SOCI 250 Lecture 1: 1
8 Jun 2018
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SOCI250 – SOCIAL PROBLEMS
Lecture 1 (September 7th, 2017)
Introduction
! What is sociology?
•!Sociology is the scientific study of social life, social change, and the social causes and
consequences of human behavior
o!Trying to generate a series of hypotheses based on theories
o!We take those theories and try to test them empirically: we look and observe the real
world data and we see whether or not the real world is what we expect it to be
o!Scientific: systematic knowledge gained through observation and experimentation
•!Journalists don’t operate off to actual evidence; sociologists use data representative of real
sample (more empirical)
•!Since nearly all human behavior is social, the subject matter of sociology has a vast range
o!Core issues that sociology deals with: change over decades, inequality in society
(primarily, how resources are allocated within a society in a non-equal way),
distribution of power in society, ethnicity, race, gender, and how life chances/power
are relevant considering those dimensions…
•!Few fields have such broad scope and relevance for research, theory, and application of
knowledge
•!Sociology and social problems: sociologists often explore why social problems fluctuate
across time and place
o!Why is this happening this way?
o!In most developed countries in the world, they are not a huge fan of immigrants.
•!Sociology is one of the principle disciples the idea of criminology – why do people commit
crimes?
o!Structural factures: environment, S.E.S., educational opportunities, family…
•!Psychology is more about what is going with “you”, while sociology looks at structure and
society
! What is society?
•!A society is any group of people living together and constituting a single related,
interdependent community
•!Frequently taken to include entire national communities; we might, for instance, comment
upon some aspect of Canadian society
•!Society can also be used to refer to smaller groups of people, as when we refer to “rural
societies” or “academic society,” etc.
•!Society is probably the most generic term – you can place that on almost every group of
people
! What is culture?
•!People learn culture
•!While many aspects of human life are genetic/biological (i.e. the desire for food, shelter)
most can’t be explained by characteristics of the human genetic code
