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Week 1 · Lecture outline

Week 1 — Lecture Outline · The Sociological Imagination & Doing Sociology

Introduction to Sociology · SOC 1 Fall 2026 · Prof. Adeyemi Fictional sample

Course: Introduction to Sociology (SOC 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Adeyemi
Objectives covered: Objective 1 — Apply the sociological imagination and the three major theoretical perspectives to interpret social phenomena.
SLOs touched: A (apply theory to interpret social phenomena) · B (reason from evidence, not anecdote)
Meeting pattern: 2 sessions × 75 min = 150 min. Segment minutes below total ~150; scale to your own pattern.

Week at a Glance
The week's big question "What is the 'sociological imagination,' and how can three very different theories all be 'right' about the same slice of social life?"
By the end of the week, students can… (1) define sociology and distinguish it from psychology and "common sense"; (2) use the sociological imagination to connect personal troubles to public issues; (3) name and contrast the three major perspectives (structural-functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism) and label each macro/micro; (4) match the founders (Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Du Bois) to their core ideas and explain why sociology is a science.
Key vocabulary sociology, social structure, the sociological imagination, personal troubles, public issues, macro vs. micro, social fact, theory/paradigm, structural-functionalism, manifest & latent functions, dysfunction, conflict theory, bourgeoisie/proletariat, alienation, symbolic interactionism, the Thomas theorem, anomie, solidarity, rationalization, verstehen, double consciousness, the color line, empiricism, correlation vs. causation
Materials slides (Deck 1), the week's readings + video links, one approved chatbot (Gemini / Claude / ChatGPT) for the AI-critique moment and the tutorial
Timing note 8 segments, ~150 min total. Session 1 = Segments 1–4 (~75). Session 2 = Segments 5–8 (~75).

Segment 1 — Hook & the Promise (8 min) · Session 1 opens

Hook. Put one question on a slide and have the room vote by a show of hands: "True or false — in America, anyone who works hard enough can get ahead." Let the hands fall, then push: "Hold that thought. Some of you said true, some false. Here's the sociologist's move — instead of arguing from our own stories, we ask: what does the pattern look like across millions of people, and what in the structure of society produces it?"

Then the turn: "When one person can't find work, we call it bad luck or a bad résumé — a personal trouble. But when the unemployment rate hits 10%, no résumé tip explains it. That's a public issue, built into the structure of the economy. Telling those two apart is the skill this entire course is built on."

The promise (write it on the board): "By Friday you'll be able to connect your own private life to the larger society that shapes it, look at any social phenomenon through three different theoretical lenses, and place the discipline's founders with the ideas they're actually known for."

Why it matters line (memory hook): "Sociology is what happens when you stop explaining society one person at a time and start seeing the pattern."

Segment 2 — What Sociology Is (18 min)

Plain language first.
- Sociology is the systematic study of society and social behavior — of groups, institutions, and social structure, and how they shape (and are shaped by) the people inside them.
- The key word is social structure: the recurring, patterned arrangements — families, schools, the economy, class, race, gender — that exist before you arrive and outlast you, and that channel your choices.

Two contrasts students always need:
- Sociology ≠ psychology. Psychology asks what's happening inside the individual (the mind, emotions, the brain). Sociology asks about what's happening between and among people — the group, the institution, the society. "Psychology zooms in on the person; sociology zooms out to the pattern." (This is the level of analysis distinction — keep it sharp; it's a classic quiz trap.)
- Sociology ≠ common sense. Common sense is full of confident, contradictory sayings ("birds of a feather flock together" and "opposites attract"). Sociology tests claims against systematic evidence rather than trusting what "everybody knows."

The two signature habits (name them now; they're the two SLOs):
1. Apply theory — see the same situation through more than one lens (Segments 5–6).
2. Read the evidence — reason from data and patterns, not from one vivid anecdote (Segment 4, and every weekly Workshop).

Memory hook (put it on a slide):

"See the general in the particular — and the strange in the familiar." (The sociologist's double vision: your private life is a case of a larger pattern; the everyday things you take for granted are choices a society made.)

Segment 3 — The Sociological Imagination (22 min)

Plain language first. In 1959, C. Wright Mills named the discipline's core skill the sociological imagination: the capacity to see the connection between personal troubles (private, individual) and public issues (shared, structural). (Mills's phrase is used here factually — it's the standard frame the discipline teaches.)

The distinction, made concrete (do this out loud):

  • Personal trouble: one person loses their job. We look at that person — their skills, their choices, their luck.
  • Public issue: millions lose their jobs at once when a factory town's plant closes or a recession hits. No individual story explains a society-wide pattern; the cause is structural (the economy, automation, policy). Mills's own example was exactly this — unemployment.
  • More examples to run the same way: one couple divorcing (trouble) vs. a rising divorce rate across a society (issue); one student in debt (trouble) vs. trillions in national student debt (issue).

The payoff: the sociological imagination protects you from two opposite errors — blaming individuals for problems that are structural, and excusing structures by treating everything as a personal choice. "Your biography is lived inside history and social structure."

A founders' preview (named factually — full tour in Segment 7): the imagination has deep roots — Durkheim showed that even something as private as suicide has social causes (rates rise and fall with how integrated people are into society). That's the imagination in action: a seemingly individual act, explained by social structure.

Memory hook: "Troubles are personal; issues are structural. The imagination is the bridge between them."

Segment 4 — Sociology Is a Science: Reading Evidence (railing against anecdote) (15 min) · Session 1 closes (~75)

Plain language first. Sociology is an empirical social science: its claims rest on systematic evidence — surveys, field studies, and social data (rates, percentages, distributions) — not on intuition. (We go deep on methods next week; today, the attitude and one data-reading rep.)

A short read-the-data walkthrough (the move you'll do every Workshop):

Put a simple two-row table on a slide — say, a labor-force statistic described in words: "Group A's unemployment rate is 4%; Group B's is 8%." Walk the class through the four questions you ask of any social statistic:
1. What is measured? (A rate — percentage of the labor force actively seeking work who can't find it — not a head count.)
2. Over what population and period? (Who's counted, and when?)
3. What does it show — and what does it not? (Group B's rate is double — a real, documented gap. It does not tell us why.)
4. Correlation or causation? (The number is a correlation/description; jumping to "Group B must not try as hard" is both unsupported and a stereotype. The cause could be hiring discrimination, location, industry, schooling — all structural.)

Name the misconception + cure (the correlation-vs-causation beat):
- ❌ "Two things move together, so one causes the other."
✅ Cure: a correlation is just an association; causation is a much stronger claim. Ice-cream sales and drowning rise together — because both rise in summer (a third variable), not because ice cream causes drowning. "Correlation is a clue, not a verdict." (Mastering this is half of SLO B.)
- ❌ "I know someone who…, so that's how it is."
✅ Cure: one anecdote is not a pattern. Sociology asks for the rate and the evidence.

Segment 5 — The Three Major Perspectives (25 min) · Session 2 opens

Hook back in: "Last session we learned to connect biography to structure and to respect evidence. Today: the three theoretical lenses working sociologists use to explain what the evidence shows — and why they're partners, not enemies."

Plain language first — the three perspectives (one-line picture each):
- Structural-functionalism (macro) — society is a system of interconnected parts (family, school, economy, religion) that each do a job to keep the whole stable. Ask: "What function does this serve? What holds society together?" Roots in Durkheim; developed by Parsons and Merton (who added manifest vs. latent functions, and dysfunctions). ("Society as a body — every organ has a function.")
- Conflict theory (macro) — society is an arena of inequality and competition over scarce resources (money, power, status); social structures tend to benefit the powerful at the expense of others. Ask: "Who benefits? Who loses? Where's the power?" Roots in Marx (class conflict between the bourgeoisie who own and the proletariat who labor). ("Society as a struggle over the pie.")
- Symbolic interactionism (micro) — society is built from the ground up out of everyday interactions and the shared meanings we attach to symbols, words, and gestures. Ask: "What does this mean to the people involved, and how do they negotiate it?" Roots in Mead, Cooley, Blumer (who named it), and Goffman. ("Society as a conversation.")

Memory hook — three words:

Function (glue) · Conflict (power) · Interaction (meaning).
And the level: the first two are macro (big-picture structures), the third is micro (face-to-face).

Land the key idea: these are complementary lenses, not rival truths. A complete sociologist reaches for more than one. "'Which theory is correct?' is the wrong question — ask 'what does each one reveal?'"

Segment 6 — One Phenomenon, Three Lenses (the fully worked example) (18 min)

Set it up: "Watch me run one ordinary social phenomenon through all three perspectives — this is the move I want you doing by Friday."

One fully worked example (do every lens out loud) — take the phenomenon: higher education / going to college.

  • Structural-functionalist: schooling does functions for society — it transmits knowledge and shared values (a manifest function) and also sorts people into jobs and provides childcare and social networks (latent functions). It helps the social system run.
  • Conflict theorist: schooling also reproduces inequality — those with money get better-resourced schools and credentials, so the system tends to keep advantage in the same hands. Ask who benefits from the current arrangement.
  • Symbolic interactionist: zoom in to the classroom — the meanings and labels in daily interaction (a teacher's expectations, the label "gifted" or "remedial," how students see themselves) shape what actually happens to a student.

Land it: "No single lens is the whole truth. The functionalist sees the glue, the conflict theorist sees the power, the interactionist sees the meaning. Together they explain college far better than any one alone."

Misconception + cure:
- ❌ "One perspective is right and the others are wrong."
✅ Cure: they work at different levels and ask different questions. Saying college is "really just about sorting workers" is true at one level and blind at others. Use the lens that fits the question.

Segment 7 — The Founders, Named Factually (20 min)

Plain language first. Sociology is young — roughly 200 years old. A handful of thinkers built its foundations; you should be able to match each to their core idea (not memorize biographies). (All real figures, used factually; no invented quotes.)

The founders (one line each; put names + ideas on a slide):
- Auguste Comte (1798–1857) — coined the word "sociology" and pushed for a positive (scientific) study of society.
- Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) — an early sociologist and methodologist who translated and extended Comte and studied social life in Society in America; an early voice on women and slavery.
- Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) — the architect of functionalism: society is held together by solidarity; he coined anomie (normlessness), insisted on studying social facts (social forces external to the individual), and showed in his study Suicide that suicide rates are explained by social integration and regulation, not just individual psychology. (The imagination, proven with data.)
- Karl Marx (1818–1883) — the wellspring of conflict theory: history runs on class conflict between the bourgeoisie (who own the means of production) and the proletariat (who sell their labor); capitalism produces alienation. (Marx is a social theorist here, not a political endorsement — we use his analytic framework.)
- Max Weber (1864–1920) — emphasized rationalization (the spread of efficiency, calculation, and bureaucracy), argued culture and ideas matter (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), and championed verstehen — interpretive understanding of the meaning social action has for people. (Pronounced "VAY-ber.")
- W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) — the first Black American to earn a Harvard PhD; pioneered empirical urban sociology (The Philadelphia Negro, 1899) and gave the discipline "the color line" and "double consciousness" — the felt experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that devalues you. (His line "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line," from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, is quoted factually.)
- Jane Addams (1860–1935) — co-founded Hull House and modeled applied/public sociology; later a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Tie it back: Durkheim → functionalism; Marx → conflict; Mead/Cooley/Goffman → interactionism; Weber → bridges structure and meaning; Du Bois → inequality and race made empirical.

Memory hook: "Durkheim glues, Marx fights, Weber interprets, Du Bois sees the color line."

Segment 8 — Technology Workflow + AI-Critique, Callback & Hand-off (14 min) · Session 2 closes (~75)

Technology workflow — the three-lens habit, on demand:
1. Pick any headline (rising rent, a viral trend, remote work, a new law).
2. Write the three perspective names down the side of a page.
3. Force one sentence per lens — no skipping. (The discipline is in filling all three, even when one feels like a stretch.)
4. Notice which lens you default to. That's your bias; the habit corrects it.

AI-critique moment (students verify, not consume) — this previews the weekly Workshop:

Paste this to an approved chatbot: "Explain the three major sociological perspectives and who founded each, and give me one statistic about U.S. income inequality."
Then check its work against today's lecture and a real source:
- Did it misattribute a perspective (e.g., credit conflict theory to Durkheim instead of Marx, or call Weber a symbolic interactionist)?
- Did it invent a statistic or a "study"? Chatbots fabricate numbers and plausible-sounding citations constantly. Never repeat a figure you haven't seen at the source (Census, Pew, BLS, World Bank).
- Did it slide from correlation to causation in its explanation?
Your job all semester: the tool drafts, you judge. This is exactly how the weekly Sociology Workshop's AI-critique step works — you'll catch the model, not trust it.

Callback + tease:
- Callback: "Every claim about society this term rides on this week — sociology connects biography to structure, respects evidence over anecdote, and reads any phenomenon through more than one lens."
- Tease next week: "We said sociology runs on evidence. Next week: how do we get it? Surveys, experiments, field studies — and the single most expensive mistake in all of social science, mistaking a correlation for a cause."

Hand-off (the week's graded work):
- Lecture Tutorial 1 (AI tutor, share-link submission) — the imagination, the three perspectives, and the founders.
- Quiz 1 (end of week) and Discussion 1 ("Three Lenses on One Headline").
- Assignment 1 — classify perspectives, place the founders, and build a short evidence-based argument.
- Workshop 1 — "Your Biography Meets History": apply the sociological imagination to your own life, then catch an AI's reasoning slips.

Instructor FAQ — Common Stumbles

Student says / does Quick cure
"Isn't sociology just common sense?" Common sense is contradictory ("opposites attract" vs. "birds of a feather") and only feels right after the fact. Sociology tests claims with systematic evidence.
Confuses sociology and psychology. Different level of analysis: psychology = the individual mind; sociology = groups, institutions, social structure. "Zoom in vs. zoom out."
Treats the three perspectives as rivals where one "wins." They're complementary lenses at different levels — function (glue, macro), conflict (power, macro), interaction (meaning, micro). Use the one that fits the question.
Credits conflict theory to Durkheim (or mixes the founders). Durkheim → functionalism & social facts; Marx → conflict & class; Mead/Goffman → interactionism; Weber → rationalization & verstehen; Du Bois → the color line.
Hears "Marx" and thinks "the professor is endorsing communism." Marx is used as a social theorist — the conflict framework (who has power, who benefits). Analyzing inequality isn't advocating a politics; we present perspectives evenhandedly.
Says a social problem is "just people making bad choices." That's the error the sociological imagination corrects: a society-wide rate is a public issue, not millions of independent personal failings.
Slides from correlation to causation ("X and Y move together, so X causes Y"). A correlation is a clue, not a verdict — watch for a third variable (ice cream & drowning both rise in summer). We prove causation carefully (Week 2).
Confuses macro and micro. Macro = big structures and whole societies (functionalism, conflict); micro = face-to-face interaction and meaning (interactionism).

Scope flag

This outline stays within Objective 1 (what sociology is; the sociological imagination; the three perspectives; the founders). The machinery of research methods — surveys, experiments, operationalization, sampling, and a full treatment of correlation vs. causation — is Week 2 and is only previewed here. The figures named (Comte, Martineau, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Du Bois, Addams, Mead, Cooley, Goffman, Parsons, Merton) are referenced factually as part of the discipline's real history; the instructor and institution remain fictional.

~ Prof. Adeyemi's edition · Fall 2026 · built with thecoursemaker.com