religion and they practice their religion this way. Group B has these religious beliefs and they practice their religion that way". I don't say A is better than B or B is better than A. I simply say "A does this and B does that" and that's our job in sociology. At the bottom here we see applied sociology. Applied sociology uses research for social improvement. It says that sociology's job is to make things better, to use research specifically to tackle some of these social problems. So really thinking with a sociological imagination in order to make things a bit better For example, it has been found in American inner cities that children are joining gangs at younger and younger ages. With the help of research we have found that something as simple as keeping the parks in these communities well lit and at least having some supervision by staff in these parks it reduces the number of children joining gangs. In other words they really were just looking for something to do. That's applied sociology, putting research to work We see here a basis of the social sciences; they all have areas of overlap. The one that we are most often compared to is Psychology. But psychology focuses on individual behavior and internal mental processes. In other words, things that go on inside the mind. There is little more physiology and biology and psychology looking at your brain patterns and some nerves Where sociology looks at group behavior. Groups of all sizes. Anything social. Levels of Analysis: this is just a scientific way of really asking "what size group are
are we dealing with or are we studying"? Do you have a small level of analysis? Are we studying a Dyad. a small group of friends, or a small team of coworkers? Or, do we have a larger level of analysis? Are we studying an entire society, for example?
Are we studying the entire global community? That would be the ultimate level of analysis. It's really just a scientific way of asking
"what size are we dealing with?" Social units, social structures, social institutions; these are different levels of analysis. A social unit is a small everyday group. Again, you and your group of friends, you and your family, you and your coworkers. These are all the social units you are a part of and probably more. Several units together form a social structure. A social structure is more of a medium size level of analysis, where as a social unit is a small level of analysis. Like I mentioned, you and your family form a social unit but if you think of all the families in
your local area, they'd form a community. That would be a social structure. Another way to think of a social structure is as a social organization. Then several structures together form social institutions. There are eight major social institutions in the United States but institutions are found in every society. Our social institutions include the family, education, religion, politics, the economy,
media, sports, and Health Care. They all have a society wide reach. Now, you might say, "Didn't you say my family was a unit?" Yes! Your family, at home, is a social unit, the
families in your local area form a community, which is a structure. But, if you think of all the families in the United States, what they do and what they have historically done, that forms the institution of family. social processes are simply the firms that happen social processes that actions that are Social processes are the "verbs" that happen. Social processes are the actions that are
happening all around us, at every level of analysis. For example, the social process of you and your family is to support one another emotionally; whereas the social process of politics as an institution is to set goals for society and protect us from internal and international threats. Socialization is how we learn social behavior. We'll talk much more about that with Module 4.
And Change. Every level of analysis is always changing. Some of it is very slow, some of it is very rapid. The environment is the setting and we can also look in the environment from the different levels of analysis. The environment of the family as a unit would be its home, for example. Whereas the environment of the community would be that particular neighborhood. The environment for our institutions is our actual, physical country. The environment for our institutions is our actual, physical country. Here, we have more scientific terms for levels of analysis; you might have heard some of these before. The micro level is just a focus on everyday small groups. Meso means middle, which looks at medium sized organizations and structures. Macro is big, large. So looks at larger groups, entire societies and definitely anything global. Sociologists generally specialize and identify as either a micro sociologist or a macro sociologist. It really is just a starting out point. Both levels tend to dabble in meso since it's in between but once we get to meso, it's generally a bit more along the lines of macro. By the time we get to meso, we're getting pretty big so again we can look at the micro level as our social units, the meso level as our social structures and the macro level as our institutions, our society and anything global. They all add depth and understanding.
A micro sociologist and a macro sociologist will often partner together to form a very complete picture of any kind of social phenomena. picture of any kind of social phenomena. So, then what level of analysis, micro, meso or macro, would we use for each of these? How do couples divide housework? Which factors determine the percentage of women in political power? Does the size of the sports stadium matter for students who are choosing a college? Hhmmmm???? Well, ... Did you already let me trick you? As I mentioned, any of the levels of analysis could be used. You might look back and think couples with housework... isn't that micro?? Well, if I'm studying one couple, definitely micro sociology. If I'm studying two couples, a few couples, that's all micro. But, if I'm studying all the romantic couples in United States, that's huge, that is definitely Macro. It's really just about asking "what size are we dealing with"? We can look at any social phenomenon from any of the levels of analysis and they all contribute to a better understanding
of our social world.