ABSTRACT
Like most jobs, sociological analysis is easier if you have some tools to work with. Theories and concepts are intellectual tools. They help to organize data and make visible connections between things that might otherwise seem unrelated. Similarly, research methods are the tools used to collect and analyze data. This chapter will outline the theory of status relationships and define the concepts of social structure, social formation, ideal-type, and hierarchy-pluralism. These will be the tools we use to understand American teenagers. (Don’t worry if this string of notions sounds like impenetrable jargon; I will explain what these mean and why they are useful as we go along.) Finally the chapter will briefly describe the nature of the data and how it was collected.
