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Epistemology social sciences

Apr 04

2018

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in Epistemology social sciences, Sociology of gender, Sociology of knowledge

Tags Androcentric vision Male chauvinism Principles of vision and division Social perception Social structure Symbolic violence

Perception and symbolic violence

Traditionally, the study of the social perception of reality has been approached either from the standpoint of political demoscopy of how “public opinion” defines the most varied social problems, or from social psychology analyzing the mental processes which give rise to the perceived images of reality. But none of these perspectives takes into account how social relations of power affect social perception. The sociology of knowledge, with the centrality it gives to the relationship between social structure and points of view, can alleviate this explanatory inadequacy.

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Jun 10

2011

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in Epistemology social sciences, Social theory

Tags Immigration Material conditions Social class Social identity Social mobility Social structure Stigmatization Symbolic capital

Racism and crisis

There are two possible hypotheses explaining the mechanism of racism in situations of crisis. The first appears to be not specific to situations of crisis and suggests that when these contexts receive immigrants there are some changes in the social structure which would be analogous to upward mobility. According to the second hypothesis, the changes that are taking place in the social structure are totally opposed to what is pointed out in the previous hypothesis, involving a loss of symbolic capital of certain native classes.

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Aug 25

2010

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in Epistemology social sciences, Methodology

Tags Epistemological vigilance Sampling Stratified random sampling

Epistemological vigilance and sampling

Opting in a thoughtless way to attract participants for a study by the contacts we have in the social networks is a very bad sampling strategy that we can pay dearly. So dearly that it may invalidate the reliability and representativeness of the results. To opt for this strategy would be analogous to perform a snowball sampling when, on the contrary, the required strategy would be a random sampling.

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Aug 25

2010

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in Epistemology social sciences, Social theory

Tags Self-analysis Social structure Sociology

The sociologist and the social position

Not everyone can be a social scientist. As not everyone can be a soccer player. The only people being really able to do social science or sociology are the socially uprooted as many cases demonstrate all along the history of the social sciences; that is, those who are not well integrated in its membership groups, and which do not have reference groups: these are characterized by having a habitus which, by socialization (some would call it "by nature"), is cognitively heterodox; i.e., socially critical.

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