SOC 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: The Sociological Imagination, Social Conflict Theory, Symbolic Interactionism
Document Summary
Social sciences: the intellectual and academic disciplines designed to understand the social world objectively by means of controlled and repeated observations [p. 4] Traditional social sciences: anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, sociology. The five traditional social sciences will study the family in different ways: anthropology: culture. People will usually honor and try to meet the family"s wishes over their own desires/wants: economics: resource allocation. Who gets what? split 50/50: political science: government. Government can determine who marries who and if they can marry: psychology: the individual. Children: sociology: society trends and patterns. Social forces that make the previous examples possible. Why take a social science course: to understand how social life is predictable, to learn to see the world through multiple perspectives, to engage in the world in a more meaningful way. Literal: the study of the processes of human companionship. Approaching the world without preconceptions in order to see things a new way.
