Knowledge and understanding
After successfully completing the course, students will be able to:
Define: basic sociological concepts as basic blocks of sociological theories and explanations of social phenomena. The students should be able to define basic sociological concepts such as socialization, deviance, class, nation, social stratification. They should recognize that these terms appear in everyday speech and should be able to conduct a simple analysis of social phenomena. They should in addition be able to identify the mythic structure of everyday thinking and reach out to its social basis.
Explain: how the individual and the society are connected and how the society changes, how the society influences individual behaviour and the relationship of free decision-making and social structures in which it takes place. For example, students will understand how legal norms are changing in parallel with certain social changes. Finally, they will be able to identify what the causes of social inequality are, or why the frequencies of certain occurrences like divorce or changes in the family structure change.
Explain: what is a scientific explanation of social phenomena and how it differs from common sense, value or one based on a tradition.
Application
Group and describe: group basic approaches to the analysis of social phenomena and to describe their differences on various examples.
Understand: the mechanisms that produce phenomena such as culture, deviance, social stratification, politics, economy, religion, family and kinship, race and ethnicity, nation and nationalism and social change.
Apply: the acquired knowledge to explain social phenomena that surround the student of the phenomenon of conflict, ideological interpretation of the world, issues of social relations of ownership, power and belief.
Sketch: the basic contours of explanatory models for explaining the explanation of social phenomena such as culture, deviance, social stratification, politics, economy, religion, family and kinship, race and ethnicity, nation and nationalism and social change.
Analysis
Demonstrate: students will be able to distinguish between the causes of phenomena such as culture, deviance, social stratification, politics, economy, religion, family and kinship, race and ethnicity, nation and nationalism and social change. In doing so, they will be able to demonstrate the social determination of these social phenomena.
Categorize: types of social phenomena that are important for further analysis of causal relationships such as mechanical and organic solidarity or dimensions of rationalization of law, or basic types of political systems.
Analyze: internal logic of creation and functioning of social institutions.
Compare: different theoretical approaches to social phenomena. Compare common sense and scientific explanation, knowledge and belief.
Synthesis
Construct elementary explanations of social phenomena using and comparing different theoretical approaches. Suggest the best ways to explore a phenomenon.
Evaluation
Reconsider: why it is possible to put in a sociological framework for explanation what is taking place in social life. In this way, the students will understand the social determination as a self-explanatory process.
Compare: applicability of methods (survey, experiment, observation, content analysis, etc.) to analyze different types of categories-social phenomena. Explain and compare the theoretical frameworks (structural functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism or evolutionism) in explaining certain social phenomena.
Evaluate: advantages and disadvantages of different methods to study certain social phenomena. In addition, they will be able to evaluate advantages and disadvantages of theoretical approaches in explaining various social phenomena.
Assess: the extent to which certain research methods can provide answers to the research questions and the extent to which a particular theoretical framework enables the elaboration of answers to the questions formulated, or, in other words, to assess the adequacy of the theoretical approaches and methodologies applied to specific phenomenon being examined.
Knowledge is assessed in seminars, mid-term exams, written and oral exams.
Mid-term exam and final exam are written forms of assessing knowledge in which the student must demonstrate that s/he is able to define sociological concepts, reproduce explanation of some basic social process, group phenomena, for example, to recognize the phenomena of social integration in a variety of contexts, to compare terms and their meanings and explanatory achievements to such alienation and anomie as the sketch to some problem could be investigated or explained by various theoretical frameworks.
Seminar paper is focused on public presentation of students' own texts in which they analyse some texts, demonstrate its understanding, categorise it, synthesize it and finally evaluate it. Apart from the prsentations, students have to write a seminar paper that contains all of the above elements.
Written exam consists of reproductions of some elementary explanations of the phenomenon, comparing some elementary concepts and explanations from different theoretical perspectives, concepts and application of theory to some simple explanation of the phenomenon.
Oral exam consists of the test of the understanding of some phenomena, comparison of theories and concepts, demonstration of the ability to apply them in the explanation of social phenomena and everyday occurences, evaluation of applicability of these concepts and theories in the sense of their explanatory power for individual phenomena.
