Florence's Social Sciences Glossary
Florence's Social Sciences Glossary
20 Sociology terms
Hi, my name is Florence Stevanovic and I have been studying Social Sciences for 2 years. This fall, I'm beginning my fifth session at Lionel-Groulx College. This glossary could help the students during their first session in Social Sciences. Some of these words are rarely used in our everyday life so this glossary can help beginners understand the theory and the sociological notions of the course. It can also help them understand society and their place within it. With this glossary, learning sociology would never be so easy.
- actor
- Person who takes an active part and who plays an important role in a society.
- alienation
- Situation of someone who is dispossessed of what constitutes his essential being, his reason for being and for living.
- comparison
- The act of comparing, bringing together people or things to examine their similarities or their differences.
- culturalism
- Anthropological doctrine which considers as primordial the influence of the cultural environment, of acquired forms of behavior on the formation of individuals and of society.
- culture
- Set of acquired forms of behavior in human societies.
- deviance
- Position of an individual or a group who challenges, transgresses and who sets themselves aside from the rules and norms in force in a given social system.
- elite
- The elite is the minority of individuals to whom the most prestige, and in practice, the most power, attaches in a society, by virtue of natural or acquired qualities.
- employment
- Sum of human labor actually employed and paid, in an economic system.
- environment
- Set of natural and cultural conditions that can affect living organisms and human activities.
- family
- Set of people living under the same roof.
- habitus
- Manner of being of an individual, linked to a social group and manifested in his physical appearance.
- identity
- What makes it possible to recognize a person among all the others.
- inequality
- Character, state of affairs or people unequal to each other.
- mediation
- Intervention intended to agree, to reconcile individuals, parties, States.
- process
- Ordered sequence of facts or phenomena, responding to a certain pattern and resulting in something.
- role
- Influence and function of someone in a society.
- socialization
- Process by which the child internalizes the various elements of the surrounding culture (values, standards, symbolic codes and rules of conduct) and integrates into social life.
- status
- Social position that an individual occupies in a given social organization.
- symbolical
- Set of symbols relating to a culture, an era and an area.
- value
- The term value can refer to attributes and perceptions that a person shares with members of their social or cultural group.