- antipositivism
- the view that social researchers should strive for subjectivity as they worked to represent social processes, cultural norms, and societal values
- conflict theory
- a theory that looks at society as a competition for limited resources
- constructivism
- an extension of symbolic interaction theory which proposes that reality is what humans cognitively construct it to be
- culture
- a group's shared practices, values, and beliefs
- dramaturgical analysis
- a technique sociologists use in which they view society through the metaphor of theatrical performance
- dynamic equilibrium
- a stable state in which all parts of a healthy society work together properly
- dysfunctions
- social patterns that have undesirable consequences for the operation of society
- figuration
- the process of simultaneously analyzing the behavior of an individual and the society that shapes that behavior
- function
- the part a recurrent activity plays in the social life as a whole and the contribution it makes to structural continuity
- functionalism
- a theoretical approach that sees society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of individuals that make up that society
- generalized others
- the organized and generalized attitude of a social group
- grand theories
- an attempt to explain large-scale relationships and answer fundamental questions such as why societies form and why they change
- hypothesis
- a testable proposition
- latent functions
- the unrecognized or unintended consequences of a social process
- macro-level
- a wide-scale view of the role of social structures within a society
- manifest functions
- sought consequences of a social process
- micro-level theories
- the study of specific relationships between individuals or small groups
- paradigms
- philosophical and theoretical frameworks used within a discipline to formulate theories, generalizations, and the experiments performed in support of them
- positivism
- the scientific study of social patterns
- qualitative sociology
- in-depth interviews, focus groups, and/or analysis of content sources as the source of its data
- quantitative sociology
- statistical methods such as surveys with large numbers of participants
- reification
- an error of treating an abstract concept as though it has a real, material existence
- significant others
- specific individuals that impact a person's life
- social facts
- the laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and all of the cultural rules that govern social life
- social institutions
- patterns of beliefs and behaviors focused on meeting social needs
- social solidarity
- the social ties that bind a group of people together such as kinship, shared location, and religion
- society
- a group of people who live in a defined geographical area who interact with one another and who share a common culture
- sociological imagination
- the ability to understand how your own past relates to that of other people, as well as to history in general and societal structures in particular
- sociology
- the systematic study of society and social interaction
- symbolic interactionism
- a theoretical perspective through which scholars examine the relationship of individuals within their society by studying their communication (language and symbols)
- theory
- a proposed explanation about social interactions or society
- verstehen
- a German word that means to understand in a deep way