Sociology - Term Paper Example

Social events vary in a wide range, due to the variations in human tendency and behavior. Analyzing the reason behind social events requires a psychological study of human behavior, as that strongly holds the ethics of religious, cultural and community values as its background. Matthew Desmond in his book analyzed the subjective facts of individual psychology of temptation and risk bearing factors. Fighting against the forest fire is a life taking job but the country boys, in their every efforts, tries to prove their braveness by accomplishing the challenging job.

Every forest fires are followed by death, injuries and bone breaks; but they never give up fighting against it (Desmond). Hence, the factor behind the human guts must be very personal; the responsibility they feel about rescuing forest from fire, to maintain their identity as a firefighter and also the inability to do the same would be a question to their masculinity. All the mentioned factors seem to have their connection with the psychological prospects of an individual with his ethical values.

Psychological factors are equally responsible for the involvement of individual in any social events. On this contrary Randall Collins, emphasizing on micro-sociological theory, gives stress on social violence as a result of the big shape of emotions in an individual, connected to several past and present happening in his/her life. For example: poverty, race, and origins in divorce or single parent families etc. Human psychological condition of fear, insecurity and inferiority leads to the violence of different kinds.

For example: mass murder, serial killing, revenge taking, sexual abuse and suicide. He insists on the use of the modern technology to give authentication to the findings. As per Collins, police normally uses the available data to confine the cause of the happening. But such empirical data are not liable to give psychological justification to the case. The use of micro analysis theory becomes a necessity, in such cases, as that can draw out the emotional involvement of the individual in a particular social event (Collins).

As these two frameworks, seem to have the similarities with the Comte’s social theory of positivism and anti-positivism. Where, Collins views inclines more towards anti-positivists whereas Desmond towards positivists. Giving stress to positivism, Durkheim maintained that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisted that they should retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality. This approach eschews epistemological and metaphysical concerns such as the nature of social facts, in favor of methodological debates concerning clarity, reliability and validity (Wacquant ).

Supporting anti-positivism, sociologist Max Weber argued that sociology may be loosely described as a science as it is able to identify causal relationships of human "social action", especially among "ideal types", or hypothetical simplifications of complex social phenomena. Karl Marx's methodology is borrowed from Hegelian dialecticism but also a rejection of positivism in favor of critical analysis, seeking to supplement the empirical acquisition of "facts" with the elimination of illusions.

He maintained that appearances need to be critiqued rather than simply documented