Introduction to Sociology using Computers
A93.0001.003
Professor Caroline Hodges Persell




Department of Sociology, New York University




    Fall 2005
 
 




 
 
 
 

Course Objectives

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The course has liberal education, substantive knowledge, and skill objectives.

Liberal Education Goals:

To sharpen your ability to think critically about problems and issues, e.g., to ask what evidence supports an argument, what else might explain a phenomenon, or what ideas or viewpoints are missing from a particular formulation of a problem.

To become aware of, and be able to apply, some of the major intellectual traditions and approaches within sociology, and the social sciences more generally.

Substantive Goals:  

To understand and be able to apply some basic sociological concepts such as social stratification, roles, norms, values, deviance, power, and social institutions, and processes such as socialization and stigmatization.

To develop a new, sociological, set of orientations toward the world, that is, to learn to think sociologically, including being aware of contexts and relationships.

To learn some basic social facts about the United States and other societies, including something about major social changes and their implications.

To increase your capacity to formulate questions about why things are the way they are in the social world and about the possible consequences of various social arrangements.

To acquaint you, at an elementary level, with some of the analytical tools sociologists use to address their questions and test their hypotheses, and enable you to apply those tools using a PC.

Skill Goals:

To acquaint you with some of the many electronic resources available for learning about society and social life.

To help you to approach the world wide web in a critical and questioning way, assess the quality of data and evidence you find, and see how you might use the web to continue learning for the rest of your life.

To learn something about how PCs can be used to analyze and display data, to communicate ideas, and to retrieve and organize information.

To understand and be able to apply some basic research concepts, e.g., variable, probability, study design, association, causality, models, sampling, measurement, measures of association, and statistical significance.

To begin to learn how to raise sociological questions, analyze data to address them, and draw inferences from data.