Historical documents

Records and accounts of qualitative kind for example relating to belief, values, social relationship or social behavior may also be contemporary or may refer to earlier periods. There are several difficulties immediately present themselves in the use of records from the past. Few chroniclers of social relation and social action record observations in the systematic way in which the sociologists are interested. There are often intriguing and sympathetic records but the information that is vital to the sociologist is often missing.Contemporary RecordsContemporary records relating to social relationship and social behavior are seldom used as the sole source of information and sociological research. They are usually one source of a particular account or achievement.

22. Reliability & Validity We often think of reliability and validity as separate ideas but, in fact, they're related to each other. Here, I want to show you two ways you can think about their relationship.One of my favorite metaphors for the relationship between reliability is that of the target. Think of the center of the target as the concept that you are trying to measure. Imagine that for each person you are measuring, you are taking a shot at the target. If you measure the concept perfectly for a person, you are hitting the center of the target. If you don't, you are missing the center. The more you are off for that person, the further you are from the center. A hypothesis (from Ancient Greek ὑπόθεσις, from Greek ὑποτιθέναι – hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose,"^[1] plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous observations that cannot satisfactorily be explained with the available scientific theories. Even though the words "hypothesis" and "theory" are often used synonymously, a scientific hypothesis is not the same as a scientific theory. A working hypothesis is a provisionally accepted hypothesis proposed for further research.^[1]A different meaning of the term hypothesis is used in formal logic, to denote the antecedent of a proposition; thus in the proposition "If P, then Q ", P denotes the hypothesis (or antecedent); Q can be called a consequent. P is the assumption in a (possibly counterfactual) What If question.The adjective hypothetical, meaning "having the nature of a hypothesis", or "being assumed to exist as an immediate consequence of a hypothesis", can refer to any of these meanings of the term "hypothesis". In statistics and survey methodology, sampling is concerned with the selection of a subset of individuals from within a statistical population to estimate characteristics of the whole population. Two advantages of sampling are that the cost is lower and data collection is faster.Each observation measures one or more properties (such as weight, location, color) of observable bodies distinguished as independent objects or individuals. In survey sampling, weights can be applied to the data to adjust for the sample design, particularly stratified sampling (blocking). Results from probability theory and statistical theory are employed to guide practice. In business and medical research, sampling is widely used for gathering information about a population.

23.

Emile Durkheim	This philosopher focused on the "glue" which holds society together. For him, society functions through rituals.
Karl Marx	He believed that economics was the most important social determinant for society.
Max Weber	He argued that an understanding of people's perception was also important for understanding society--something he called verstehen.
Max Weber	He did a study about how Puritan ideals helped foster capitalism, proving that culture can effect history. It's not just economics, he said.
Adam Smith	He was not only the father of capitalism, but also believed that people making individual decisions in their own self-interest worked for the betterment of society. The "invisible hand," he called it.
C. Wright Mills	Believed that one needs to develop a "sociological imagination" in order to study society effectively.
Jeremy Bentham	Believed that people made decisions based on pain-avoidance. Well organized, he argued, are needed in human societies.
C. Wright Mills	Believed that the most important thing to understand about society is how history and biography work.
Clifford Geertz	Believed in "thick description" as a means to uncover the social significance of symbols in everyday life.
Karl Marx	Believed that class struggle was the most important aspect of modern societies that would eventually bring revolution and destruction of the status quo.
Sigmund Freud	He believed that the unconscious mind was the place where unpleasant memories lurked, yet still had a way of affecting a person's behavior.

24. Karl Marx (1818–1883) is best known not as a philosopher but as a revolutionary communist, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is hard to think of many who have had as much influence in the creation of the modern world. Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, towards economics and politics. However, in addition to his overtly philosophical early work, his later writings have many points of contact with contemporary philosophical debates, especially in the philosophy of history and the social sciences, and in moral and political philosophy. Historical materialism — Marx's theory of history — is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, characterized by class struggle, culminating in communism. Marx's economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx's prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism. However Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal. Historical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx (1818–1883) as "the materialist conception of history". Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans collectively produce the necessities of life. Social classes and the relationship between them, plus the political structures and ways of thinking in society, are founded on and reflect economic activity. Entfremdung (estrangement) is Karl Marx’s theory of alienation, which describes the separation of things that naturally belong together; and the placement of antagonism between things that are properly in harmony. Theoretically, Entfremdung describes the social alienation(estrangement) of people from aspects of their human nature (Gattungswesen, “species-essence”) as a consequence of living in a society stratified into social classes; Marx had earlier expressed the entfremdung theory in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1927). Philosophically, the Entfremdung theory relies upon The Essence of Christianity (1841), by Ludwig Feuerbach, which argues that the supernatural idea of “God” has alienated the natural characteristics of the human being. Moreover, in The Ego and its Own (1845), Max Stirner extends the Feurbach analysis by arguing that even the idea of “humanity” is an alienating concept for the individual man and woman to intellectually consider; Marx and Engels responded to these philosophic propositions in The German Ideology (1845). Alienation (Entfremdung) is the systemic result of living in a socially stratified society, because being a mechanistic part of a social class alienates a person from his and her humanity. The theoretic basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine his or her life and destiny, when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of himself as the director of his actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define his relationship with other people; and to own the things and use the value of the goods and services, produced with his labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realised human being, as an economic entity, he or she is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, in order to extract from the worker the maximal amount of surplus value, in the course of business competition among industrialists.

25. David Émile Durkheim April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.^[Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labor in Society (1893). In 1895, he published his Rules of the Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology.^[4] In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth byAuguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of institutions,^{[ citation needed ]} its aim being to discover structural social facts. Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purelyholistic;^] that is, sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals.He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon. In his 1893 work The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim examined how social order was maintained in different types of societies. He focused on the division of labor, and examined how it differed in traditional societies and modern societies. Authors before him such as Herbert Spencer and Ferdinand Toennies had argued that societies evolved much like living organisms, moving from a simple state to a more complex one resembling the workings of complex machines. Durkheim reversed this formula, adding his theory to the growing pool of theories of social progress, social evolutionism and social darwinism. He argued that traditional societies were 'mechanical' and were held together by the fact that everyone was more or less the same, and hence had things in common. In traditional societies, argues Durkheim, the collective consciousness entirely subsumes individual consciousness-social norms are strong and social behavior is well-regulated.In modern societies, he argued, the highly complex division of labor resulted in 'organic' solidarity. Different specializations in employment and social roles created dependencies that tied people to one another, since people no longer could count on filling all of their needs by themselves. In 'mechanical' societies, for example, subsistence farmers live in communities which are self-sufficient and knit together by a common heritage and common job. In modern 'organic' societies, workers earn money, and must rely on other people who specialize in certain products (groceries, clothing, etc.) to meet their needs.

26. Robert King Merton (July 4, 1910 – February 23, 2003) was a distinguished American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor. In 1994, Merton won the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science.Merton developed notable concepts such as "unintended consequences", the "reference group", and "role strain" but is perhaps best known for having created the terms "role model" and "self-fulfilling prophecy".^[2] A central element of modern sociological, political and economic theory, the "self-fulfilling prophecy" is a process whereby a belief or an expectation, correct or incorrect, affects the outcome of a situation or the way a person or a group will behave.^[3] Merton's work on the "role model" first appeared in a study on the socialization of medical students at Columbia. The term grew from his theory of a reference group, or the group to which individuals compare themselves, but to which they do not necessarily belong. Social roleswere a central piece of Merton's theory of social groups. Merton emphasized that, rather than a person assuming one role and one status, they have a status set in the social structure that has attached to it a whole set of expected behaviors.. Theories of the middle range Merton's work is often compared to that of Talcott Parsons. Unlike Parsons, who emphasized the necessity for social science to establish a general foundation, Merton preferred more limited, middle-range theories. According to Merton, middle-range theory starts its theorizing with clearly defined aspects of social phenomena, rather than with broad, abstract entities such as society as a whole. Theories of the middle range should be firmly supported by empirical data. These theories must be constructed with observed data in order to create theoretical problems and to be incorporated in proposals that allow empirical testing.^[10] Middle-range theories, applicable to limited ranges of data, transcend sheer description of social phenomena and fill in the blanks between raw empiricism and grand or all-inclusive theory. In his advocacy of these kinds of theories Merton stands on the shoulders of Émile Durkheim andMax Weber.. Clarifying functional analysis Merton argues that the central orientation of functionalism is in interpreting data by their consequences for larger structures in which they are implicated. Like Durkheim and Parsons he analyzes society with reference to whether cultural and social structures are well or badly integrated. Merton is also interested in the persistence of societies and defines functions that make for the adaptation of a given social system. Finally, Merton thinks that shared values are central in explaining how societies and institutions work, however he disagrees with Parsons on some issues.According to Merton's perception of "functionalism", all standardized social and cultural beliefs and practices are functional for both society as a whole as well as individuals in society. This outlook maintains that various parts of social systems must show a high level of integration, but Merton argues that a generalization like this cannot be extended to larger, more complex societies. The second claim has to do with universal functionalism. This claim argues that all standardized social and cultural structures and forms have a positive function. Merton argues that this is a contradiction to what is seen in the real world; not every structure, idea, belief, etc., has positive functions. The third claim of functional analysis that Merton argues with is that of indispensability. This claim states that the standardized parts of society have positive functions, and also represent indispensable parts of the working whole, which implies that structures and functions are functionally necessary for society. Here, Merton argues, people must be willing to admit that there exist various structural and functional alternatives within society

27. Mead begins with the idea of the human organism as existing in a social context. We are beings with a certain physical form in an environment that is both precarious and stable.^[1] We are in need of food, shelter and other basic goods and need each other's help to secure them. Our youth need a particularly long period of nurture and care from both parents and community (Mead, MSS, 241) before reaching (relative) independence. The combination of our instinctive drives towards food, sex, and parenting and the long period of maturation to adulthood conspire to create a human environment that necessitates interaction and cooperation. It is out of this context of cooperation and mutual need that the self emerges.^[2] Drawing on the work of Darwin and Wundt on the concept of a gesture, Mead explains how self-consciousness—the first stage in the development of the self—emerges out of the use of significant symbols. Human beings, since they are in need of one another and therefore must live amongst each other, must learn to anticipate what each other is doing by reading gestures as signs of more overt behavior to come. We read each other's facial expressions and bodily movements as signs of behavior to follow, so when someone clenches his teeth and balls his fists, we know to expect trouble. On the other hand, when someone approaches with open arms and a smile we (ordinarily) expect friendly interaction. Gestures, in short, are attitudes, that is, the beginnings of acts. After some experience with them, we can read them as signs of something more, and adjust our conduct accordingly.

28. Social mobility is the movement of individuals or groups in social standing social position It may refer to classes, ethnic groups, or entire nations, and may measure health status, literacy, or education — but more commonly it refers to individuals or families, and their change in income.^[1] It also typically refers to vertical mobility—movement of individuals or groups up (or down) from one socio-economic level to another, often by changing jobs or marriage; but can also refer to horizontal mobility—movement from one position to another within the same social level. Social mobility can be the change in status between someone (or a group) and their parents/previous family generations ("inter-generational"); or over the change during one's lifetime ("intra-generational"). It can be "absolute"—i.e. total amount of movement of people between classes, usually over one generation (such as when education and economic development raises the socio-economic level of a population); or "relative"—an estimation of the chance of upward (or downward) social mobility of a member of one social class in comparison with a member from another class.^[4] A higher level of intergenerational mobility is often considered praiseworthy, and the sign of greater fairness, or equality of opportunity, in a society.Mobility is enabled to a varying extent by economic capital, cultural capital (such as higher education), human's capital (such as competence and effort in labour), social capital (such as support from one's social network), physical capital (such as ownership of tools, or the 'means of production'), and symbolic capital (such as the worth of an official title, status class, celebrity, etc.) In sociology, social stratification is a concept involving the "classification of people into groups based on shared socio-economic conditions... a relational set of inequalities with economic, social, political and ideological dimensions." When differences lead to greater status, power or privilege for some groups over the other it is called Social Stratification.^[1] It is a system by which society ranks categories of people in a hierarchy ^[2] Social stratification is based on four basic principles: (1) Social stratification is a trait of society, not simply a reflection of individual differences; (2) Social stratification carries over from generation to generation; (3) Social stratification is universal but variable; (4) Social stratification involves not just inequality but beliefs as well.In modern Western societies, stratification is broadly organized into three main layers: upper class, middle class, and lower class. Each of these classes can be further subdivided into smaller classes (e.g. occupational

[1]. I use the phrase 'precarious and stable' in the Deweyan sense (Dewey, Experience and Nature, Chap. II.)

[2]. Unlike some of the neo-pragmatists (e.g., Rorty, Contingency), who argue that "convention goes all the way down," Mead grounds his idea of the socially constructed self in a biological/environmental context.

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