Review sheet - Assignment Example

The start of the discipline was influenced by the industrial revolution during the 19th century. Comte is regarded as the father of sociology starting in the year 1838, based on his belief that the society should be evaluated as it is and not the way it is expected to be. 3. The major historical reasons that contributed to the birth of sociology as a discipline include the rise of the industrial revolution, which triggered Comte’s belief that society should be studied and understood like it was, and not the way it was anticipated to be.

Its start could also be traced to Comte’s realization that understanding the world required a scientific approach to the different phenomena. Many of the phenomena that triggered the conception of sociology include deviance and crime, the rise of social inequality and the development of industry and work models. 4. Sociological imagination is the employment of imaginative to the process of questioning and developing answers to sociological problems and questions. For the person using sociological imagination, social problems are solved using thinking, which is distant from the familiar daily routines used in society. 5. In social research, a variable is an entity that can assume different values; they are the phenomena studied during social or other forms of research, where their variation in value or measure is taken into account as a predictor of the inferences of the study.

For example, age can be considered a variable, because it varies from one person to another, or in the same person from one time to another. 6. In social research, “secondary analysis is the utilization of available data – which had been collected during a prior study - during a research inquiry for a research theme which is different from the one of the initial study. 7. The main points of major sociological theories in sociology include the symbolic meanings that individuals develop and use during social interactions; the role of power and coercion in creating social order and how social order is realized/ how society maintains stability.

Other main points include position of men and women in society, critiquing and altering the society, the sources of criminality, the effects of socialization on the self, the effects of the gaps in society, the role of costs and benefits in influencing people and the role of human behavior in the society’s fabric. 8. Culture is the evolved human ability to categorize and symbolize different experiences using common symbols, and the ability to act creatively and imaginatively. Culture is divided into layers, including the cultural traditions that differentiate societies; the subculture, which are the aspects of original cultures that are maintained by members of new societies; and cultural universals, which are learnt behavioral patterns that are common among all human groups. 9. Cultural relativism is the outlook that all human ethics, customs and beliefs are relative to the person, who is a part and parcel of the social context.

The emphasis of cultural relativism is that the definition and the conception of right and wrong are culture-specific; what is moral in one society may not be regarded so in another. That implies that there are no universal standards of morality, therefore no one is allowed to judge the customs of other societies.