analyzed using sociological
Develop a 3-5 page outline of concepts you would like to apply to your own life and identify relevant scholarly sources that will help you with your application of concepts.
As you may have noticed as you have worked through earlier assessments, Sociology is applicable to our everyday lives. We can oftentimes take a sociological concept and use it to explain something that occurs in our own lives. For example, you have learned about norms and how we tend to follow the norms of a society. You can use that to explain how people behave when they are in an elevator. Most people face forward, look up at the numbers, and don’t talk.
Many of your experiences can be analyzed using sociological concepts. For your final assessment, Assessment 6, you will complete a Sociology of Me and apply many of the concepts you have learned about in this course to your own life. For Assessment 5, begin to think about which concepts you would like to apply to your own experience, develop an outline, and identify appropriate resources. In order to complete this assessment, you will need to show your understanding of some additional concepts related to social structure, education, and technology/media.
We have learned how a society’s culture can influence people. There are other elements in society, however, that also affect our decisions and behavior. Sociological research has found that in addition to culture, social structure and groups also significantly impact many of our individual choices. Our position in the social structure affects our behaviors, attitudes, and ideas. For example, an important element of social structure are groups. We belong to a variety of different groups. Decades of research have documented the impact of group conformity on the individual. Although people tend to often believe that they act as individuals and aren’t impacted by others, research has found this is usually not the case. The Milgram experiment in your Resources is a great example. Milgram (1963) examined conformity and obedience and found that people are highly influenced by authority and the demands of conformity, even to the point that we will inflict pain on another person to obey authority.
