Give English and Russian definitions to the following sociological terms.

Social fact, macrosociology, social solidarity, sociology, scientific method, mechanical solidarity, microsociology.

Read the text again and answer the following questions.

1) What is sociology?

2) What is the connection between social facts and social causes?

3) What is the role of data and theory in the scientific method?

4) What is the difference between local theories, general and middle-range theories?

5) What holds society together according to the functional and the power perspectives?

6) How can individual choices be explained according to the structural and the action perspectives?

7) What changes contributed to the development of sociology as a discipline?

8) How did Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham contribute to the development of sociology?

9) How is the rational-choice theory influential in several areas of sociology?

10) How did the founding theories address the two basic sociological questions?

11) What do phenomenologists and interactionists focus on?

Decide which of the following statements are right and which are wrong. Give the correct variants.

1) The sociological perspective examines behaviours and attitudes as influenced by interaction with others and by the larger social settings.

2) Social facts are not properties of social life that cannot be explained by reference to the activities of characteristics of individual persons.

3) Ideal type is a sense of shared interests and problems among members of a social class.

4) Sociologists try to determine possible social forces as causes for the social facts they identify.

5) Wright Mill’s notion of the sociological imagination emphasized that sociologists identify as many social facts as possible.

6) Sociology emerged during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

7) Rational-choice theory holds that in making decisions, people weigh the possible gains to be made from a particular action against the possible costs.

8) Bentham believed that the public good could be achieved best by scientifically planned government action.

9) Durkheim was the sociologist who stressed the increasing rationalization of social action and social institutions.

10) The focus of the interactionist perspective is that people address and respond to others depending on how they inertpret the social situation. They also focus on the communication process and the use of symbols.

11) Sociological imagination is a way of looking at our personal experiences in the context of what is going on in the world around us.