The sociological imagination is widely considered essential to sociology and sociological scholarship-of-teaching-and-learning research. Still, sociologists have struggled to agree on precisely what it is and how to measure its development effectively. A content analysis of every article published in Teaching Sociology was conducted examining where the sociological imagination appeared in the journal, where authors claimed to develop students’ sociological imagination, and the methodological sophistication of the evidence they provided to substantiate those claims. Analysis confirms the importance of the sociological imagination, appearing in a fourth of all published articles and nearly half of the articles published between 2010 and 2020. Just over a fourth of claims-making authors provided no evidence to validate their claims, and the frequency of making unsubstantiated claims persists even as the methodological rigor of the journal overall increased. Among the studies that provided evidence, however, the methodological sophistication appears to be increasing.

中文翻译：

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社会学教学中的社会学想象：1973-2020

社会学的想象力被广泛认为是社会学和社会学教学研究的必要条件。尽管如此，社会学家一直在努力就它的确切含义以及如何有效地衡量其发展达成一致。对《教学社会学》上发表的每篇文章的内容分析进行了检查社会学想象力出现在期刊中的位置，作者声称开发学生的社会学想象力，以及他们提供的证据的方法复杂性来证实这些主张。分析证实了社会学想象力的重要性，出现在 2010 年至 2020 年间所有已发表文章的四分之一和近一半发表的文章中。略超过四分之一的主张作者没有提供证据来验证他们的主张，而且即使该期刊的方法学严谨性总体上提高了，提出未经证实的声明仍然存在。然而，在提供证据的研究中，方法的复杂性似乎正在增加。