Studying Society

The Essentials

Karen Evans, Dave King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134255399
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This introductory text combines study skills and research methods to provide students with an invaluable guide to the techniques, practical skills and methods of study that will enable them to achieve success in their academic courses and become effective 'students of society'. It covers key topics such as:

• asking questions – how to formulate questions and think about essay and exam questions
• looking for answers – the strengths and limitations of different information sources
• collecting and organizing information – how to get the best from indexes, contents pages and electronic search engines
• evaluating the authority, currency and validity of the information collected
• communicating through essays, reports and oral presentations.

Throughout the book there is an emphasis on applying the problems and solutions presented, to 'real world' issues, including the use of examples and exercises immediately relevant to the undergraduate experience, everyday life and the contemporary concepts studied by the social scientist.

Coherent and up-to-date, this text will be an invaluable learning tool for students of any discipline involving the study of human beings and their societies.

Part I
Studying society

INTRODUCTION

To be successful in higher education depends on developing your capacity for independent, self-directed learning. Whether you have come to university straight from school or via some other route, you will probably have been learning in a more supported environment than the one you will find yourself in now. At university you will be expected to take responsibility for your own learning, to identify your learning needs, to organise your time and to find and use a variety of sources of help. Your lecturers won’t be organising and monitoring you in the same way that your teachers probably did and you will have a lot of freedom in terms of time and what to do with it. Don’t panic though: students today have access to more sources of help than ever before. The world abounds in books and websites designed to help with your studies. And now you have this book to help you too!

This book began its life in a course that we run for our first-year students in their very first semester. The basic aim of the course is to ensure that students are equipped with the various skills that they need in order to complete their other courses successfully. In planning that course we asked ourselves the question: ‘What are the essential skills that students in the social sciences need in order to succeed in their studies?’. In trying to answer that question we looked at our own practices and those of our colleagues and decided that what was needed was an integration of social theory, research methods and study skills so that from the very first first-year essay, students are beginning to practise the craft of the social scientist.

We realised that our students would be developing their skills over the whole of their degree programme and beyond and also that we couldn’t cover everything in detail. So we have concentrated on providing a starting point with lots of leads to follow up as and when required and in particular on developing an awareness that learning and studying are skills to be focused on and worked at.

• Do you know how to go about studying society?
• Do you know the kinds of questions that you might ask?
• Do you know what sources of knowledge might contain some answers?
• Do you know how to search those sources effectively?
• Do you know how to evaluate any information that you might find?
• Can you communicate clearly with others in writing and verbally?
• Do you know how to make good use of information technology in your studies?
• Do you know how students of society carry out research and discover new knowledge?
• Do you know how to use the work of others and refer to it correctly?
• Do you know how to integrate theory into your work?
• If you have answered ‘no’ to any of these questions, then this book should be able to help you.

This book is addressed primarily to first-year students on degree programmes in sociology, criminology, social policy, politics, geography, social work, communications/media studies, economics, history, or some combination of these; but many other degree programmes such as medicine, and the various professional courses allied to medicine, also require their students to acquire some understanding of the nature of human society.

Students in later years of their programmes and even, we are afraid to say, postgraduates, may find that this book can help to fill in some gaps in their skills base.

The book is designed to help you to develop effective study skills and to develop an understanding of the ways in which we can carry out research into aspects of human society and how we can use theories and concepts to make sense of what we find there.

As a student of society you will need first of all to be able to formulate questions to direct your study, something which is more difficult than it first appears. You then need to know how to go about looking for answers to your questions that might be available in books, journal articles or on the Internet. In order to assess the validity of any answers that are found, you will need to learn to be critical of their sources and to understand the methods by which those answers were arrived at. And, finally, you will need to be able to communicate the results of your work to others. To be a successful student of society, therefore, requires the development of certain study skills combined with an understanding of the principles of social research and how each of these links to sociological theories and ideas.

We shall have much more to say about society and sociology in due course. For now we want to explain that we are not using the word ‘sociology’ to refer to the specific discipline of that name but to refer to its basic meaning – the study of human society. So a ‘sociologist’ for our purposes here is not only someone who is studying for a degree in sociology but is anyone who is studying human society. A sociologist is simply someone who is interested in, and fascinated by, human beings. And, because human beings are inherently social animals, we can’t get very far in understanding them without studying the societies and social relationships within which their lives are embedded.

How to use this book

You don’t need to read through this book from cover to cover. In fact we hope that you will not do that. Compared to students in the natural sciences, students in the social sciences will have to consult a lot of books. But you will rarely need to read a book in its entirety. That is particularly true of this book, which is designed as a kind of handbook that you can dip into for help when you need it. We suggest that you read the next two chapters which are concerned with thinking about society and thinking about studying. Then you should skim over the remaining chapters of the book so you know what they deal with. You can then dip back into them when you need some help with a particular point.

Chapter 1
Thinking about society

Before we go any further we need to say something about our object of interest – human societies. Human societies are amazing and complex phenomena. It is easy to appreciate our own individuality and contemporary popular culture encourages us to focus on our own personalities and those of others. And yet left to our own devices there is little that we can accomplish. Since you were born you have been dependent on other people in one way or another. At first you had to be fed, clothed, washed and kept warm. Gradually you learnt to do these things and many others for yourself. Importantly you also learnt to speak a language. That is a crucial skill which has enabled you to communicate with others around you and to share in the society and culture that has helped to shape the kind of life that it is possible for you to live.

Before you read any further carry out Exercise 1.1.

EXERCISE 1.1

In order to appreciate how our lives are intertwined with those of others, make a list of all the things you have done today which have only been possible because of something that other people have done.

Can you think of anything you have done which hasn’t depended on other people?

Did you remember to include all the people who were involved in the long chain of activities that resulted in your having something to eat for breakfast? Did you remember those who built the building you are living in, the people who made your clothes, your furniture, the people who made this book possible, those involved in the fact that you were able to take a bus to get to your lectures this afternoon, including those who built the roads that the bus ran on. Did you remember to include the people who made the paper and the pen that enabled you to write your list in the first place? We could go on; but the point, we hope, is made – without the activities of millions of people around the globe (most of whom you will never meet and who do not know that you even exist) your day today would have been very different. And we haven’t even begun to think about all the people who are now dead but whose behaviour over the ages has had an influence on your life

.

Now try Exercise 1.2:

EXERCISE 1.2

Do the opposite of what you did in Exercise 1.1 and make a list of everything that you have done today which has affected someone else’s life.

In that exercise you probably remembered to include the things you have done that have had an immediate effect on those people you are in actual contact with – you perhaps bought a friend a cup of coffee or lent someone a book or a CD. But did you think about the things you did which on their own did not have a big effect on the lives of others but which have enormous consequences when added to the behaviour of many other people? So your university department won’t have lost too much sleep if you had decided to study somewhere else; but if many students had made that decision then your department might have had to close down.

Another example, and one of which we are becoming increasingly aware, is the way in which the cumulative actions of individuals can have massive consequences for our physical environment. Our individual decisions to fly away on holiday, to consume drinks in plastic bottles or cans, and many other decisions that we do not think about, will not by themselves have an effect but when added to the actions of millions of other people will shape the physical environment of people who will be around long after we are dead.

The ability to grasp this interrelationship between our individual lives and those of others at a particular period in history is a characteristic of what the American sociologist C. Wright Mills called the ‘Sociological Imagination’.

In the following passage Mills draws attention to two important points which are central to sociological thinking. One is that we all, simply by living our lives, have some impact, however small, on the nature of our society and on history. The second is that our lives are shaped by the nature of the society into which we are born. Take a break from reading now and try Exercise 1.3. This will take a bit longer than the earlier ones.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove.

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise.

(Wright Mills, 1959: 6)

EXERCISE 1.3

Find someone who is the same sex as you but who is 20 years or so older. Probably the people who you are most comfortable with at university are about the same age as yourself, so you can phone a parent, an aunt or an uncle or other relative if you wish for this exercise.

Ask them to tell you something about their lives when they were aged about 20.

Then write down five ways in which your life now is different from what it would have been like 20 years ago.

Now we want to look in more detail at the word ‘society’. In the box overleaf is an extract from a book by the American sociologist Peter Berger, in which he discusses some of the ways in which the term ‘society’ is used. You will probably find that you are not able to understand this passage entirely; don’t worry about that. Learning doesn’t take place instantaneously and if you are new to sociological ways of writing you will need some practice before you get up to speed. If you have ever learned to play a musical instrument think back to when you began; you certainly didn’t just pick it up and play, you spent long hours practising before you could make a decent sound.

Some of Berger’s words may be unfamiliar; do you know what he means by ‘collectivity’ or ‘autonomous entity’? Sometimes words can be defined but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee understanding, and if you are familiar with a foreign language you will know that sometimes something just cannot be translated adequately; it has to be understood within the language and culture to which it belongs.

SOCIETY

Like most terms used by sociologists, this one is derived from common usage, where its meaning is imprecise. Sometimes it means a particular band of people (as in ‘Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’), sometimes only those people endowed with great prestige or privilege (as i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Part I: Studying society
• Part II: Finding out about society
• Part III: Using our sources
• Part IV: Researching society
• Part V: Communicating your ideas
• Afterthoughts
• Bibliography