Final answer:
Typically sociological criticism does not involve evaluating literary techniques, which is more characteristic of New Criticism. Instead, it focuses on social and cultural contexts, character motivations in those contexts, and power dynamics represented in the story.
Step-by-step explanation:
Evaluating the literary techniques used in the story would NOT be a typical way to use sociological criticism in analyzing a story. Sociological criticism primarily involves examining the social and cultural context of the story, analyzing the characters' motivations and actions in this context, and identifying the underlying power dynamics in the story, rather than focusing on the literary techniques themselves.
For sociological criticism, the story's content and context are inspected to understand how they reflect and interact with the real world. This includes exploring how characters represent social roles or class struggles, such as in Marxist criticism, or how the story reflects historical social conditions, as seen in New Historicism. This approach is concerned with how literature portrays and affects power relations and societal norms, not necessarily the formalist aspects like plot structure, point of view, or the use of symbolism and imagery. These latter aspects are more characteristic of New Criticism or Formalism, which focus on the text itself, divorced from its social context.