- Identify one specific folkway that could be broken on purpose.
- Find four videos where people have recorded themselves breaking this specific social norm in some way.
- Remember that the videos you find must show people reacting to the folkway breach in an observable way.
- You will be finding multiple videos of breaching this same, specific folkway.
- All four videos should be about breaching the same folkway so that you can collect sufficient observational data on people’s reactions and draw reasonable conclusions about how strongly your chosen folkway is held.
Write a minimum five (5) paragraph summary about your four breaching videos. Be sure to include ALL of the following five (5) sections in your paper:
Section 1 – Introductory Paragraph
Describe your research design. Summarize the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’, and ‘why’ of your decisions. Contextualize your chosen folkway and how it was broken in the four YouTube videos you chose. The summary you submitted for approval should provide a useful starting point for this. Give specifics!
Section 2 – What happened / How did people react / Debriefing Responses
Report your observations. Specifically, describe how people reacted to your chosen folkway breach in the videos you selected. What did they say? What did they do nonverbally? In other words, explain what you were able to observe in the videos. Include detail on the reactions of the people in the scene. Were there any consistencies in reactions? Did they differ by age or gender of the person? Also, if the videos showed a debriefing afterwards, where the subjects were made aware of the deliberate breach, what did the subjects say when they were debriefed?
Section 3 – Your feelings about the broken folkway
Describe your own response to the breached folkway. Exactly what did you learn from the assignment? Is it fine to give you honest view about the breaching exercise. Your grade will be based on the thoroughness of your response and not on whether your response fits into my social world.
Section 4 – Textbook Connections to Sociology
- Discuss or interpret the results of your observations using one sociological theory. – For example, by formulate and answer the questions in terms of Goffman’s dramaturgic theory, e.g. according to Goffman’s dramaturgic theory, why did people react as they did? According to Goffman’s dramaturgic theory, why did you feel as you did? You may use the above example or frame your explanation in a context of your own.
- Make an three (3) textbook connections. You must 1) identify three (3) specific theories, major concepts, and/or major ideas, 2) define each of them, and 3) explain each of these connections to your breaching experiment. Bold them in your text.
- Cite the page of the textbook where you found the definition and include quotations around the definition of you are directly quoting from the text. For each definition you should include a source in-text which says (Ferris & Stein, 2014, p.____).
Section 5 – Conclusion
In four (4) sentences or so, highlight the main points of your paper.