Anybody here have experience in graduate level sociology?

I'd argue that psychology applied to the crowd is social psychology, not sociology. Now don't get me wrong - social psychology is also full of bullshit and many of its studies are very low-quality, but at least they attempt to use the scientific method and hypothesis testing. Sociology seems to always use qualitative methods (e.g. interviews, ethnographic fieldwork) to make some biased interpretations about a few people and use it to make claims about society as a whole. The worst thing is the jargon though, I'll never forgive my professors for making me spend hours trying to decipher all the jargon in these papers which essentially made points which were either fairly basic or meaningless once you understood them.

>how should i go about composing a thesis?
Look for interesting connections or "tensions" in the work. Tensions being contradictions or just interesting moments in the text that beg for furtherror analysis. For example, I often look for ways in which the language of the text itself informs or complicates the "meaning" of the text itself. Like, as a very banal example, a text that expounds upon the virtue of reading dense boring books, and is itself written in a dense boring fashion.

>Compare it with venerable theories like Hylozoism and Animism
This user is on the right track...

Anthropologist here. I love Bourdieu, but how contemporary is he when he died 13 years ago?

Well, he still gets read. Starting with Latour as recommended is not something that's highly appreciated in sociology, at least in my experience. So what's left? Giddens? Sennett? Meh. Maybe Michael Burawoy, at least he's not all empty talk.

As a sociologist, I agree that >90 % of all theoretical works and a large part of the empirical stuff is bullshit or at least incomprehensible without 200 years of study. For several reasons I still dislike experimental psychology more. The only thing I can really appreciate about psychology is psychotherapy.

>I often look for ways in which the language of the text itself informs or complicates the "meaning" of the text itself

Why in the FUCK would you do that? Do you just need a hobby? You sound like the biggest loser on earth.

What do you dislike about experimental psychology? Yes there's a shitload of bad science out there, mainly because of academic culture imo, but the principles behind it are good.

I think that experimental psychology confuses experiments as means of inquiry with experiments as means of demonstration. Plus (at least from what I've seen at my friends' institute here), it's super boring, methodlogically obsessed for no reason, and usually lacking results that are not likely to be artifacts of the experimental setup. Maybe I just fail to see how pressing buttons in a sterile room with a one-way mirror tells us something fundamental about our psyche. But then again, that might only be me.

> sorry for this thread. is there a better place to ask a question like this?

Yeah, it's called office hours you little shit

Fuck if I know. I mostly read anthropologists. We only really read sociologists if they contributed a lot directly to theory or tend to blur the line between sociology and anth.

so you think psychology should turn to field reportage or what

Auguste Comte was the last great sociologist. Departments of sociology should just be closed. They are embarrassing circle jerks that have failed to advance human knowledge one iota.

>taking a graduate level class
>can't name a single major contemporary work in the field
THE. FUCK.

Are you taking the class outside your department? If so, just ask classmates. If not, holy shit.

more pages more stuffs

I didn't realize there were "levels" to what amounts to a meme course of study

not necessarily, I don't even think experiments have a place in psychology. But take, for example, that marshmallow experiment they did with kids where they get one each and can either eat it or get another one if they can wait for the experimenter to come back. It's a very simple experiment that's only able to ask one specific question ("How important is instant gratification to kids?") and will only accept one answer (either "highly" or "not so much"), with implications for their ability to deal with stress and frustration. Now what happens (it's in one of those YT vids) is that one girl eats only ~90 % of the marshmallow, hoping she'll still get another one because technically she didn't eat the whole thing. Desu senpai, that's at least a very clever attempt for a four year old that should tell you more about their cognitive abilities than the initial question. Not only is that kid greedy beyond hope, it can also easily switch from an urgent desire to devour that marshmallow to self-restraint when it reaches the last 10 %.

From what I've see in our local psychology departments (I've proofread two of my friends' final theses and sat through a couple of their classes with them), that's just not a valid result. Whereas Google would pay that kid 10,000 marshmallows for finding a flaw in their experimental setup, you'd have to reject her behavior if you share EP's understanding of a proper experiment.

Now what happens in the actual sciences (and I don't consider sociology one) is quite a different type of experiment. Most experiments there can hardly be considered controlled; most of the time people are just doing shit with their objects and are waiting for something unforeseen to happen.Only when trying to reproduce an unforeseen event in order to check for its objectivity, they will gradually resort to more and more standardized methods (which sometimes don't exist beforehand). I rarely ever see this type of experiment in EP papers, and it doesn't surprise me that the findings are usually of a kind that anyone could have deduced from common sense or at least the initial setup.

>I don't even think experiments have a place in psychology
*don't have a place