Sociology Chapters 1-2

According to marx inequality leads to

Class conflict

Sociology

Disciplines that examine the human or social world

If a researcher has obtained informed consent from all his participants, it means that:

they all understand the nature of the study and what will be asked of them and they have all explicitly agreed to participate in the research

What are the goals of ethnography?

to describe activities sociologists observe and to understand what those activities mean to the people involved.

Which of the following is a disadvantage of using ethnography as a method of social research

It is very difficult for another researcher to repeat or replicate any particular ethnography.

Ethnographic research projects can be designed so that there is a minimum of outside interference.

False

Conflict Theory

Sees conflict as the basis of society and social change

Many kitchen tools today are made with easy-to-grip silicone handles, a vast improvement over old wire tools, which were often painful to use. Although the advantages of silicone over wire might seem obvious, kitchenware makers were unaware of the problems with wire tools until they hired ethnographers to visit people at home, see how they worked in the kitchen, and determine what sorts of things could be sold to them. This ethnography was an example of:

A nonacademic use of research methods

What kind of question usually produces a wide variety of responses by allowing respondents to answer in whatever way seems appropriate to them?

An open-ended question

The social sciences are all those disciplines that study

the human, or social, world

Lili is conducting a sociological research study on the underground music scene. She has just finished collecting data for the study. What is the next step that Lili should take in the sociological research or approach or method?

Analyze data

Which method of social research might involve shifting between participating in a social situation and being an observer?

ethnography

In a random sample, everyone who happens to be available when a researcher is seeking participants could be included in a study.

False

What can an institutional review board do if it has reservations about the safety or ethics of a research project

It may stop the project from going forward, at least until changes have been made.

What do you call broad theoretical models of the social or natural world?

paradigms

What did Karl Marx believe?

Capitalism was creating social inequality between the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production and the proletariat were the workers

Jai is conducting a sociological research study on differences in interactions between similar and dissimilar co-workers. After reviewing the literature, he developed a hypothesis that interactions between co-workers who are more similar will be more positive and he has operationalized study variables. What is the next step that Jai should take in the sociological research or approach or method?

Choose a research design or method

Which of the following is an advantage of replicability in experiments?

Experiments can be performed again and again over time in order to measure change.

Which research method most closely resembles the scientific method?

Expertimental research

According to C. Wright Mills, most people think about their problems as issues of social structure, rather than as matters of character, psychology, or chance

False

According to conflict theory, most major social institutions are separate from the economy and therefore do not reinforce the class structure.

False

According to sociological research methods, what are the steps in research, and in what order should they be completed?

Form a hypothesis, define variables, collect data, analyze data, predict outcomes

culture shock

Happens when you experience a sense of disorientation upon entering a new environment

Sociologists who administer interviews can only gather data from a limited number of people because

Interviews are too time consuming

Which of the following best characterizes microsociology?

It is an approach that examines interactions between individuals and the ways those interactions reflect larger patterns within a society.

Although everyday cultural practices, such as greeting a friend, giving flowers, or using the thumbs-up sign, seem like natural ways of acting, why does an awareness of how they vary across cultures demonstrate a healthy sociological imagination?

It reminds us that everyday interactions are connected to larger social structures.

After researchers conduct a series of interviews, they usually transcribe the responses. The transcription process is fairly time consuming, but it is valuable in part because it allows researchers to:

Look for patterns in their data

Which of the following statements best describes the approach taken by macrosociologists?

Macrosociology directly examines large-scale social structures in order to see how they affect individual lives

Macrosociology and microsociology seem to make very different assumptions about how society works. How does sociology, as a discipline, deal with these two very different perspectives?

Most sociologists think of these two perspectives as being on a continuum with each other, adopting whatever perspective seems most useful for a particular problem

A paradigm shift is a major break in the assumptions that are used to understand the world. What causes a paradigm shift?

New data forces a new way of looking at the world

When conducting experiments, how is the experimental group different from the control group

The experimental group receives the independent variable, and the control group does not.

Macrosociology

The study of large-scale groups, organizations, or social systems to determine how they impact groups and individuals

Ethnographers sometimes write down key words or quotations while they're interacting with people. Given that they will write much more detailed fieldnotes later, what is the advantage of these brief, sketchy notes?

They are an aid to memory when writing more detailed fieldnotes.

What does mills say?

To understand social life we must understand the intersection between biography and history

As long as correct sampling techniques are used, researchers can make generalizations about a large population from a much smaller sample.

True

C. Wright Mills described a process by which biography (individual lives) and history (larger social forces) are related. He argued that this process works in two ways: individual lives influence society while society also influences individuals.

True

Emile Durkheims's pioneering work, Suicide, used data gleaned from government records to help look for correlations between demographic variables and suicide. This made his work compatible with Auguste Comte's ideas about how society should be studied.

True

Market research is probably the most common use of sociological methods for nonacademic purposes

True

Queer theory argues that no category of sexual identity is fundamentally deviant or normal

True

Taking the sociological perspective means thinking sociologically about a problem

True

We cannot necessarily see society as a whole; we have to look at its component parts

True

When the earliest social theorists established that society was an appropriate object of scientific scrutiny, it was thought of as revolutionary.

True

You're doing a research project on the effects of contemporary media. If your hypothesis is that "watching violence on television causes an increase in violent behavior," then what are your variables

Violent behavior and violence on television

Most of the time people use psychological rather than sociological arguments to explain why the world is the way it is and why things happen to us. Why?

We have insufficiently developed our sociological imagination.

sociological perspective

a way of taking a sociological approach or thinking sociologically about the world

Which of the following affect the methods used by sociological researchers?

a. what they want to accomplish b. the methods they are trained in and feel comfortable with c. the time available to complete their projects d. the resources and funds available e. all of the above

Sociology can be defined as the systematic and scientific study of human society and social behavior. Given this definition, what level of social structure might sociologists examine?

almost any level—from interactions between two people to large-scale institutions

If a researcher allows his own values and opinions to affect his analysis, he is guilty of:

bias

Sociologists observe society:

by studying the various parts of a society and the ways they interact and influence each other

Unlike sociologists, most people base their knowledge of the world on:

conventional wisdom, background knowledge, and personal experience.

Why would culture shock be a useful state of mind for a sociologist?

e. It makes us realize we lack an understanding of our surroundings, so we are able to truly perceive what is right in front of us.

Microsociology

examines small group interactions to see how they impact larger institutions in society

Regardless of which methodology they use, what are all sociologists trying to do?

illuminate the connection between the individual and society

Howard Becker said that sociology can be best understood as the study of people "doing things together." This definition reminds us that:

neither society nor the individual exists in isolation; each is dependent on the other

Which of the following research techniques focuses on gaining an insider's perspective of the everyday lives of subjects under investigation, often dispelling stereotypes about the group being investigated

participant observation

If the federal government conducts research on the value of checking batteries in home smoke detectors, what method will produce data that is most easy to transmit to many people?

quantitative

Before beginning a research project, what will a good researcher always do?

review the literature in order to become familiar with earlier research that relates to his topic

Emile Durkheim suggested that, in traditional societies, people were bound together through mechanical solidarity. What was the basis of these sorts of bonds?

shared traditions with similar experience

What is the sociological imagination?

the ability to understand the connections between biography and history, or the interplay of the self and the world

Ethnographers using participant observation must always be aware of reflexivity, which occurs because

the presence of ethnographers may alter the behavior of the people they are observing

If a piece of sociological research is representative, it means that:

the smaller group of people studied can tell us something about a larger group

What is reactivity?

the tendency of research subjects to change their behavior in response to being studied

Even though a small number of people have been academically trained as sociologists, we all can be described as "natural sociologists" because:

we are all members of society and so have a great deal of background knowledge about how society works.