The sociological Perspective Chapter 1 Notes
1 |P a g eChapter 1: The Sociological PerspectiveChapter SummarySociology offers a perspective, a view of the world. The sociological perspective opens a window intounfamiliar worlds and offers a fresh look at familiar worlds. Sociologists study the broader social contexts thatunderlie human behavior. These include the social groups that influence human behavior and the largersociety that organizes it.The sociological perspective is an approach to understanding human behavior by placing it within its broadersocial context. C. Wright Mills referred to the sociological perspective as the intersection of biography (theindividual) and history (social factors that influence the individual).Sociology is one of several disciplines referred to as a “social science.” As the term implies, social sciencesaddress the social world. The natural sciences, on the other hand, are the intellectual and academic disciplinesdesigned to explain and predict the events in the natural environment. The other social sciences includeanthropology, economics, political science, and psychology.As a scientific discipline, sociology seeks to explain why something happens, attempts to make generalizationsthat can be applied to a broader group or situation, and predicts what will happen based on the knowledgereceived. Sociology specifically seeks to explain the causes of human behavior and to recognize the patternsof human behavior. It also seeks to predict the future behavior of people. Although sociologists usually donot make decisions on how society should be changed or people treated, sociologists provide valuableresearch data that can be used by authorities who do make such decisions.Sociology grew out of the social, political, economic, and technological revolutions of the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries. The Industrial Revolution, in particular, eroded old traditions and necessitated new waysof perceiving and examining the social world. With the success of the natural sciences serving as a model forthe social sciences, sociology emerged in Western Europe as a distinct discipline in the mid-1800s.Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber were early thinkers in thedevelopment of sociology. The idea of applying the scientific method to the social world, known aspositivism, was first proposed by Auguste Comte. Based on this innovation and Comte’s effort to apply thescientific method to social life, he is credited as being the founder of sociology. Herbert Spencer, one of themost dominant and influential English sociologists, is often called the “second founder of sociology.”Spencer’s concept of Social Darwinism suggested that societies evolve from primitive to civilized and that the“fittest” societies evolve and survive, while unfit societies become extinct.
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USING SOCIOLOGYImagine that you are the mayor of a city of about 100,000 residents. Similar to many other cities, yours has a mixture of rich and poor neighborhoods. Because you and one of your key advisers were sociology majors in college, you both remember that the type of neighborhoods in which children grow up can influence many aspects of their development. Your adviser suggests that you seek a large federal grant to conduct a small field experiment to test the effects of neighborhoods in your city. In this experiment, 60 families from poor neighborhoods would be recruited to volunteer. Half of these families would be randomly selected to move to middle-class neighborhoods with their housing partially subsidized (the experimental group), and the other 30 families would remain where they are (the control group). A variety of data would then be gathered about the children in both groups of families over the next decade to determine whether living in middle-class neighborhoods improved the children’s cognitive and social development. You recognize the potential value of this experiment, but you also wonder whether it is entirely ethical, as it would be virtually impossible to maintain the anonymity of the families in the experimental group and perhaps even in the control group. You also worry about the political problems that might result if the people already in the middle-class neighborhoods object to the new families moving into their midst. Do you decide to apply for the federal grant? Why or why not? |