Social Action

Key words
1. Social actors
2. Social roles
3. Meaningful behaviour
Key sociologists
1. Max Weber
  1. All behaviour is linked to a role
  2. Social actors are conscious and have free will
  3. Society is the individual
  4. Individuals create society
  5. No such thing as social facts
2. Meid
  1. 'I, self, me'
  2. Generalised others
  3. Significant others
  4. Behaviour is about our interaction with others
Methods
1. Verstehen
2. Qualitative
  1. Interviews
  2. Participant Observation
3. Depth
4. Detail
5. unreliable
6. Meaning
7. Validity
8. Opinions
9. Thoughts
10. Feelings
What do they study?
1. individuals within society
2. Want to know why?
3. Individuals act in socially meaningful ways
Interpretivists
1. No such thing as a social act
2. Individuals cannot be measured scientifically
Criticisms
1. Subjective
  1. Takes opinions into account
Perspectives
1. Interactionism
  1. claims that individuals can exert control over forces in society
  2. individuals can determine their own identities
  3. study how people behave in small scale situations
  4. look at how people interact with eachother
  5. do not want to generalise their ideas to the whole of society
  6. Strengths
    1. There is empirical evidence to support the approach
    2. the approach has practical applications
  7. Weaknesses
    1. incomplete theory as it doesn't explain why some people are labelled as deviant and not others
    2. it ignores wider features of the social structure and their influence on behaviour
interpretivism
1. humanistic approach
2. social world differs from natural
3. verstehen
4. depth
5. understanding
6. validity
7. qualitative
8. subjective
9. variables can not be controlled
10. society and people are unpredictable
11. different people have different experiences of society
12. small scale

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	Created by courtneyfry about 9 years ago