SOC 2070 Final: SOC 2070 – Textbook notes Final

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 2070
• Professor: Patrick Parnaby

Document Summary

One way to determine this is by reading past textbooks and journals written on deviance. Second way is to simply ask people (polling) and tally up the responses you get. What others may see as deviant, you may not. So the idea of deviant is different for every individual. Deviance involves violating norms that have been accepted in the society and so doing this, makes a person abnormal. Deviance is studied by deviance specialists, who analyze criminal or noncriminal forms of deviance; those who focus exclusively on criminal forms of deviance are more specifically known as criminologists. Objective views of deviance claim that the presence of certain characteristics defines deviance; behaviours or people with those characteristics are deviant and those lacking such characteristics are normal. Subjective views of deviance claim that there is no shared, observable characteristic that can clearly tell us who or what is deviant and who or what is normal.