Category: Basic Concepts
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What does it mean to have objectivity?
Objectivity is the state of mind in which the social scientist remains objective, just, unbiased and is not influenced by emotions, personal prejudices, or preferences. It restrains the social scientist from contaminating or manipulating the collection and analysis of data. This is important in order to generalize the findings. This is done by making it…
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What is Ethnomethodology? Write a Short notes
Ethnomethodology, literally meaning people’s methodology, is the method by which people study the social order in which they live. The term when broken down into three parts can be explained as ethno, which means a specific socio-cultural group, method, which refers to those methods, and techniques that this group uses to negotiate everyday life situations,…
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Micro sociology and Macro sociology – Explanation
Sociology can be understood as the study of the social structures, their functioning, and development in society. Micro sociology and macro sociology are its two levels of analysis in studying society. The branch of sociology which is concerned with the study of small scale processes going on in the society like social interaction between humans…
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Malthusian Theory of Population
The Malthusian theory of population growth was propounded by the English political economist Thomas Robert Malthus. It was a pessimistic theory where he argued that human population tends to grow at a faster rate than the rate at which the means of human subsistence, especially food, and agricultural products along with clothing, grow. The uncontrollable…
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Cooley’s “The looking glass self” Theory and Examples
Charles Horton Cooley, in his work, Human nature and the Order, introduced the concept of “the looking glass self” in 1902. It can be explained as the reflection of what we think we appear in front of others or how we are viewed and conceived by others. Cooley used the term to explain the process…
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Short Notes on Ethnocentrism and Examples
The term ethnocentrism was coined by William Graham Sumner in 1906 when he saw the tendency among people to differentiate between in-group and out-group. It can be understood as the view of perceiving one’s own culture as better than anyone else’s culture in terms of language, behaviors, religion, customs, etc. This is because each individual,…