BCS Written Sociology flashcards

38 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Sociological Imagination

C. Wright Mills' concept describing the ability to connect personal troubles to public issues and to see individual biography in relation to historical and structural forces.

Social Fact

Durkheim's term for external, constraining ways of acting, thinking and feeling that exist over and above individuals and can be explained only by other social facts.

Verstehen

Weber's interpretive method of understanding social action from the actor's own subjective point of view, grasping the meaning the actor attaches to conduct.

Positivism

The epistemological position that social science should imitate natural science, seeking observable, causal laws through empirical observation and measurement rather than introspection.

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

Tonnies' contrast between community based on close personal ties, shared tradition and kinship, and society based on impersonal, instrumental and contractual relationships.

Institution

An established and enduring pattern of normative rules and expected behaviour governing a major area of social life, such as family, education, religion or property.

Looking-Glass Self

Cooley's idea that the self arises from imagining how others see us, imagining their judgement, and experiencing a resulting feeling of pride or mortification.

Role Conflict

The tension experienced when the expectations attached to two or more different statuses held by the same person make incompatible demands on behaviour.

Ascribed Status

A social position assigned at birth or by circumstance rather than earned, such as sex, caste, kinship position or age, and typical of closed stratification systems.

Social Mobility

Movement of individuals or groups between social positions, classified as vertical or horizontal, intergenerational or intragenerational, and structural or exchange mobility.

Gini Coefficient

A summary measure of inequality ranging from zero for perfect equality to one for perfect inequality, often applied to income or consumption distribution.

Caste System

A closed, hereditary stratification order based on ritual purity and occupational restriction, historically associated with the Indian subcontinent and endogamous group boundaries.

Endogamy

A marriage rule requiring a person to marry within a specified group such as caste, clan, religious community or class, thereby maintaining group boundaries.

Kinship

A system of social relationships based on descent from common ancestors and on marriage, defining rights, obligations, inheritance and marriage eligibility.

Protestant Ethic Thesis

Weber's argument that ascetic Protestant values of discipline and worldly calling encouraged rational capitalist accumulation, helping explain the rise of modern capitalism.

Cultural Capital

Bourdieu's term for knowledge, credentials, tastes and dispositions that confer advantage in education and social life and are transmitted largely through family.

Cultural Lag

Ogburn's concept for the gap that arises when material and technological culture changes faster than non-material culture such as norms and institutions.

Modernization Theory

A perspective treating development as a unilinear transition from traditional to modern society, emphasizing industrialization, rational values and diffusion from developed countries.

Dependency Theory

The argument that peripheral economies remain underdeveloped because core capitalist economies extract surplus through trade, investment and political domination.

Human Development Index

A composite index created by Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen combining life expectancy, education and income to measure development beyond economic growth.

Strain Theory

Merton's explanation of deviance as arising when socially approved goals are unattainable through legitimate means, producing innovation, ritualism, retreatism or rebellion.

Labelling Theory

The view that deviance results from societal reaction: once labelled, individuals may internalize the label and adopt a deviant career through secondary deviation.

Differential Association

Sutherland's theory that criminal behaviour is learned through interaction with intimate groups, depending on the ratio of favourable to unfavourable definitions of law violation.

Social Bond

Hirschi's control theory construct comprising attachment, commitment, involvement and belief, whose strength restrains individuals from engaging in delinquent behaviour.

Anomie

Durkheim's condition of normlessness in which society fails to regulate desires and expectations, producing disorientation and higher rates of suicide and deviance.

Dramaturgical Analysis

Goffman's approach treating social life as theatre, analysing front-stage performance, back-stage preparation and impression management in everyday interaction.

Structuration

Giddens' theory that social structures are both the medium and the outcome of human action, resolving the opposition between structure and agency.

Habitus

Bourdieu's term for durable, embodied dispositions acquired through socialization that generate practices and perceptions appropriate to a person's social position.

Operationalization

The process of translating abstract concepts into specific, observable indicators or measures that can be collected and analysed in empirical research.

Triangulation

The use of multiple data sources, investigators, theories or methods in one study to cross-check findings and increase confidence in the conclusions.

Snowball Sampling

A non-probability technique in which existing respondents recruit further respondents from their networks, useful for hidden or hard-to-reach populations.

Ecological Fallacy

An error of inference in which conclusions about individuals are drawn from aggregate group-level data, ignoring variation within the group.

Bargadar

In rural Bangladesh, a sharecropper who cultivates another's land in return for a share of the produce, typically half, supplying labour and sometimes inputs.

Shalish

A traditional informal village arbitration process in Bangladesh in which local elites and elders adjudicate disputes, often concerning family, land or personal matters.

Push-Pull Migration

An explanatory framework in which negative conditions at origin push people away while attractive conditions at destination pull them toward a new location.

Remittance

Money transferred by migrants to relatives in their home country, a major source of household income and foreign exchange for Bangladesh.

Climate Vulnerability

The degree to which a system or population is exposed to climate hazards and lacks the capacity to adapt, high in low-lying deltaic Bangladesh.

Intersectionality

Crenshaw's concept that overlapping social identities such as gender, class and ethnicity produce distinct and compounded experiences of advantage and disadvantage.