These notes capture the key concepts, discussions, and important information from the class sessions. They are intended to provide a comprehensive summary of the material covered, including lecture highlights, significant topics, and any additional insights provided by the instructor.
Email TAs for attendance (anna beard: annabeard36@tamu.edu)
You need someone to be the bad guy in order to find out what’s wrong
Taboo – more extreme, seen as wrong across majority of cultures
Chapters 1 and 2
Ronald Akers
Differential reinforcement theory
Behavior that is in a direct disapproved of by others
Influenced by others
Robert Merton
Status based
People are expected to behave according to their perceived social status
Adaptations to strain, when people are behaving outside of normally accepted behavior in order to achieve
outside goals (getting a job to make money vs starting a gang or being part of a mafia)
Dr being addicted to drugs vs a homeless person, perceived differently based on status
Howard Becker
Labeling
Individuals are only deviant if they are successfully labeled as deviant
Strongly based on social reactions
If no one knows you committed a deviant act you may not be labeled as deviant, all about other people
seeing the deviant act
Biker with tattoos walking into a bar vs being in a church as a priest with tattoos on display
Kai Erickson
Social construction
No behavior is inherently deviant
Deviance is based on audience perceptions
Robert Franzese
“deviance involves the violation of social norm and encompasses the difference in behaviors, values,
attitudes, lifestyles, and life choices among individuals and groups”
Ethics
Stanford prison experiment
SRS selected, all men who were seemingly rebellious in their daily lives. Half prisoners and half
guards. Guards were able to get to the “prison” a day early in order to make it their own, make it seem like they had
control. The prisoners were picked up by actual local police, detained like normal, then blindfolded so they could be
taken to the experimental prison. Day 2 the prisoners rebelled so the guards had to use fear tactics and punishments
to keep them in line. Guards degraded the prisoners, putting them in solitary, making them do gross chores, and
having them shame each other. Some of the prisoners broke down and had to be released while others became
“zombies”. The experiment was to go on for two weeks but was stopped after 5 days. Would not be approved with
today’s guidelines. MY THOUGHTS: I think the experiment should’ve been done, we learned something valuable
from it. Given the chance some people will take the opportunity to act in a way that is not socially acceptable, to live
out their fantasies of being someone terrible. Although the experiment was not in any way ethical, it still provided
insight. There is argument that the experiment may not have been needed because these results have been seen in
Nazi Germany and Japan, however this experiment proves that it doesn’t matter the circumstance, regardless of if
we are at war, people are going to become horrible to each other. There’s a question that begs if this experiment
involved women if there may have been more humanity. The results sort of align with the Milgram experiment,
given the chance or if told by authority people are willing to do awful, vial things. But why? Because someone in a
position of power told them to? Because they were in a place where there would be no repercussions? or because
they are conforming to something they think they are supposed to be? The men who became the guards may have
been replicating what they’ve seen on tv or read in books or heard on the radio. Can the same be said for the
prisoners? Or were they having a fight or flight response?
Milgram experiment- shocking
Laud Humphreys -
Patricia Adler – drug smugglers/drug dealers
Undercover authority investigations – the goal is to do significant legal harm to the subject
vs academic researcher studies – still going undercover except the goal is to do no harm to your research subject
Research participants and researchers themselves (goal is to minimize or prevent) may face risks
, Institutional review board (IRB) – a group of scholars within a university who meet regularly to review and approve
the research proposals of their colleagues and make recommendations for how to protect human subjects
Research without IRB approval will almost never be published
Deception – the extent to which the participants in research projects are unaware of the project or its goal
Confidentiality – the assurance that no one other than the researcher will know the identity of the respondent
^ led to stronger guidelines
no name or identifying information should be attached to responses
code of ethics – ethical guidelines for researchers to consult as they design a project
helps to avoid situations that could potentially harm yourself or others
Value – Max Weber coined the phrase “value-free” sociology to convey the idea that researchers should identify
facts without allowing their own personal beliefs or biases to interfere in the process
value relevance vs value neutrality – dictates that once a social scientist chooses a topic over something they care
about and then suspend own values to maintain neutrality (flipped in textbook)
Quantitate research – research that translates the social world into numbers (ex: us census)
Qualitative research – research that works with nonnumerical data (ex: anne frank’s diary)
Scientific method: a procedure for acquiring knowledge that emphasizes collecting data through observation and
experiment (general plan for conducting research in a systematic way)
Literature review – a thorough search through previously published studies relevant to a particular topic
1. Finding literature
a. Think about alternative terms for what you are researching (ex: parental rejection vs parental
attachment)
2. Reading the literature
3. Writing the review
a. Paragraph 1 = theme/topic 1, citations: (article 1, article 3)
b. Paragraph 2 = theme/topic 2, citations: (article 3, article 2)
c. Paragraph 3 = theme/topic 3, citations: (article 1, article 2)
Hypothesis – a theoretical statement explaining the relationship between two or more phenomena
Variables – two or more phenomena that a researcher believes are relates; these will be examined in the experiment.
Anything that varies or changes from case to case.
Replicability (reliability): the ability of research to be repeated and, thus, later verified by other researchers
Correlation: a relationship between variables in which they change together and may or may not be casual
Causation: a relationship between variables in which a change in one directly produces a change in the other
Intervening variable: a third variable, sometimes overlooked, that explains the relationship between to other
variables
Spurious correlation: the appearance of causation produced between an intervening variable (ex: the rise in ice
cream sales is related to the rise in murder rate, which is related to a rise in heat)
Causality
- Three criteria required to determine causality
o Temporal ordering: timing (x)
o Covariation or correlation: relation (y)
o Accounting for spuriousness: other factors (z)
Deductive approach: hypothesis first, then gathers data
Inductive approach: gather data first, then formulates a theory
Validity: researcher studies what he/she/they wanted to study, requires concepts and questions to be carefully
constructed
Reliability: the replicability of a study over time, requires concepts to be carefully constructed
Generalizability: how well the sample of people selected to participate in the study represent the general population
Operationalization (operational definition): the process of strictly defining concepts or terms into measurable
factors that can be selected and categorized consistently and replicated by others
Sample: members of the population who will actually be studied, will be used to generalize about the population
Target population: who do you want to make the generalization about (ex: adult Americans, Texas college students)
Research methods
1. Field studies
a. Ethnography: studying people in their own environment
b. Participant observation: the researcher both observes and becomes a member in a social setting
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