Theoretical Perspectives and Methods of Social Research
Chapter 2
Theoretical Perspectives and
Methods of Social Research
Transcript for Author-Created Video Introduction to Chapter 2:
Theoretical Perspectives and Methods of Social Research
Chapter 2 is the theory and methods chapter. It is probably the most challenging chapter in the textbook. It may also be the most important. It introduces you to the three major theoretical perspectives sociologists use to think about any issue or event. It also introduces you to research techniques sociologists use to observe the things going on around them and in the world.
You will notice that Chapter 2 focuses on Mexico—more specifically, on the border fences that were constructed by the United States and that are used to prevent undocumented immigrants from crossing into the United States from Mexico. Eighty miles of fence are already in place, and another 700 miles are planned. Look at the map. The blue lines show where the fences have already been built, and the red lines show the sites of proposed fences.
I chose the border fences because they are such an emotional issue for people on both sides of the border. The three major theoretical perspectives help us to keep emotions in check by offering key questions that guide our thinking—questions like . . .
· Who benefits from the construction of the fence along the U.S.-Mexican border, and at whose expense?
· What are some of the ways the fence has affected and shaped interactions between Mexicans and Americans?
In Chapter 2, we also look at the research methods sociologists use to help them answer these questions, such as
· riding with border patrol agents during ten-hour shifts under the scorching sun.
· reading letters undocumented workers send home to family members.
· walking the paths the undocumented take into the United States and observing the kinds of litter they leave behind.
· interviewing people in Mexican communities to learn the number of family members who have made successful trips into the United States as undocumented workers.
Chapter Outline
Theoretical Perspectives and Methods of Social Research: With Emphasis on Mexico
I. Why Focus on Mexico?
A. The United States and Mexico share a 2,000-mile border. Millions of people cross each week to work, shop, socialize, and vacation.
B. The border includes fences and other barriers to prevent illegal immigrants from crossing into the United States from Mexico.
1. The fences are known in Mexico as the “Walls of Shame.”
2. The fences are known in the United States by such names as “Operation Gatekeeper” in California (launched 1994), “Operation Hold-the-Line” in Texas (launched 1993), and “Operation Safeguard” in Arizona (launched 1994).
3. In 2006, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, authorizing the construction of at least 700 additional miles of strategically placed fences.
4. If the fencing project is completed, about 40 percent of this 2,000-mile border will be fortified.
5. In 2007, President George W. Bush claimed that 370 (rather than 700) miles of fencing would be sufficient because vehicle barriers, ground-based radar, and unmanned aircraft could be used instead.
II. Sociological Theories
A. Core Concept 1: Sociological theories offer a set of guiding questions and key concepts that address how societies operate and how people relate to one another.
B. The sociological approach to understanding important social issues and events involves two interdependent and essential parts:
1. Theory: a framework that can be used to think about what is going on around us.
2. Sociological theory: a set of core assumptions and core concepts that examine how societies operate and how people in them relate to one another and respond to their environment.
3. Three major theories that dominate the discipline of sociology: functionalist, conflict, and symbolic interaction
4. Each theory offers a central question to help guide thinking and offers a vocabulary or set of concepts for answering that question.
III. The Functionalist Theory
A. Core Concept 2: Functionalists focus on how the “parts” of society contribute in expected and unexpected ways to social order and stability and to social disorder and instability.
1. Functionalists are inspired by Émile Durkheim.
2. Functionalists focus on order and stability in society.
3. Functionalists define society as a system of interrelated, interdependent parts.
4. Functionalists use the human body as an analogy for society.
5. Each of society’s parts is interdependent and functions to maintain a larger system.
B. Functionalists argue that all parts of society—even those that do not seem to serve a constructive purpose, such as poverty, crime, illegal immigration, and drug addiction—contribute in some way to the larger system’s overall stability.
1. Functionalists maintain that a part would cease to exist if it did not serve some function. Functionalists strive to identify how parts—even seemingly problematic ones—contribute to the stability of the larger society.
2. Early functionalists were criticized for defending existing social arrangements.
C. Sociologist Robert K. Merton (1967) introduced other concepts to the functionalist perspective that help us think about a part’s overall effect on society, not just its contribution to order and stability.
1. Manifest functions: a part’s anticipated or intended effects on order and stability
2. Manifest dysfunctions: a part’s anticipated disruptions to order and stability
3. Latent functions: the unanticipated or unintended effects on order and stability
4. Latent dysfunctions: unanticipated or unintended disruptions to order and stability.
D. Functionalists maintain that a part would cease to exist if it did not serve some function. Functionalists strive to identify how parts—even seemingly problematic ones—contribute to the stability of the larger society.
IV. The Functionalist Perspective on United States-Mexico Border Fences
A. Functionalists ask: Why do fences exist on the U.S.-Mexico border? What are the anticipated and unintended consequences of the border fences for American and Mexican societies?
1. Functionalists use the concepts of manifest and latent functions and dysfunctions to answer these questions.
2. Manifest functions of U.S. border fences
a. Success in forcing illegal entries away from now-fenced urban areas to less populated areas, as well as to areas with rough terrain and climates (such as steep mountains, deep canyons, thick brush, the extreme cold of winter, and the searing heat of summer), thereby giving border patrol agents a strategic advantage
b. Along the border, an overall drop in the crime rate from 30 percent higher than the national average to 12 percent higher.
c. Decrease in the number of illegal immigrants apprehended for crossing the now-fenced area of the border from Mexico into heavily populated areas on the U.S. side
3. Latent Functions of U.S. border fences
a. Cooperation between Mexican and U.S. officials in launching the Border Safety Initiative Program to prevent injuries and fatalities of those crossing the desert and other rough terrain to enter the United States
b. The creation of the Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue team, which responds to all incidents involving people in distress, not just incidents involving illegal immigrants
c. A fence that doubles as a volleyball net, allowing U.S. and Mexican volleyball players to face off as part of goodwill festivals and other cross-border celebrations
d. The emergence of humanitarian groups that provide food, drinking water, and medical supplies to distressed illegal immigrants crossing difficult terrain
4. Manifest Dysfunctions of U.S. border fences
a. Increased apprehensions of illegal immigrants in border counties not protected by fences
b. A crime rate above the national average in thinly populated, unfenced counties
c. Fatalities along the border as illegal immigrants seek to enter the United States through the desert and other inhospitable terrain
d. Illegal immigrants paying organized smugglers, or “coyotes,” to guide them through areas where U.S. immigration policies are most strictly enforced
5. Latent Dysfunctions of U.S. border fences
a. The emergence of humanitarian groups that save the lives of many illegal immigrants but, in doing so, help people circumvent the law.
b. Dramatic disruptions in grazing, hunting, watering, and migration patterns of wildlife
c. Denial of access to the Rio Grande by ranchers, farmers, and sport fishers (The river, which runs for 1,254 miles and serves as a natural border between Texas and Mexico, is used for watering herds, crop irrigation, and fishing.)
d. Longer, and perhaps permanent, stays in the United States by migrant laborers who normally would work only seasonally or part of the year here but who do not return home for fear that they will be unable to get back into the United States
e. Redirected flows of illegal immigrants to areas unaccustomed to this movement, fueling the perception that illegal immigration to the United States is out of control
f. Disruptions in the efficient exchange of goods, services, and people between border communities that are now separated by a fence
V. The Conflict Theory
A. Core Concept 3: The conflict perspective focuses on conflict over scarce and valued resources and focuses on the strategies dominant groups use to create and protect social arrangements that give them an advantage over subordinate groups.
1. Conflict theorists focus on conflict as an inevitable fact of social life and as the most important agent for social change.
a. Conflict can take many forms, including physical confrontations, exploitation, disagreement, tension, hostility, and direct competition.
b. Dominant and subordinate groups compete for scarce and valued resources.
c. Those who gain control of these resources strive to protect their own interests against the competing interests of others.
2. Conflict theorists try to identify dominant and subordinate groups, as well as practices that the dominant groups have established, consciously or unconsciously, to promote and protect their interests.
3. Conflict theorists draw their inspiration from Karl Marx, who focused on the means of production.
a. Conflict exists between bourgeoisie and proletariat classes because the bourgeoisie exploit workers by paying the workers only a fraction of the profits made from the workers’ labor.
b. Exploitation is disguised by a facade of legitimacy—an explanation that members of dominant groups give to justify their actions.
B. The Conflict Perspective on United States-Mexico Border Fences
1. Conflict theorists would point out that the fences divide a high-wage economy from a low-wage one.
2. Conflict theorists point out that the legal and illegal migration of labor from Mexico to the United States has been going on steadily since at least 1880.
a. The social forces both pushing and pulling Mexican workers to the United States are deeply institutionalized and multigenerational.
b. In some Mexican communities, 22 to 75 percent of adult residents have worked or are working in the United States.
c. Many Mexican households have come to rely on remittance income.
3. Conflict theorists give special attention to the social forces pulling the Mexican worker into the United States.
a. U.S. employers and consumers depend on foreign labor, especially labor from Mexico and other Central American countries.
b. Employers depend on the increased profits they make from the labor of low-wage workers.
c. Consumers depend on low prices of goods and services. This dependence is fueled by a number of factors, including
1. the internationalization of the labor market, which has an overall depressing effect on wages as employers seek to keep labor-related production costs low.
2. a shortage of U.S.-born workers to fill low-skill, low-status, physically demanding, entry-level jobs.
3. a domestic labor supply that is insufficiently mobile or willing to respond to seasonal, cyclical, low-paying job opportunities that are hundreds or thousands of miles away.
4. The most common justification (facade of legitimacy) for the construction of fences is that such physical barriers prevent illegal workers from entering the country. However, this argument is flawed because most undocumented workers have entered legally but have overstayed their visas, have entered by using border cards that allow the holder to stay in the United States for 72 hours but never returned to the home country, or have used official ports of entry and have evaded border guards’ detection.
5. These facts suggest that the real purpose of the border fences is political: constructing the fences gives the appearance that government leaders are taking action to stop illegal immigration when, in reality, the unauthorized low-wage laborers continue to enter the country.
6. Conflict theorists ask, “Who benefits from the fences, and at whose expense?”
VI. The Symbolic Interactionist Theory
A. Core Concept 4: Symbolic interactionists focus on social interaction and related concepts of self-awareness, reflexive thinking, symbols, and negotiated order.
1. Symbolic interactionists draw much of their inspiration from three American sociologists: George Herbert Mead, Charles Horton Cooley, and Herbert Blumer.
2. Symbolic interactionists focus on social interaction, everyday events in which people communicate, interpret, and respond to each other’s words and actions
3. Symbolic interactionists study people in interaction while drawing upon the following concepts:
a. Self-awareness/reflexive thinking - the process of observing and evaluating the self from another’s viewpoint
b. Symbols - any kind of physical phenomenon to which people assign a name, meaning, or value
c. Negotiated order - the sum of existing and newly negotiated expectations, rules, policies, agreements, understandings, pacts, contracts, and other working arrangements
4. Symbolic interactionists maintain that people interpret others’ actions, words, and gestures first and then respond based on their interpretations.
B. The Symbolic Interactionist Perspective on United States-Mexico Fences
1. Symbolic interactionists immerse themselves in the border world by studying
a. interactions between border control agents and those crossing legally and illegally.
b. ways Border Patrol agents are recruited and trained.
c. interactions between illegal immigrants and contacts in the United States.
d. ways employers knowingly or unknowingly hire illegal immigrants.
e. the strategies illegal immigrants use to blend in upon entry into the United States.
f. strategies illegal immigrants use to escape detection when passing though official border crossings.