SOC200 - Paradigms (Chapters 2 + 4)

Question 1

PARADIGM

Answer 1

model/framework for observation + understanding which shapes what we see + how we understand it
•Powerful for how we see things/limit what we are seeing
•How we are socialized influences how we perceive things
•represent variety of views – offers insights others lack + ignores aspects of social life others reveal

Question 2

Early Positivism: Auguste compte

Answer 2

elements of sociology can be traced back to enlightenment
•coined term, driven by idea that society can be explained scientifically
•In 1800s was radical idea, most ppl didn’t inquire about society

Question 3

Early Positivism

Answer 3

• Positivism: using stats, discovering universal law, quantitative
• Compte saw it as relying on science to understand society not religion
• Replace religion + mythical understanding

Question 4

Conflict Paradigm: Marx

Answer 4

• Observe poverty + economic dislocation due to industrial revolution
• Social behaviour oriented around conflict by owners of production + those who don’t, attempt dominate others + avoid being dominated
• Applied when group has competing interests

Question 5

Conflict Paradigm: Marx

Answer 5

• Rise in capitalism: capital concentrated in small upper class
• Majority can only sell labour
• George Zimmel: conflict in small group processes – intimacy
• Groups with competing interest

Question 6

Symbolic interactionism

Answer 6

common understanding on how to interact
•Cooley: looking glass self
•Similar to psychology theories
•More focused on common understanding betw ppl in participation in social life
•Mead: take role of other, process of ppl reaching common understanding through language + other symbolic systems

Question 7

Ethnomethodology: ppl methodology

Answer 7

•Structures continually made as ppl interect
•Interactions follow general pattern but has some difference
•Focused on communication
Garfinkel – ppl continually creating social structure through actions + interactions, creating their realities

Question 8

Ethnomethodology: ppl methodology

Answer 8

•Big on breaching experiments: violation of social norms (elevator)
•How submicrolevel interactions (gestures) can maintain social order
everyone is continuously trying to make sense of life, acting like a social scientist

Question 9

Structural Functionalism

Answer 9

not as popular, viewing society as a whole organism – made up of parts each contributes to functioning of the whole
•Parsons, Durkheim
•Seek to understand roles played in larger society as way of understanding why they persist + how eliminate them

Question 10

Feminist Paradigms

Answer 10

way of understanding society incorporating gender
•recognizing gender inequality
•doesn’t see other paradigms as taking into account viewpoint of women + must include women’s experiences + standpoints
•Focused on gender diff + how they relate to rest of social organization
•Counters to male worldview that dominates in theory + research

Question 11

6 Social Science Paradigms

Answer 11

Points of view grounded in assumptions about reality (a way of looking at the world)
•Moving into different paradigms seen as progress, never goes backward
•In social science, we never really drop one

Question 12

(Social) Theory

Answer 12

Interrelated statements intended to explain what we actually see (according to the paradigm)
attempts to systematically explain observations in life

Question 13

Macrotheory Topics

Answer 13

Studies large aggregate entities:
-Struggle among economic classes (Marx)
-Interrelation among major institutions
aimed at understanding big picture of institutions, whole societies + interactions among societies

Question 14

Microtheory Topics

Answer 14

understanding social life at intimate level of individuals & small groups + interactions

• student-faculty interactions
• conversation analysis

Question 15

DEDUCTIVE MODEL OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

Answer 15

• Interest + theory: hard to say which comes first
• Axiom/postulate: uncontested premises
• Concept: general ideas related to research
• Proposition: conclusions about relationships, drawn from postulates

Question 16

DEDUCTIVE MODEL OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

Answer 16

• Hypothesis: specified expectations from empirical reality
• Operationalization: defining variable + how you’re going to measure it
• Groups, category, variables, attributes

Question 17

DEDUCTIVE MODEL OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

Answer 17

• Testable Hypothesis: only focus on operational variables, what we work with
• Observation: see whether observation confirm hypothesis
• Move back to working hypothesis + re-evaluate theory

Question 18

EXPLORATORY Research: pilot study

Answer 18

When examining new interest/subject of study
•problem not clearly defined beforehand
•Satisfies researcher’s initial curiosity
•Tests feasibility of more in depth study
•Helps develop methods to be used in a subsequent study

Question 19

EXPLORATORY Research

Answer 19

• Rarely provide satisfactory answers to questions
• Popular in marketing + stats Canada
• Narrow + small sample
• Seldom definitive because of representativeness

Question 20

DESCRIPTIVE

Answer 20

Careful + precise scientific observation + description of events/relationships, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, HOW?
•precursor to explanatory study seeking to examine why the described pattern exists
•Just to highlight relationships that already exists

Question 21

DESCRIPTIVE

Answer 21

eg. Marketing studies giving a breakdown of consumer behaviour by demographic + economic characteristics
•Canadian Census publications
•Don’t attempt to explain why

Question 22

EXPLANATORY: WHY?

Answer 22

seeks to clarify relationships betw variables through
hypotheses
CAUSALITY versus CORRELATION
•In academic papers
•Often helpful in confirming + disconfirming theory

Question 23

RESEARCH

Answer 23

• Research likely contains all 3

* Start out in exploratory, then describe, then explain

Question 24

Idiographic Explanation

Answer 24

exhaust the idiosyncratic causes of condition/event
full + complete understanding of relationship + its causes
•Scope of the explanation limited to case at hand
•Intent is to explain one case fully
•Mostly qualitative

Question 25

Nomothetic Explanation

Answer 25

•Seeks explanations that can be generalized to a class of situations
•Only partial explanations
•Intent is to explain most substantive factors driving the relationship
seek to identify few causal factors that influence a class of conditions or events

Question 26

CAUSATION IN IDIOGRAPHIC MODELS OF EXPLANATION

Answer 26

series of events,thoughts/actions result in particular event/outcome concerned with context + understanding outcome as part of interrelated set of larger circumstances
retrospective approach to understanding makes it deterministic model of causality because it is explaining what already happened

Question 27

CAUSATION IN IDIOGRAPHIC MODELS OF EXPLANATION

Answer 27

Reliance on retrospective piecing together of events and relationships makes it difficult to definitively establish one causal story over another. Leaves the research open to alternate explanations.

Question 28

CAUSATION IN NOMOTHETIC MODELS OF EXPLANATION

Answer 28

Belief that variation in one variable followed by variation in other variable
focus on partial but substantive explanations makes it probabilistic
Exceptional cases do not disconfirm the pattern

Question 29

CAUSATION IN NOMOTHETIC MODELS OF EXPLANATION

Answer 29

Partial explanations, though they may claim to be a general law, do not give a complete picture of what causes the relationship
more open to misunderstanding and misinterpretation

Question 30

THREE MAIN CRITERIA IN NOMOTHETIC CAUSALITY: variables must be correlated

Answer 30

When one variable changes, so does the other to a substantial degree

Question 31

THREE MAIN CRITERIA IN NOMOTHETIC CAUSALITY: cause must precede the effect

Answer 31

Often the ordering of two variables in the social sciences is unclear

Question 32

THREE MAIN CRITERIA IN NOMOTHETIC CAUSALITY: variables must be nonspurious

Answer 32

detected correlation between the IV and DV cannot be greatly explained by a third IV that is correlated with the DV
•Spurious relationships: coincidental statistical correlation betw two variables that is shown to be caused by some third variable

Question 33

STUDY DESIGN and CAUSALITY

Answer 33

Studies that collect data over time are useful for establishing causality in the social sciences
Temporal sequence is often crucial for ruling out spurious relationships – another key criterion for establishing causality

Question 34

STUDY DESIGNS AND THE TIME DIMENSION

Answer 34

• Cross Sectional: one point in time
• Cohort: following group of same age range
• Not studying same ppl, but studying ppl in same generation 10 years later

Question 35

STUDY DESIGNS AND THE TIME DIMENSION

Answer 35

• Trend: looking at age group of ppl at diff points in time
• Panel*: same ppl over time
• Panel attrition: ppl dropping out before study is over

Question 36

Necessary cause

Answer 36

represents condition that must be present for effect to follow
•Discovering cause that is both necessary and sufficient is most satisfying outcome in research
•Never discover a single causes that are absolutely necessary and absolutely sufficient when analyzing them

Question 37

Sufficient cause

Answer 37

represents condition that, if present, guarantees of fact in question
•Doesn’t mean only possible cause of particular effect
•It is not uncommon to find causal factors that are 100% necessary or 100% sufficient