Sociological Perspective Essay

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The Sociological Perspective, what is sociological perspective? The sociological perspective refers to the systematic study of the human social life and groups as well as societies. There are three major sociological perspectives and these are: symbolic interactionism, functionalism and conflict theory. In this research there will be a dicussion what sociological is, and discuss each of the three major sociological perspectives. Interactionists study how we use and interpret symbols not only to communicate with each other, but also to create and maintain impressions of ourselves, to create a sense of self, and to create and sustain what we experience as the reality of a particular social situation. In extreme cases, they would deny class as an issue, and would say that we cannot generalize that everyone from one social class thinks in one way. Interactionist reject statistical (quantitative) data, a method preferred by structuralists. Whilst the sociologist would be distant, it is argued that a hypothesis means the research is biased towards a pre-set conclusion Rosenhan experiment in 1973. This is again rejected by Interactionists, who claim it is artificial, and also raises ethical issues to experiment on people. Interactionists prefer several methods to contrast with Structuralist methods, namely; unstructured interviews, …show more content…

The researcher may then be inclined to observe certain events happening while ignoring the bigger picture. This perspective enables us to see how even the most undesirable aspects of social life, such as war, racism, sexism, etc., are bound up with otherwise normal functioning of societies and their institutions. Functionalists believe that society is held together by social consensus, in which members of the society agree upon, and work together to achieve, what is best for society as a

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