Tools of Sociology

Our week is cut in half this week, so we're discussing the readings for the tools of sociology on Monday and Tuesday. This week's class was interesting. On Monday morning the lively discussion took us to a place where we took up Weber's challenge of discovering inconvenient facts. We engaged in the preliminary process of this by hypothesizing about the various reasons why higher education may in fact not be "beneficial." The purpose of doing this, as Babbie states in the second reading, is becuase this is where solutions to social problems lay.

I've also asked students to find a sociological journal article and to make a photocopy of it (sociology journals are housed in the library-- go online and search for articles in sociology journals or ask a librarian to help you). Study the methods section. You will be asked to share the methods section of this article with one of your classmates. You will also find a New York Times article related to the topic culture. You will turn the journal article and the newspaper article in with your regular answers. Everything is due next week on either Wednesday or Thursday, depending on which class you are in.

Today's recomended reading is a New York Times article about the lack of pain medication in developing countries despite its cheap cost. Its interesting to read about how cultural ideas about addiction lead to government policies prohibiting doctors (many of whom are also prejudiced) from prescribing narcotics to those who are in severe pain.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/health/10pain.html?_r=1&ref=health&oref=slogin

First Discussion

Papers were collected yesterday and today. Your first graded assignment was on answers to readings 1-3. Because we can get caught up answering the questions line by line, its best to remember to identify the author's main argument. Rather than sacrificing his/ her main argument, we look to the questions to help us to better understand what the argument is. In reading Mills and answering the questions, we found out that the main argument is that the development of the sociological imagination in every modern man is a necessity, whereas it may not have been for men in previous societies. Man's place was once rather fixed. Today, social changes like structural and geographic mobility, which occur in single generations, disrupt the everyday lives of man making the development of this special insight imperative. People fail at this essentially becuause they do not understand social structure, or the overlapping of many milieux. Berger argues that the development of the sociological perspective is a moral issue. Gaines supports the sociological imagination and uses it to understand the four teens' group suicide from a macro perspective rather than a psychological or medial perspective. She argues that using the sociological imagination can help us to better understand trends in social behavior. Blaming individuals will stymie opportunities to address social conditions like suicide at the micro level (i.e. in families), the middle level (i.e. at school), and the macro level (i.e. in the media).

The book recomendation this week is "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis' protagonist has "everything," which we often think of as tons of money, the so-called right friends, is successful at his job, etc., and he is impossibly disconnected.

Tuesday, Sep. 4

Welcome back from the extended weekend. Today's topic was a continuation of the introduction to sociology, focusing on reading 1 in Seeing Ourselves. It was interesting to ask the questions aloud, getting various ideas from around the room. We also applied Mill's concept of the sociological imagination to yesterday's West Indian American day parade. We discussed the culture showcased, the violence which someone says, "always happens," and ethnic identity in the U.S. This was helpful because we were able to identify one event and build from there a discussion of broader concerns, (i.e. violence and ethnicity). We also took a poll counting the number of students who have attended a parade other than the culture they identify with. Few of us raised our hands. Berger, author of reading two, encourages us to push past the limits of our comfort zones. It is this comfort zone, which Mills describes in reaing 1, which can often make us feel trapped.
For those in the 11AM class, we also used the sociological imagination to discuss marriage. The questions Mills poses on p. 3 in reading 1 asks us to identify the types of men and women emerging in this society. According to one student's demographic data the Lehman female to male ratio is 7:3. This is reflective of a growing trend in colleges and universities in which women outnumber men increasingly. According to sociological studies, women with college or more are more likely to want to date and marry men with an equal amount of educational attainment, however studies show that those men are most likely already married, often to younger women with less education. Others studies indicate that women with college or more will marry eventually, perhaps later in life than was expected by their environment. The largest proportion of single men exists in the working class and poor. It seems that in pursuing higher education, women are perhaps also delaying marriage, however inadvertently. Participation in society shows us that individuals need college degrees to participate in the primary economy. Yet have we thought about what that might mean for other aspects of our private lives, and as we prefer to delay marriage and just live together, what effect does that trend have on the institution of marriage?
For the Monday and Wednesday students we will collect papers regarding questions from Seeing Ourselves and your autobiographies and definitions of sociology. We will discuss the questions in class. For T/ TH students we will also discuss the questions in class together.
Next week we move on to ch. 2 to discuss very technically the tools of empirical research, and we will discuss what it means to be "value free" in sociology.

For further reading on immigrant identities, as mentioned in class, you might purchase or check out Mary Waters' "Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities," in which Waters conducts many interviews and finds that resisting Americanization among West Indian immigrants can help them to succeed in the U.S.