TEACHSOC: Re: Time-tested sociological insights

[Del Thomas Ph D]

There are dramatic increases in the number of homicides in Phila. and Wilmington They are on   News at 11.....  the bureau stats are drowned out by these and the political campaigns re: crime.    Also,  crime like politics is local.   There is a data item in Barkan...... do you know some one  killed  /homicide victim You can break it down by race income....etc.  as we would expect....... the rates vary greatly...... as do the  rate found in the data from the Bureau....  when it is broken down by location. Del Sarah Murray wrote: If you research the Bureau of Justice Statistics, you'll find we're in a 32 year low for violent street crime -- yet if I ask my students here in metro NJ if they believe that we are living in a more dangerous culture then we did a generation ago, they invariably say "yes". I open each semester of Violence in the Community with this surprise, and that kind of contradiction is the basis of our exploration of violence for the rest of the semester. Sarah Murray William Paterson U of NJ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan Ryan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "'Teaching Sociology'" <teachsoc@googlegroups.com> Sent: Saturday, September 16, 2006 4:16 PM Subject: TEACHSOC: Re: Time-tested sociological insights Comrades, Maybe this ground has been trod already -- apologies if so. Seems key to me to pay attention to the structure of "insights" -- I'm influenced here by Murray S. Davis ("That's Interesting!") and Randall Collins (_Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Nonobvious Sociology_) -- so as to distinguish them from "facts I knew but you didn't." Interesting insights are the ones that counter conventional expectations of the audience. Davis tries to characterize what makes various theories interesting and suggests that the best ones have form of "everyone thinks (or it's obvious that) X is Y, but really it's Z", especially when Y and Z are, respectively, "personal/individual/psychological" and "social" (or vice versa). Thus: everyone knows suicide is personal, but really it's social (Durkheim); everyone knows war is social, but death instinct may be personal (Freud); work is tough on individuals -> work is tough on whole classes of individuals; religion/god is a superstitious atavism -> religion/god is fundamental part of all group life. A piece that I've used over the years is an extract that appeared in Coser's _Pleasures of Sociology_ by Paul Lazarsfeld, "What is obvious?" You can find the original in JSTOR -- Public Opinion Quarterly v 13 Fall 1949. He offers some "obvious" explanations for "findings" such as soldiers from the south fared much better in the heat of the south pacific during world war II because they were used to hot climates. After presenting these sound explanations he reveals that in fact research showed the opposite -- here, soldiers from the south fared less well. It's a great exercise because students don't just get clobbered with "here's how clever we are" or "let me show you how false your consciousness is!" but rather with constructing a plausible explanation and then discovering how easy it is to rationalize something that's in fact false and how a result can surprise us. Refs Collins, Randall. 1982. _Sociological Insight_. Oxford. Murray S. Davis, "That's Interesting: Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology", Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol.1, pp.309-344, 1971 http://www.mang.canterbury.ac.nz/writing_guide/marketing/index.shtml Lazarsfeld, P. F. (1949). The American soldier: An expository review. Public Opinion Quarterly, 13, 377-404. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0033-362X%28194923%2913%3A3%3C377%3ATASER%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z Coser, Lewis. The Pleasures of Sociology. New York: New American Library. For links to electronic versions of some sources for this book: http://djjr.net/dan/crss/soc055/resources/coser-pleasures-of-sociology.html --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Teaching Sociology" group. To post to this group, send email to teachsoc@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/teachsoc -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---