Social Action

Social Action

1. Key words

   • Social actors
   • Social roles
   • Meaningful behaviour

2. Key sociologists

   • Max Weber
     • All behaviour is linked to a role
     • Social actors are conscious and have free will
     • Society is the individual
     • Individuals create society
     • No such thing as social facts
   • Meid
     • 'I, self, me'
     • Generalised others
     • Significant others
     • Behaviour is about our interaction with others

3. Methods

   • Verstehen
   • Qualitative
     • Interviews
     • Participant Observation
   • Depth
   • Detail
   • unreliable
   • Meaning
   • Validity
   • Opinions
   • Thoughts
   • Feelings

4. What do they study?

   • individuals within society
   • Want to know why?
   • Individuals act in socially meaningful ways

5. Interpretivists

   • No such thing as a social act
   • Individuals cannot be measured scientifically

6. Criticisms

   • Subjective
     • Takes opinions into account

7. Perspectives

   • Interactionism
     • claims that individuals can exert control over forces in society
     • individuals can determine their own identities
     • study how people behave in small scale situations
     • look at how people interact with eachother
     • do not want to generalise their ideas to the whole of society
     • Strengths
       • There is empirical evidence to support the approach
       • the approach has practical applications
     • Weaknesses
       • incomplete theory as it doesn't explain why some people are labelled as deviant and not others
       • it ignores wider features of the social structure and their influence on behaviour

8. interpretivism

   • humanistic approach
   • social world differs from natural
   • verstehen
   • depth
   • understanding
   • validity
   • qualitative
   • subjective
   • variables can not be controlled
   • society and people are unpredictable
   • different people have different experiences of society
   • small scale