Sociology 377A: Sociological Inquiry I
Course Description and Objectives
This course introduces the student to various approaches used to study society. The course is organized around the concept of "INFORMATION" about society and how social scientists collect and critically analyze it. The lecture and reading material will address the following questions: How do social scientists recognize what information is needed to solve a problem or model social reality? How can we improve the scientific quality of the information we use to understand society? How do we organize the information we collect so that hypotheses and theories can be developed, examined and tested?
You will learn several cognitive and technical skills central to sociological inquiry. Foremost among these and the most general are "critical thinking skills". These skills strengthen our ability to evaluate arguments in the literature and media as well as to construct more valid arguments on our own. "Scientific reasoning" skills help us apply the scientific paradigm to studying social processes and events that are always probabilistic. You will learn about three major research designs used in sociology to collect information: long interviewing, naturalistic observation, and focus groups.
The class has access to the Sociology Quantitative Research Laboratory (SOCQRL) in DU222 containing networked personal computers. The SOCQRL environment gives you access to several useful applications and you will learn how personal computers are used in all aspects of modern sociological research. MS WORD and ACCESS will be used as word processing and database applications. NETSCAPE will be used to locate sources of sociological information on the WWW. At the completion of this course, you should be able to:
[1] Critically evaluate substantive arguments and problems amenable to sociological inquiry, noting logical fallacies and other failures to apply critical thinking and scientifically valid approaches;
[2] Translate narrative text into Conceptual Path Models; distinguishing among descriptive, interpretative, and explanatory models of social reality;
[3] Specify the appropriate research design to answer a research question: particularly sampling issues, focus groups, ethnographic observation, and textual analysis;
[4] Master the technical skills needed at each stage of a sociological inquiry: literature review, collecting of qualitative date, organization and analysis of qualitative data (e.g. Event Structure Analysis);
[5] Conduct a preliminary analysis of textual, audio, or video information, using computer based applications, to generate an empirically informed Conceptual Path Model of the event, process, or material you analyzed.