Sociology 101: Satisfaction of Multiple Inquiries Requirement

 

What characterizes social science as an approach to inquiry and understanding is a commitment to developing theoretical accounts of human social behavior through systematic empirical research.  Sociology 101 introduces students to the sociological perspective, a particular variety of social scientific understanding. All syllabi for Sociology 101 include the understanding of the concepts, theories, and research methods of sociology among the explicit learning goals for students.

The shared learning objectives adopted by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology for this course very clearly state that students should develop an understanding of what it means to take a social scientific approach to understanding social phenomena.  Objective 3 states that, after taking the course, students should “know that sociology is a social science based in empirical research as well as theoretical interpretations.”  Many of the other learning objectives specify how students will know this (note especially objectives 4, 5, 6, 15, 16, and 17).

All sections of Sociology 101 also include written assignments in which students practice “doing” social science by somehow bringing empirical research and theory together to understand some social phenomenon.  In many sections, this takes the form of assignments in which students are asked, either as individuals or in groups, to carry out and write up the findings of some small piece of empirical research.  In other assignments, students are asked to use to use published research in sociology to answer their own research question or to review published monographs in sociology, explaining how these combine theory and empirical research.  In all cases, however, students emerge from the course with first-hand experience making the connections between theory and research that are characteristic of social science.