SOC 301 final exam study guide

Megan wants to study bullying in high school. She randomly selected 1,000 students at a high school, and 400 students completed the survey. What is the response rate?

40%

The most commonly used value for confidence levels by social science researchers is:

95%

Which accurately describes how sociologists view macro-level issues and micro-level issues?

A Macro-level issues and micro-level issues are linked because large-scale systems affect personal experiences.

Which of the guidelines below needs to be considered by the writer of this question: "should loving soon-to-be mothers take prenatal vitamins?"

Avoid leading questions

This figure depicts three different ways to draw a probability sample of 12 from six-person groups. Which type of sampling is illustrated from top to bottom of the figure?

Cluster sampling, stratified sampling, simple random sampling

In scientific research, an idea that can be clearly named, defined, and eventually measured is called a:

Concept

Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression is a statistical procedure that does what?

Estimates how well changes in the independent variables predict changes in the dependent variable

An author submits a journal article and receives an editorial decision of "revise and resubmit." The author is probably:

Happy, because this is the most common path toward publication, and she will be able to improve the article with the feedback of her peers

Dr. Lang plans a study of why some high schoolers join Honor societies. Which of the following is the unit of analysis?

High-School Students

Raj is interested in the impact of race and social class on interactions with the police. He has created a factorial design experiment. What is a characteristic of this experiment?

His study has two independent variables - race and social class

For which research question would mapping be an ideal research method?

How does social inequality influence access to grocery stores?

Compared to behavioral measures, what is a characteristic of an attitudinal measure?

Researchers prefer attitudinal measures when they are interested in understanding why an outcome occurs.

The split-half method is when

Researchers randomly split the set of items for a measure into two sets to create two separate measures instead of one

A researcher distributes a survey to college students. One question asks, "what is your GPA?" If the study has a cross-sectional design, which conclusion is possible?

Students who sleep more have higher GPAs

__________ is an example of an omnibus survey.

The General Social Survey (GSS)

Lisa is analyzing the results of her pretest. What would indicate to her that a question needs revision?

The cognitive interview showed that the question was confusing

Which of the following describes operationalization?

The process of linking conceptualized variables to a set of procedures for measuring them

In establishing causality, which if the following conditions, in practice, is the MOST challenging?

The relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable must not be caused by some other factor.

Which best explains why the Literary Digest poll failed to predict the winner of the 1936 presidential election?

The sample didn't represent the American population

If you were conducting a sociology study and had a particular concern about you, as the researcher, deceiving people by misrepresenting your identity, which study and subsequent scholarly dialogue would be MOST helpful to consult?

Laud Humphrey's Tearoom Trade

The NAS poverty line may offer a more accurate picture of poverty in he US than the FPL, but it:

May not be as reliable a measure over time

What did Nazi concentration camp experiments and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment have in common?

Researchers inflicted deliberate harm on research subjects.

Michelle collects five new reports and adds them to her data set. She finds that these new reports add nothing new; rather, they reinforce what she has already found. Michelle has reached the point of:

saturation

Concepts such as socialization, deviance, and self-control can be linked to explain crime. When concepts are systematically linked in such a way that they generate an explanatory chain of relations, they become a(n):

Theory

What is the ideal when asking an ego to generate a list of alters?

about 5 alters, so the research can yield good results and still be completed in a cost-effective manner.

Teodor designs a study in which he will use closeness centrality to analyze network actor characteristics in a large corporation. He considers how each actor in a corporation can:

access other networks in a smaller number of steps

A researcher wants to know whether stress influences time spent exercising. She wants to strengthen the validity of her measure, so she:

collects primary data, so she can control the accuracy of her measure.

The __________ refers to the probability that a confidence interval includes the population parameter.

confidence level

when participants' identifying information is only accessible to members of the research team, this is called:

confidentiality

Survey researchers must take care to protect respondents' __________. It is unrealistic and impractical for survey researchers to promise __________ to respondents.

confidentiality; anonymity

Twila designs a sociology research study about gender-based violence. After she proposes the study, she decided that she really wants it to be applied research. Accordingly, she refines the study to:

evaluate a local nonprofit organization devoted to reducing domestic violence.

The __________ condition is a condition in an experiment where the independent variable is manipulated

experimental

When a sociologist studies a network from the perspective of individual actors within the network, the sociologist has adopted a(n) __________ network approach.

egocentric

Increasingly, businesses and governments use big data derived from __________ to interpret people's lives and behaviors.

electronic traces, such as websites visited or cell phone usage.

In the course of his study on nursing homes, Inger inadvertently learned about specific instances of elder abuse. She had promised her subjects confidentiality but:

in some states, she is required to report abuse, even if she learned it in the course of research.

Dr. Han plans a large-scale panel study, with prospective design, and secures funding. There are many challenges to the project, and in an effort to minimize attrition, he:

incentivizes participants with moderate cash payments.

This figure describes the relations between variables in a causal hypothesis. 1 refers to __________ variable; 2 refers to __________ variable.

independent; dependent

Structural functionalism and conflict paradigms are more often criticized for neglecting __________; symbolic interaction is criticized for ignorning __________.

individuals; social structures

Thomas Kuhn's ideas about paradigms and paradigm shifts show that:

scientists are predisposed to prefer certain theories.

If a researcher wanted to see how spouses' marital quality changed over time if and when children were born, he or she would probably use a __________ design.

panel study

Observations about the noise level in the household, how well the respondent understood the questions, and whether another family member was present are examples of

paradata

Biological responses to stimuli are known as __________ measures.

physiological

Dr. Kline studies sexually transmitted diseases. He is generating a social network analysis of people who could possibly be infected by a particular disease. He wants to map non-directed network ties, so he asks people whether:

they have had sex with others in the network

David conducts a historical-comparative study of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. When he considers counterfactuals, he:

thinks about what would have happened in society if the terrorist attacks had not occurred.

When used as a concept in sociological research, a clique must include:

three people who are all directly connected to each other.

The use of different types of research methods to study the same general research question is known as:

triangulation

A sociologist takes a problem-based approach, identifying drug addiction as a social ill that should be addressed. An anthropologist's cultural relativistic approach would:

try to grasp the drug user's view (the insider view)

If you are interested in studying a city that has similar features to the average city in the US, what type of case should you select?

typical

Why is direct observation rarely used to collect social network data? Direct observation:

used to be preferred, as in ethnographies of small societies, but it is less feasible with large populations.

What is a strategy survey designers use for avoiding response set?

word some questions positively and others negatively

The most important reason why, when the choice is available, sociologists collect primary information over secondary information is because:

secondary information was collected by someone else, so the researcher cannot control its quality or content.

Dr. Nguyen is interested in better understanding which students at the University of Houston study abroad. Her target population is all:

students at the University of Houston

Which of the following is an example of a quantitative method?

surveys

These hypothetical networks show that people who maintain weak ties often have what advantage? They

tend to have access to more distant regions of a network

Emily is conducting a materials-based study of a social issue in Mexico. Which of the following would be classified by sociologists as a report?

the U.S. State Department's official document that synthesizes information about the human rights in Mexico.

When sociologists consider whether research is ethical, they are referring to if _____.

the actions are right or wrong, good or bad.

Which of the following is a variable?

the number of illegal activities in which a person has engaged over the last year

network size refers to:

the number of social actors in the network.

What was the ethical breach of the Milgram obedience experiment?

the people administering the shocks might have experienced psychological harm

Which of the following is a name generator?

the question, "does [NAME] live in your neighborhood?"

The test-retest method is an approach in which:

the same measure is administered to a sample and then re-administered to the same sample later

In her analysis of U.S. family history, Stephanie Coontz used materials such as census data to challenge which societal blind spot?

the tendency to romanticize the past as a golden time when families were stable and happy.

When researchers want to test robustness, or how well an operational protocol is working, they might use which of the following techniques?

the test-retest method

Amy applies status characteristics theory to student government at her university. This theory predicts that student government officials gain power and prestige when

their race, gender, and social class characteristics are highly valued in the broader society.

In a matrix, a tie is represented by which symbol?

1

A researcher is getting ready to gather data from a nationally representative sample of 5,000 Americans on their attitudes toward voting in local elections. In order to make sure our measures are reliable, we might gather a random sample of 100 Americans and test the study. What would we call this preliminary study?

A pilot study

Agata is planning two different studies. One will be a content analysis of how often romantic storylines occur among older adult movie characters. The second will be a study of whether those who see older adults in romantic film roles have different attitudes about older adults' sexuality than those who do not see older adults in romantic film roles. The form of measurement Agata will most likely use the first study is __________. Alternatively, she will probably use __________ as the fork of measurement for the second study.

Artifact counts; manipulation

In a study of family process, a sociologist finds that the relation between poverty and childhood problems is influenced by parental support. When the parents provide strong support, poor children's problems are less numerous and less severe. The three concepts are poverty, childhood problems, and parental support. Which category of relations within a theory best describes these findings?

Concept 1------------------> Concept 2 ^ Conditioning Concept

Suppose a researcher wants to measure difficulties for college students whose parents did not attend college. The researcher writes survey questions about grades, quality of support on campus, and financial resources, but does not ask about whether the student has family support or a good adviser. If the researcher has not tapped into all the dimensions of difficulties for first-generation college students, which of the following would be at risk?

Content validity

Sierra conducts a study of unemployment and reaches this conclusion: "In 2016, the unemployment rate in Dover County was 6%." Such a conclusion may be reached with which type of study design?

Cross-sectional

Which of the following questions is a common position generator?

Do you know someone who is a surgeon?

When social network analysts diagram networks, how do they represent nodes?

Each circle represents a node, which is a social actor.

There are approximately equal numbers of men and women in the United States population. If a researcher wants to study the impact of gender on whether teenagers decide to apply to college, but only includes women in the study, which if the following would be in jeopardy?

External validity

__________ refers to the extent to which the conclusions drawn from a study generalize to a larger population or to a different setting.

External validity

For which of the following would it make sense to measure using a composite variable?

Happiness

Social scientists prefer the active voice over the passive voice because the active voice

Indicates who took action in the sentence

The degree to which a study establishes a causal effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable is known as:

Internal validity

What is a characteristic of a natural experiment?

It is more observational than a true experiment

Qualitative research, often using an inductive approach, typically starts with data collection, which means that conceptualization and operationalization:

Often come later than they do in a quantitative study

Horace is studying how chronic pain affects people's work lives. He has collected a massive amount of scholarly literature related to his topic. He read some of it and plans to read more later. He used some of it in his study, while other parts will be useful in a future, related study. What belongs in the bibliography of his study about chronic pain and work lives?

Only the sources he cited in the research report

The key difference between an interval and a ratio variable is that only

Ratio variables have a true zero point

Anh plans to study the effect of age on standardized test performance and chooses to represent age with number of years of age and to represent standardized test performance with Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores which are very similar to Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) scores. In this study, age is a(n) __________ variable and GRE scores are a(n) __________ variable

Ratio; interval

Lucinda completes her study of people's attitudes toward affirmative action and finishes collecting her data, but while analyzing the data, she realizes she should have reworded certain questions in her questionnaire. What should Lucinda do with this insight?

Record responses into what she thinks participants would have said if the wording had been more clear

In a research study, which of the following steps typically occurs first?

Write literature review

Jenna is conducting a study on gender bias in hiring. She has recruited participants to evaluate job applications. What is an effective way to manipulate the independent variable?

She can randomly put common women's names and common men's names on similarly qualified applications.

Sociologists have studied social media use and loneliness for some time. What can most definitely be claimed, based on the research by Primack and colleagues?

Social media use and loneliness are correlated

How do ties relate to nodes?

Ties are links that connect the nodes in a social network.

Which of the following terms refers to whether results are true or accurate?

Validity

Which of the following is a research question for a descriptive study?

What is the rate of home ownership in the United States?

Jasmine is doing research . on poor single mothers. For which question is leaving the response open-ended most appropriate?

What kinds of assistance do you think the government can provide that does not currently exist?

George is researching the relationship between racial animosity and political preference. However, he tells his subjects that his study is about undergraduate political party preferences. Which is false. This false reason for participation in an experiment is known as:

a cover story

Micaela conducts a critical content analysis of beginner's piano lesson books. She deconstructs these artifacts to find:

a hidden theme of racial superiority embedded in the illustrations

Among professional social scientists, what is the MOST common form of research report?

a peer-reviewed article in a refereed journal

Sampling is necessary because:

a researcher cannot study every member of the population of interest.

Which is an example of micro data?

an individual's birth and death rates

A sociology study about employment seeking and criminal backgrounds collects data from publicly available databases, and then de-identifies the data. No one, not even the researcher, can trace a piece of data back to the person it describes. This researcher has achieved:

anonymity

What kind of institutions must have institutional review boards?

any institution that receives research money from the federal government.

A survey question asks respondents, "Do your friends secretly binge eat?" This is a problematic question because it is prone to projection bias. This means respondents:

assume their friends are more like they are, without certain knowledge of their friends' hidden behaviors

If a researcher is struggling with the data in a longitudinal study of job satisfaction because the composition of the sample has changed over time, he or she is most likely dealing with a problem of:

attrition

Mary is a researcher studying sexual harassment. What can she use to make the face-to-face interview setting more comfortable when discussing this topic?

audio computer-assisted self-interview (ACASI) technology

Junmey conducts a study on water quality in a village where people are suffering from poor water. Junmey does not use her findings to help the people even when she could, stating that the purpose of this study is for her to earn a dissertation. She says she will apply findings in her later work, but not this one. Junmey has violated which Belmont principle?

beneficence

Dr. Machi writes an abstract as part of his research report. The purpose of the abstract is to:

briefly summarize the research report

In the course of her study on drug use, Eileen finds many instances of criminal activity. She ensures her subjects confidentiality, because before the study began she received a(n)

certificate of confidentiality

Historical research methods consider __________; comparative research methods consider __________.

change over time ; variation across locations

Dr. Luther has accessed a list of all public elementary schools in the state of California. He randomly selects 20 schools from the list and then randomly selects 100 students at each school to survey. What type of sampling method has Dr. Luther used?

cluster

A document that lists all variables in a survey and provides information about each variable, including question and response categories, is called a(n):

codebook

When McCabe and his colleagues studied gender in children's literature, they developed a list of five possible categories for gender in book titles. This list is the:

coding scheme

A question that asks about two or more ideas or concepts in a single question is known as a(n) __________ question.

double-barreled

Julio needs to collect data for his senior honors thesis and has decided to administer surveys to 500 students who are currently enrolled in an Introductory Sociology course at his college. Julio's sample is a good example of a __________ sample.

convenience

Eli is a family life educator and wants to intervene at the micro level to influence the issue of domestic violence. What should Eli do?

counsel a family affected by domestic violence

Lincoln and Guba (1985) argue that instead of validity and reliability, qualitative research should instead be judged based on:

credibility and dependability

Herman is a U.S. Census statistician and notices that in one zip code there is only one Arab-American family in an otherwise white neighborhood. He chooses the statistical technique that will make the Arab-American family's presence in society noticeable, but not traceable to the actual zip code where they live. Herman chose:

data swapping

Johann took part in a study that he was told initially was about test-taking strategies. After the experiment was over, he was surprised to learn that the actual purpose of the experiment was to determine whether exposure to negative racial stereotypes causes changes in test performance. The interview after the study when Johann was informed of the actual purpose of the experiment is known as the:

debriefing

the central ethical principle at stake in Laud Humphreys' Tearoom Study was __________; in contrast, the central ethical principle at stake in the study of Harvard Facebook users was __________.

deception; privacy

Megan is collecting data for a research project. She has decided to increase her sample from 500 participants to 1,000 participants. As her sample size increases, her sampling error __________ and her margin of error __________.

decreases; decreases

The goal in research involving a hypothesis is to

disprove the null hypothesis

Emile plans a study about the health of deep sea divers. In determining whether to use a cross-sectional design or a longitudinal design, Emile should ask. "Do I want to know about

diver health in a single moment in time, or diver health over time?"

Xavier plans a materials-based study of Black Lives Matter protests over the last five years. Xavier uses news media to:

document where and when protests occurred.

The term materials-base methods is superior to unobtrusive methods because it:

does not carry the implication that gathering data from people is intrusive and unwelcome.

Professor Flaeger hypothesizes that when college students participate in local service activities, their views toward human rights are strengthened. In this hypothesis, what is the dependent variable?

human rights attitudes

If a researcher creates a measure of exercise frequency by averaging individual reports of exercise behavior across a neighborhood, this researcher is studying exercise at the __________ level.

group

Will wants to lose 75 pounds. Which of the following represents the constraining influence of social structure against his agency?

high-quality food and gym memberships are costly, and Will's income is low.

Lisa uses triangulation in her study, so she uses:

interviews, surveys, and observation

Why is validity a challenging ideal in a sociological study?

it is difficult to match a measure to the concept it is supposed to capture

Experiments might potentially be critiqued for problems with external validity, why?

it is hard to know if what happens in a lab setting will happen in the real world

It is desirable for a __________ to have a __________ impact factor.

journal; high

The __________ experiment is the most common type of experiment.

laboratory

The most important difference between macrosociology and microsociology is that macrosociology focuses on __________ and microsociology focuses on __________.

large-scale social systems; personal concerns and interpersonal interactions

Annette Lareau's inductive approach to studying social class and child-rearing meant that she

observed how parents interacted with their children, and then developed theories regarding child-rearing.

Sociologists model social life with three levels that move from specificity to abstraction. Which words represent these levels, in order from the widest point of the triangle to the narrowest?

macro; meso; micro

An experiment in which the independent variable is manipulated by "nature," not by the experimenter, is known as a __________ experiment.

natural

Dr. Muir asks Lin, a respondent, for a list of her closest friends. Lin offers 20 names, and Dr. Muir asks four follow-up questions about each one. Dr. Muir next asks Lin about her closest family members and notices the training effect influencing the way Lin answers the question. Lin:

offers only five names, because she realizes that each name triggers numerous follow-up questions.

Juan conducts a social network analysis of language students at his college. He finds that Spanish language students have strong friendships with Chinese language students, and Spanish language students have strong friendships with French language students, but Chinese language students and French language students are not very connected to each other. Juan concludes that this social network constitutes a(n):

open triad

Lisa wants to survey mothers and examine their kinds of attitude changes about mothering that occur as their children grow older. Which type of survey would be best suited for this research?

panel

Raul wants to conduct a study on interracial dating by asking participants to read a description of a scenario and then answer questions about how they would react to the given situation. He would like the study to have high external validity. Which type of experiment would he choose?

population-based survey

The word vulnerable has many meanings. In research, what is the MOST important quality that distinguishes a population as "vulnerable"?

potential inability to give informed consent.

An evaluation report is usually more __________, whereas a research report is usually more __________.

practical; theoretical

Critical race theory is part of the conflict paradigm because it:

questions why some races are advantaged over others

Mateo has designed a survey study in which he asks about respondents' marital quality. He administers the survey to several different samples over the course of two years and discovers that the respondents do not seem to be answering the marital quality questions in very consistent ways. This suggests that Mateo's measure of marital quality has a __________ problem.

reliability

If a researcher were interested in the general attitude trends of a society over time, he or she would probably use a __________ design.

repeated cross-sections

Before she conducted her research on Hurricane Katrina survivors, Mary Waters carefully considered whether the study would produce useful knowledge and whether her subjects would be traumatized by talking about the experience. Such an assessment of _________ and _________ is central to the IRB review process.

risks; benefits

The __________ inspired Stanley Milgram's experiment

role of ordinary people carrying out the Holocaust

Jamal wants to study racial representations on children's TV shows. He has made a list of every TV show that aired on Nick Jr. from 2000 to 2015. This list of TV shows is the __________ he will use to draw a probability sample.

sampling frame

What is this figure an example of?

skip pattern

Anneli designs a social network study that will measure how college students' employment networks change from the first year to the senior year. This study is designed to analyze:

social network dynamics

A survey in which a randomly selected subset of respondents, typically 50% of those persons selected to participate in the survey, receives one topical module while the other 50% receives a different topical ballot is called a(n) __________ design.

split-ballot

ABC Bowling celebrates friendship and reciprocity among its league bowlers, but the adult bowling leagues have very few social ties to the youth bowling league. There is a(n) __________ between these two groups within the same network.

structural hole