SOCI 3251 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Term Paper, Metatheory, Relational Theory
Document Summary
Posed thursday, due the following thursday by 9:30am. Too narrow (the canon of old dead white guys) A science that revolves around 2 central questions that philosophers and others have grappled with long before this was an institutionalized discipline: The attempt to solve the problem of action and order . What we do and the ways we do it. The first part (action): the factors that structure individuals or groups to act. The second part (order): the patterns and/or predictability of behavior. Sociology pays attention to external rather than internal phenomena. Action and order (what we do and the ways we do it) (empirically observable) dependent variable. We can correlate people stopping at red lights with lots of data. High traffic areas, time of day, gender of driver, type of car, etc. Enter theory -- set of rules or assumptions to interpret data. Vital to making sense of social life because it holds assorted observations and facts together.
