Inleiding Sociologie – Samenvatting ‘’Introduction to sociology’’,
Frank van Tubergen, editie 1
H1: Questions
1.1 The sociological perspective
Individual perspective: type of explanation of human behaviour which focuses on individual
causes.
Sociological perspective: type of explanation of human behaviour which focuses on social
causes.
Sociological perspective is different from the induvial because is focuses on social causes
(instead of individual characteristics) and considers collective outcomes (instead of the
behaviour of a few individuals).
Social context: social environment in which people are embedded.
Social phenomenon: collective human behaviour.
Individual Sociological
perspective perspective
Phenomena Individual Social
of interest phenomena, phenomena,
individual Collective
behaviour behaviour
(Why is John (Why is obesity
obese?) increasing in
society?)
Explanations Individual Social context,
for characteristics social causes
behaviour (e.g., genes, (e.g., country,
personality) neighbourhood,
school, family)
Principle 1.1
The sociological perspective: Sociology is the scientific study of social phenomena. So if you
want tot give a sociological explanation of human behaviour, you need to consider the
influence of social contexts and study the resulting collective human behaviour.
Sociological perspective supplements the individual perspective: they are not in conflict, but
the two perspectives provide a more comprehensive explanation of human behaviour.
The individual and sociological perspectives can be framed as alternative perspectives:
there are only social causes or there are only individual causes.
Proximate causes: factors that are close to the phenomena to be explained.
Ultimate causes: factors that underlie proximate causes.
Ultimate cause → Proximate cause → Consequence
Bullying @ school Negative self image Obesity
Micro level: the level at which individuals operate.
,Meso level: social contexts at the intermediate level (e.g., families, neighbourhoods, schools,
organizations).
Macro level: social contexts that are broader than meso level units (e.g., nations, group of
nations, continents).
1.2 Social problems
Social problem:
Goes beyond the personal troubles of the individual (it thus affects many people);
Is an issue about which mane people are concerned.
Personal trouble: problem related to the personal life of an individual.
1.3 Three aims of sociology
Social problems have a normative dimension: desirable goals or values are threatened,
people want to solve this problem and politicians, policy makers and organization offer
various measures and intervention to do so.
In sociology, social problems are studied as social phenomena, which means they are not a
normative problem but a scientific phenomenon of interest. Understanding social
phenomena thereby contributes to understanding and solving problems.
To describe
o To come up with accurate descriptions of social phenomena.
To explain
o To come up with a scientific explanations for social phenomena.
To apply
o To come up with predictions or social interventions (social policy measure).
1.4 Three types of sociological questions
Normative question: question that entails value.
Scientific question: question that doe not entail value judgements. There are three types of
scientific questions: descriptive, theoretical and application.
Descriptive - beschijvend Q(d)
o How much, many?
o What is happening?
Theoretical - verklarend Q(t)
o Why is this happening?
Application - toepassend Q(a)
o What will happen in the future?
o What are the consequences of a certain social intervention
1.5 The art of asking good sociological questions
Ill-defined question: question is vague and ambiguous.
Precise question: question which has a clear interpretation.
Question ingredients:
The human behaviour you are interested in
o Crime → homicide
, The social context (place)
The period
The population (male/female)
Scientific relevance: relevance of sociological work for the accumulation of social knowledge.
Societal relevance: relevance of sociological work for the understanding of social problems.
False theoretical question: theoretical question which aims to explain something that does
not exist.
Comparative-case question: question which includes some comparison of cases, such as
multiple social contexts, multiple moments in time and/or multiple populations.
1.6 Sociology and common sense
Private sociologists: the way human beings, in daily life, make sense of the social world. As
such they are prone o, among other things, intuitive thinking, implicit reasoning,
development of incoherent and vague ideas, keeping knowledge private and searching for
confirmations.
Academic sociology: the way academic institutions describe and explain the social world.
Characteristics are the systematic way of gathering knowledge, making explanations public
and subject to criticism, the development of coherent theories and rigorous testing.
1.7 Sociology as cumulative science
Cumulative science: the practice that theories and observations of earlier studies are
incorporated in the work of successive studies.
Background knowledge: the theories and observations that are known before the study
commences.
H2: Theories
Learning goals
Describe what a sociological theory is.
Use a theory schema to represent sociological theory hypotheses and observations.
Describe criteria by which one could evaluate the usefulness of a sociological theory.
Describe how concepts are related to sociological theory.
Describe the notion of causality and explain how it is related to sociological theory.
Use a conceptual model to represent various types of causal relations.
2.2 Theories and explanations
Proposition: universal statement, i.e., statement about the causal relations between two or
more concepts.
Condition: assumption about the specific setting which relates propositions to observations
and hypotheses.
Hypothesis: testable prediction, derived from theory (top down logic).
Theory schema: type of theory tool in which propositions, conditions, hypotheses and
observations are written out as a coherent set of verbal statements.
Deductive-nomological explanation: form of explanation of phenomena using propostion(s)
and conditions (bottom up logic).
