Overview of class

Q. What is the gist of the class?

A. The focus of the class is on your reports. Basically, in making these reports, you want to find something that interests you about the world, specifically you want to find a controversy that interests and is important to you. This will be the subject matter of your report. You also want to find ideas from your texts or alternative readings that will help you either make sense of this controversy or provide you with data (i.e., particular viewpoints) on this controversy. These ideas that you and other students get from the texts or alternative readings will be possible candidates for test items. Students should let me know when they have found useful ideas ASAP, so I can begin making the test as early as possible. I will try to populate the test with the ideas that most students are using in their reports. I may also bring in some other ideas to supplement the ideas that you and other students will have gotten from the texts or alternative readings.

Q. How will students be notified of which items are on the test?

A. Either through Moodle, the blog, or in class.

Q. Which ideas are you expected to pull from the books or alternative readings?

A. Those ideas 1) which are useful for describing your controversy of interest or 2) which can function as data to be analyzed in your controversy of interest.

Q. How can a sociological text count as data in a controversy analysis?

A. On the condition that the content of the text consists of a perspective that takes a side in a controversy—i.e., the writer, the person written about, or the theory written about is a controversial viewpoint with which others disagree.  Even if this text purports to report “facts”, it is still controversial as long as someone else disagrees. What science studies have taught us is that facts themselves are controversial and rarely the object of 100% unanimous agreement in the general scientific community. Even facts can have expiration dates.

Q. Which ideas can help you or be useful for describing your controversy of interest?

A. See "A brief typology of analytic ideas". If you are lucky, then you might find ideas in your texts that deal more or less directly with your topic or controversy of interest. For example, if you are studying the Trayvon Martin controversy, then the concepts of "stereotype", "discrimination", "racial structure", and "prejudice" might be good analytic ideas to use to help you understand the controversy. If you are ‘unlucky’, then you might have to resort to using more abstract concepts such as "values", "institution", "norms", "presentation of self", etc. Most of the analytic ideas in your book are useful for pointing out various aspects or components in your data. E.g., you might notice that the different sides of your controversy or debate tend to have differing "values" and "norms", or they might tend to employ different "prejudices" and "stereotypes", or they might see different “genders” as having higher or lower "status", or they might point out how the process of "labeling" people as schizophrenic and attaching a "stigma" to this label can push them further into psychosis as well as "secondary deviance", etc. In many ways, this particular type of analytic idea which designates particular aspects of social situations simply provides you with a specialized vocabulary with which you can describe what is going on in the data.

Q. How can you go about finding these ideas?

A. 1) By examining the various tables of contents and indexes, as well as summaries, of your texts, 2) by skimming through the texts, 3) by consulting me. Regardless of the approach that you take, it would behoove you to examine your data before engaging in any of the three approaches.
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Q. What do I want you to do in the class?

A. Use sociology to explore your interests.  I want you to use the tools, techniques, and ideas of sociology to learn about something that you want to learn about.

Q. How much data should you use?

A. (1) How much data can you sift through in the time afforded to you (e.g., three weeks)? (2) How much data do you need in order to know what's going on?  You need enough data to get a pretty good idea of what is happening, to spot patterns and particularities, oppositions and alliances, to make a disagreement tree, to answer the basic questions of controversy analysis, etc.

Q. Can you explain the meaning of "dataset"? Is it where I got my information from?

A. Yes.  Anything that you experience is data (or a dataset) (e.g., images, words or numbers on a screen, audio, etc.).