Introduction to Sociology course

Chapter 2. Sociological theories

Why is something happening? How can we explain social phenomena? The answers to such theoretical questions are theories and this lecture is about what theories are, what makes a theory a useful one and what tools sociologists use to represent theories. The overarching aim is that you learn how you can translate the intuitions we all have about social phenomena into sociological theories. This means that we need to make our stories, which are often implicit and incoherent, both explicit and coherent, and analytically decompose its various elements. All this means that you start thinking like a sociologist about theories.

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Ch. 2
Ch. 2.2What is a Sociological Theory?
Ch. 2.3What are Useful Sociological Theories?
Ch. 2.7Conceptual Models

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