2.1 Outline the development of sociology.

2.2 Describe the key points of sociology’s major theoretical perspectives.

2.3 Explain the core ideas underlying the scientific approach to understanding society.

2.4 List the basic steps of the scientific research process.

Key Points:

• Attempts to understand society have existed for at least two and a half millennia, but gathering of scientific evi­dence to test hypotheses and validate claims is a modern idea.
• Theories are especially important to science because they raise questions for research, and they explain the relationships among facts. Sociology has four primary, overriding, theoretical perspectives or paradigms: sym­bolic interaction theory, rational choice theory, struc­tural-functional theory, and conflict theory. Other per­spectives, such as feminist theory, serve as correctives to the main paradigms. Most of these theories are more applicable at either the micro to meso level or the meso to macro level.
• Sociology is a science used to study society, and there­fore it is essential to understand what is—and what is not—considered data or evidence. For a scientist, this means that ideas must be tested empirically, that is, sci­entifically.
• As social scientists, sociologists use eight systematic steps to gather data and test theories about the social world.
• The independent variable is the variable in a cause-and-effect relationship that comes first in a time sequence and causes a change in another variable—the dependent variable.
• Major methods for gathering data in sociology include questionnaires, interviews, observational studies, secondary data analysis, content analysis, and experi­ments.
• Quantitative data come in the form of numbers (e.g., derived from questionnaires, some secondary sources such as the Census), and qualitative data come in nonnumerical forms (e.g., derived from semistructured and unstructured interviews, observation studies).
• Use of multiple methods—triangulation—increases con­fidence in the findings.
• Scientific confidence in results requires representative samples, usually drawn randomly.
• Responsible research requires sensitivity to the ethics of research—ensuring that gathering scientific data does no one harm.
• Public sociologists use sociological tools to understand and inform citizens about how society operates, and to improve society.

Summary:

The core features of scientific research are (1) a commit­ment to empirically validated evidence, facts, and infor­mation that are confirmed through systematic processes of testing using the five senses; (2) allowing us to be con­vinced by the evidence rather than by our preconceived ideas; (3) absolute integrity and objectivity in how we con­duct and report on our research; and (4) continual openness to having our findings reexamined and new interpretations proposed. We must always consider the possibility that we have overlooked alternative explanations of the data and alternative ways to view the problem.

Science—including social science—does not consist of just facts to be memorized. Science is a process that is made possible by a social exchange of ideas, a clash of opinions, and a continual search for truth. Knowledge in the sciences is created by vigorous debate. We hope you will engage in the creation of knowledge by entering into these debates.

Theories serve as lenses to help us make sense of the data that we gather using various research strategies. The data themselves can be used to test the theories, so there is an ongoing reciprocal relationship between theory (the lens for making sense of the data) and research (the evidence used to test the theories). The most important ideas in this chap­ter concern what sociology considers data or evidence and how sociology uses methods to be a science. These ideas form the framework for the content of sociology.