41 - 50 of 255 results for: SOC

Why social movements arise, who participates in them, the obstacles they face, the tactics they choose, and how to gauge movement success or failure. Theory and empirical research. Application of concepts and methods to social movements such as civil rights, environmental justice, antiglobalization, and anti-war.

Conducting good research requires careful design and analysis, but much of the research we consume from media and political outlets often presents spurious correlations as causal relationships. What do we need to do and why to rule out spuriousness? The focus will be on using our intuition about what information we would need to properly answer questions about social life. We will find that apparently complicated statistical tests are simply following the same logic necessary to reach conclusions about social science's most interesting questions.

The demographic, economic, political, and cultural roots of social change in the 60s; its legacy in the present U.S.

Why do some people have better ideas than others? Why are some more likely to be bullied in school, get a job, or catch a disease? Why do some innovations, apps, rumors, or revolutions spread like a wildfire, while others never get off the ground? Why are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Spotify so good at recommending people, news, pictures, or songs we might know or like? What do a power outage, the collapse of the Roman Empire, a human stroke, and the Financial Crisis of 2008 have in common? What explains the success of Silicon Valley? And why are there only six (or less) people between us and any other human on this planet? While these questions may seem totally unrelated to each other on first glance, they can all be explored with the help of a single, yet powerful framework: social network analysis. In this class, you will learn to see the world as a web of relations: not only are people, ideas/concepts and things all increasingly connected to each other; the pattern of these relations can tell us a great deal about many phenomena in our social world that defy traditional explanations. At the end of this class, you will not only see networks everywhere; you will have taken a big step toward connecting some of the dots in (y)our world: this is the power of thinking in relations.

(Graduate students register for 220.) Forming ties, developing norms, status, conformity, deviance, social exchange, power, and coalition formation; important traditions of research have developed from the basic theories of these processes. Emphasis is on understanding basic theories and drawing out their implications for change in a broad range of situations, families, work groups, and friendship groups.

Dynamics of the relationship between the individual and social structure, the relationship between the individual and immediate social context, and relationships between individuals. Focus is on the dominant theoretical perspectives in sociological social psychology: social structure and personality, structural social psychology, and symbolic interactionism.

Social influences on private intimate relations involving romantic love and sexuality. Topics include the sexual revolution, contraception, dating, hook-ups, cohabitation, sexual orientation, and changing cultural meanings of marriage, gender, and romantic love.

Understanding the intuition behind key statistics in social science research. The focus will be on reverse-engineering statistical tests by starting with asking what information we would need to answer questions about social life. From here, we will find that apparently complicated statistical tests are simply following the same logic necessary to reach conclusions about social life. Nearly all statistical tests start from the foundations of probability sampling, mean group differences, and variability. With these foundational concepts, students will understand the intuition behind (and similarity between) standard t-tests and the mechanics of multivariate regressions. By focusing on providing students with a firm grasp of the basic foundations of statistics, students will be better prepared to understand the purpose and logic of more complex statistical tests, which serve to answer social science¿s most interesting questions.

The social patterns of religious belief and practice, and the classical and contemporary theoretical approaches to understanding these patterns. Topics: churches, sects and cults, sources of religious pluralism, relationships between religion and aspects of social structures including the economy, class structure, ethnicity, social networks, and the state.