How To Be A Sociologist

Culture

  • Spirituality, Superstition, and Legends

    • The common utility of a pattern of thought

    • Related: The reproduction of such myths

    • Wow so interesting:

    • gotta be careful about going native into crazy thought processes! but this seems like a good direction

Self-other. Empathy

  • Knowing others, and what others know of you
    • How much do individuals really know the internal states of each others' minds?
    • How does this understanding develop (i.e. what modulates the extent of understanding?)

Motivation

I need to compile a list of interesting sociological phenomena.
Otherwise I won't have anything to explain.
I really want to be able to understand and explain the quite strange social world.
And the best part of a good sociological analysis is the examples.

I also want to understand what sociologists can explain, and what they're confused about.
This requires a deep understanding of the dominant and functioning sociological theories.
What do researchers mobilize to explain things? Maybe I could start a dictionary of these theories.

Are extremes interesting?
I think many sociologists would say the everyday interactions we engage in are interesting.
It's a typical rhetorical move at least.

What's the ideal format?
This question is really, "what am I interested in"?
I'm interested in the interactions of human beings, but why?
I think I have to first understand why I'm interested to understand which interactions I'm most interested in.

Methodology ideas

  • Watch documentaries about people.
    • A choice problem. Which documentaries to watch?
  • Read ethnographies
    • Understand what is already known within academia about people.
  • Brainstorm first, to identify which social situations should be interesting
    • Inherent bias
    • Others may not have thought of these, though
  • Take a random sample!
    • Geographically
      • generate a random lat/lon and learn as much as you can about the individuals close
      • weighted random sample by population
    • Hierarchically by population
      • weighted random sample, by group size
  • Explore different contexts
    • Small group
    • Crowd dynamics
    • Chat rooms / online
    • Historical accounts / retrospectives
    • Autobiographies
    • Personal life, the real world
  • Find another individual who has compiled such stories
  • Topical
    • Start with a sociological topic of interest