SOCIOL 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Social Forces, Social Statics, The Sociological Imagination
Document Summary
Constraining: pressure to obey; punishment ranging from prison to embarrassment. We internalize social facts, we internalize them, we make them our own---then no longer a social fact. Individuals exhibit a great deal of variation in how we follow social facts. Some people still violate social facts---but others pressure them to follow. Some social facts don"t have to have to be enforced, because it"s natural for us. We learn to be happy obeying social facts, to find meaning and purpose. We come under the illusion that obeying social facts is our own free will. Measuring social facts is difficult: incest; some are easy: income. Gather social facts through observation: detached observation (people don"t know we"re watching), participant observation (sociologist becomes part of the group---they don"t know we"re sociologists or data won"t be reliable) Interviews: sample smaller, not as representative of population, time consuming. More traffic accidents lately because of phone usage. People are constantly deconstructing and reconstructing social facts.
