SOCI 210: Sociological perspectives

Methods & modern society

  1. Administrative
  2. Methods of social inquiry
  3. Nation states and societies
  4. European colonialism, part 1

Answering sociological questions

How do public perceptions of essential workers, shaped by media coverage and societal norms, influence the bargaining power and outcomes of labor strikes in Canada?

There is no need to visit the discussion whiteboard, but it is available on Teams if you want to follow along there

Methods
of social inquiry

A photo of a small boy intently watching a plastic ant farm

Methods of inquiry

Most Sociological research incorporates at least one of:

Surveys

Experiments

Field research

Secondary analysis

Methods of Inquiry

Surveys

Screenshot of an online quiz called 'Which Crystal Gem Are You?'

Methods of Inquiry

Surveys

A survey is a list of questions

  • Targeted
    Specific population, usually with some form of sampling
  • Uniform
    Typically same survey is sent to every participant

Format

  • Various forms of dissemination
    Mail; telephone; in-person; online; …
  • Various forms of questions
    Yes/no; scale; multiple choice; free response; interview; …

Methods of Inquiry

Surveys

Advantages

  • Allows for large samples
  • Generalizable
  • Structured data for charts and statistical anlyses

Challenges

  • Often time consuming
  • Non-response can lead to bias
  • Format can yield unreliable artifacts
    (results that reflect the survey structure rather than respondents' beliefs)

Methods of Inquiry

Experiments

Screenshot from Steven Universe: Amathyst holds a vial full of red bubbling liquid and a cup full of fries

Methods of Inquiry

Experiments

Experiments for causal analysis

  • Isolate one potential factor that might be causing an outcome
  • As much as possible, let nothing else vary
  • Assume that the remaining factors vary unpredictably

Common laboratory setup

  • Treatment and control group
  • Double-blind
    Researchers do not know group assignment
  • Compare outcomes

Methods of Inquiry

Experiments

Non-laboratory experiments

  • Vary potential causal factor “in the wild”
    Intervention or “natural experiment”
  • Less reliable than controlled experiment
    Outside factors can confound results

Ethical concerns of experiments

  • Consequences of treatment
  • Consequences of withholding treatment

Methods of Inquiry

Experiments

Advantages

  • Causal inference
  • Clear analysis
  • Again:
    causal inference

Challenges

  • Narrow scope
  • Artifical context
  • Ethical concerns
  • “Hawthorn effect”

Methods of Inquiry

Field research

Animation from Steven Universe. Steven is reading a book called 'How to talk to people'. Pages say 'Step 1: think of what to say' and 'Step 2: say it'

Methods of Inquiry

Field research

Interact with research subjects directly

  • Unstructured or minimally structured
  • Observe behavior
  • Participate in activities

Aims

  • Gather in-depth information about community, institution, or place
  • Understand how the people that participate in the case make sense of their own experience
  • Employ flexible theories and hypotheses, subject to change as researchers learn more about the people involved

Methods of Inquiry

Field research

Ethnography

  • Systematic observation of an entire community
  • “Thick description” (Geertz)
  • Often extend over months, years, or even decades

Participant observation

  • Participate in the community under study
  • Take on roles and responsibilities, form relationships
  • Sometimes “under cover”

Case study

  • Single organization, event, or person
  • May use ethnography and secondary data

Methods of Inquiry

Field research

Advantages

  • Detailed, accurate, real-life information
  • Brings individual accounts to foreground
  • Prioritizes adaptive research frames

Challenges

  • Very time consuming
  • Harder to generalize
  • Especially sensitive to researchers' prior expectations
  • Messy data (?)

Methods of Inquiry

Secondary data analysis

Animation from Steven Universe. Peridot types on a computer with a confused look on her face

Methods of Inquiry

Secondary data analysis

Use data that already exists

  • “Found data”
  • Not designed to answer the researcher’s question

Characteristics

  • Often (but not always!) easy to obtain
  • Rarely well structured for the research question—often requires extensive coding/processing
  • Ubiquitous

Methods of Inquiry

Secondary data analysis

Repurposed research data

  • Re-use data from another research project to answer a new question
  • Meta-analysis of existing published research
  • General-purpose data (e.g. Statistics Canada)

Data “in the wild”

  • Anything recorded without scholarly intent
    • Literature
    • Meeting minutes
    • Recorded conversations / correspondence
    • Social media posts and interactions
  • Very unstructured—variety of methods used to transform into usable data (e.g. content analysis, coding)

Methods of Inquiry

Secondary data analysis

Advantages

  • Often inexpensive and fast to obtain
  • No threat of researcher bias in the data itself
  • Often the only option for historical cases

Challenges

  • Data not focussed on current research question
  • Must take into account the social processes that created the data
  • Context may be unavailable
  • Processing may introduce hidden biases

Methods of inquiry

Venn diagram of four overlapping circles laveled 'Field research', 'Experiments', 'Surveys', and 'Secondary analysis'

Research rarely falls cleanly into one methodological bin

Societal transfor­mation

Close-up of a monstrous creature from the Gremlins movies wearing a sport coat and wire-rimmed glasses. Caption says 'Oh, we may stumble along the way, but civilization, yes. The Geneva Convention, chamber music, Susan Sontag.'

Societal transformation

Seven 'types' of socities layed out in a grid: 'Hunter gatherer', 'horticultural/pastoral', 'agricultural',' feudal', 'industrial', 'post-industrial', 'post-natural'

Societal transformation

Seven 'types' of socities layed out in a grid: 'Hunter gatherer', 'horticultural/pastoral', 'agricultural',' feudal', 'industrial', 'post-industrial', 'post-natural'. The seven are connected with arrows in that order.

Societal transformation

Problems with “progress” view

  • Examles of societal transitions have gone counter to assumed order
    !Kung San in Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa, e.g.
  • Danger of “reading history sideways”
    Looking to current hunter-gatherers for insight into the lives of ancient hunter-gatherers
  • Eurocentric categories
  • Can ignore interconnectedness of states and nations

Usefulness of “progress” view

  • Synchronicity
    Human history is very long, but agrarianism and industrialization emerged across the globe at similar times
  • Asymmetric effects of societal transition
    It may be “easier” to industrialize than to de-industrialize, e.g.

Place & the nation-state

Aerial shot of tall stone wall in disrepair cutting through lush forest vegetation. (Mutianyu Great Wall, China)

Place & the nation-state

What is a society?

  • Tendency to use community or town as template
    Relate to a group of people through shared trait: place

Center versus border

  • Two related ways to define a group
  • Who am I like? What makes us similar?
    Idealized core of a group holding people together
  • Who am I not like? What makes them different?
    Boundary of a group keeping non-members out
  • Two sides of same concept, but emphasizing one or the other makes big difference
A collection of about 50 penguins standing in the middle of an ice floe

Place & the nation-state

A sign on a fence that says 'Canada Border services Agency -- border inspection' and 'Agence des services frontaliers du Canada - Contrôle frontalier'

The modern nation-state

  • Nation:
    group of people sharing a cultural identity
  • State:
    Territorial government
  • Became de-facto political unit over the last 200+ years
  • Currently seen as universal
    All land seen as territory

Center versus border of the nation-state

  • Sense of unified identity often invoked, and sought by governments
  • Geographic boundary usually prevails

Place and the nation-state

A superimposed Canadian and Quebec flag

Conflicting Schemas

  • Multiple identities at odds within single country
    Québécois nationalism and Canada
    Assamese (Axamiyā) and India
  • Claims of unified identity used to question sovereignty
    Russian invasion of Ukraine
    North and South Korean jurisdiction

Nationalism

  • National unity can become a tool for dominance and oppression
  • Internally
    Rwandan genocide
    North American Indigenous genocide
  • Externally
    American exceptionalism
    Nazi Germany
A canadian flag in black and white, with a blue line crossing horizontally across the flag behind the maple leaf

European colonialism

European colonialism

A (very) brief outline of European colonialism

  • 15th century: European empires take an interest in Americas
  • Spain, Portugal, France, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and others began sending ships across oceans
  • Plundered resources (material and labor) and claimed land in North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania
  • Exceptionally violent, resulting in death, injury, and illness of countless people
  • Throughout 19th and 20th centuries, formal rule over most colonies by European metropoles ended
  • Foundation of current global systems of commerce, governance, culture, etc.

European colonialism

Animation of a world map showing colonial influence of different empires in different colors from the 15th to the 20th century

European colonialism

Major types of colonialism

  • Exploitation colonialism

    • Colonized population monitored by minimal colonial settlement
    • Oversee extraction of resources for metropole

  • Settler colonialism

    • Metropole establishes cities and moves population to colonized areas
    • Terra nullius

  • Neo-colonialism

    • Economic and cultural exploitation

European colonialism

Terra Nullius

  • View of land without settlement or active cultivation as empty
  • Language of conquest becomes language of discovery
    New World; Age of Discovery; Explorer
Photograph. Frame is filled with lush tropical greenery, as in a jungle

Manifest destiny

  • Term specific to United States, but ideology widespread
  • Colonized land is “culturally” empty
  • Duty to “uncivilized” people to teach about true religion and proper society
  • Characterized by Europeans as a burden or responsibility
Painting of a light-skinned European missionary in a pith helmet attending to an apparently sick dark-skinned child. Jesus stands glowing as a ghost behind the missionary with his hand on the missionary's shoulder

European colonialism

19th century drawings of five ape skeletons (gibbon, orangutang, chimpanzee, gorilla, human).

Dehumanization

  • Conceptualization of non-European populations as less than human
  • Environmental determinism
  • Justifies both terra nullius and manifest destiny
19th century map of central Africa labeled 'a map of the route of the emin pasha relief expidition through Africa'. Prominent in the map is 'Congo Free State (independent)'

Geographical boundaries

  • Colonial powers viewed geographical delineation as primary
  • Not common in much of the world
  • Boundaries used to frame discourse both between colonial powers and between colonizer/colonized

Next class

Required readings

  • Denis (2015), Contact theory in a small-town settler-colonial context: The reproduction of laissez-faire racism in Indigenous-white Canadian relations
  • Conerly, Holmes, and Tamang (2021), sections 11.1–11.3

Content warning:
The slides in next class's lecture contain some disturbing images, including racial stereotypes and images of Nazi scientific instruments.

Image credit

A photo of a small boy intently watching a plastic ant farm

Photo from thetoystoreonline.com

Screenshot of an online quiz called 'Which Crystal Gem Are You?'

Screenshot from Cartoon Network ("Which Crystal Gem Are You?")

Screenshot from Steven Universe: Amathyst holds a vial full of red bubbling liquid and a cup full of fries

Still from Steven Universe (2013)

Animation from Steven Universe. Steven is reading a book called 'How to talk to people'. Pages say 'Step 1: think of what to say' and 'Step 2: say it'

Animation from Steven Universe (2013)

Animation from Steven Universe. Peridot types on a computer with a confused look on her face

Animation from Steven Universe (2013)

Close-up of a monstrous creature from the Gremlins movies wearing a sport coat and wire-rimmed glasses. Caption says 'Oh, we may stumble along the way, but civilization, yes. The Geneva Convention, chamber music, Susan Sontag.'

Still and caption from Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

A brown woven basket with a few harvested wild mushrooms and a simple folding knife. Top down photo.

Photo by gryffyn m on Unsplash

Photo of a joyous looking yak in a mountain meadow wearing a large bell around its neck

Photo by Paolo Feser on Unsplash

Aerial photo of a field of young rice plants planted at regular intervals in a grid.

Photo by Ryo Yoshitake on Unsplash

Screenshot for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, framing King Arthur talking two two mud farmers in an open field.

Still from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

Photo of a factory with three stacks releasing large plumes of white steam.

Photo by Andreas Felske on Unsplash

Still from Sorry to Bother You (2018) depicting a man looking resigned and aprehensive in large room filled with cubicles.

Still from Sorry to Bother You (2018)

Image credit

Photo of the head and shoulders human man with completely white skin covered in electronics, including an eyepiece over his right eye that glows red. (Captain picard from Star Trek as a member of the Borg)

Still from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)

Aerial shot of tall stone wall in disrepair cutting through lush forest vegetation. (Mutianyu Great Wall, China)

Photo of Mutianyu Great Wall by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

A collection of about 50 penguins standing in the middle of an ice floe

Photo by Danielle Barnes on Unsplash

A sign on a fence that says 'Canada Border services Agency -- border inspection' and 'Agence des services frontaliers du Canada - Contrôle frontalier'

Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

A superimposed Canadian and Quebec flag

Image from Reddit user u/ferdeederdeetrerre

A canadian flag in black and white, with a blue line crossing horizontally across the flag behind the maple leaf

Image via Wikimedia

Movie still. A man in conquistador armor holds a small monkey and looks out of frame with a pained and confused expression

Still from Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

Animation of a world map showing colonial influence of different empires in different colors from the 15th to the 20th century

Animation via Wikimedia

Photograph. Frame is filled with lush tropical greenery, as in a jungle

Photo by Chris Abney on Unsplash)

Painting of a light-skinned European missionary in a pith helmet attending to an apparently sick dark-skinned child. Jesus stands glowing as a ghost behind the missionary with his hand on the missionary's shoulder

Painting by Harold Copping (1916) via The Wellcome Collection

19th century drawings of five ape skeletons (gibbon, orangutang, chimpanzee, gorilla, human).

Image via Wikimedia

19th century map of central Africa labeled 'a map of the route of the emin pasha relief expidition through Africa'. Prominent in the map is 'Congo Free State (independent)'

Map by Henry M. Stanley (1890) via The Wellcome Collection

Lots of ways to describe methods * Quantitative or qualitative * Big data or small data * Shallow or deep

You got... ROSE QUARTZ! You are caring, loving and untraditional and the fact that you are so different is the most special thing about you.

artifacts eg:* men show more support for war and more homophobia after questions suggesting femininity * fatigue

Participant observation: Laud Humphreys Tearoom Trade (1970)

Gremlins 2: the new batch (1990) Joe Dante

Intertwining of economics, culture, ideology, religion, etc How do individuals relate to one another (major types of relations) How do individuals relate to community (individualism?)

Intertwining of economics, culture, ideology, religion, etc How do individuals relate to one another (major types of relations) How do individuals relate to community (individualism?)

Lots of reasons, but one may be interconnectivity as trade becomes more central to everyday life, interconnections with other parts of the world become more central not easy to extract oneself from

Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

The slides in this lecture contain some disturbing images, including racial stereotypes and images of Nazi scientific instruments. Images like these have been used to justify and propagate racist institutions and further prejudice, violence, and genocide. <span></span> I include these images to help understand the historical origins of contemporary racial categories. They serve as examples of the visual schemas and methods that were commonplace among Europeans during the Colonial and Enlightenment eras. I believe it is important to be able to examine such images in order to critique and dismantle racial and ethnic prejudices, cultures, and institutions today.