Text: Principles of Sociological Inquiry September 2020 Chapter 1 1.1 Introduction -social scientific knowledge and research - understanding exactly how it is that we know what we know -Auguste Comte- coined term sociology -Research methods are a systematic process of inquiry applied to learn something about our social world -sociological research shows that children who grow up without siblings are no worse off than their counterparts with siblings when it comes to developing good social skills (Bobbitt-Zeher & Downey, 2010) - alternative ways of knowing before focusing on sociology's way of knowing: -know things simply because we've experienced them directly ... come to know what you believe to be true through informal observation (driving over limit=getting a speeding ticket) -problem with informal observation is that sometimes it is right, and sometimes it is wrong ... without any systematic process for observing or assessing the accuracy of our observations, we can never really be sure that our informal observations are accurate -e.g. Girl says "all men lie all the time" shortly after she'd learned that her boyfriend had told her a fib. The fact that one man happened to lie to her in one instance came to represent all experiences with all men. But do all men really lie all the time? Probably not ... ^ what social scientists refer to as selective observation by noticing only the pattern that she wanted to find at the time - IF experience with her boyfriend had been her only experience with any man, then she would have been committing what social scientists refer to as overgeneralization, assuming that broad patterns exist based on very limited observations -another way that people claim to know what they know is by looking to what they've always known to be true ... Without questioning what we think we know to be true, we may wind up believing things that are actually false
-this is most likely to occur when an authority tells us that something is so (Adler & Clark, 2011) (ppl we might rely on in this way are the government, our schools and teachers, and our churches and ministers, grandparents, parents, even friends, coworkers) -understandable that someone might believe something to be true because someone he or she looks up to or respects has said it is so, this way of knowing differs from the sociological way of knowing -As a science, sociology relies on a systematic process of inquiry for gaining knowledge: that process is called research methods -source of knowledge on which sociologists rely most heavily -there are many ways that people come to know what they know, which include: >Informal observation: Occurs when we make observations without any systematic process for observing or assessing accuracy of what we observed >Selective observation: Occurs when we see only those patterns that we want to see or when we assume that only the patterns we have experienced directly exist >Overgeneralization: Occurs when we assume that broad patterns exist even when out observations have been limited