Sociology exam 1
Which of the following statements best illustrates the career advantage a person gains by studying sociology?
A police officer understands which categories of people are at high risk of becoming victims of crime.
Which of the following concepts refers to a social position that is received at birth or involuntarily assumed later in life?
Ascribed status
Identify the three sociologists who played a part in the development of sociology's structural-functional approach.
Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim
The term "sociology" was coined in 1838 by ________
Auguste Comte.
Which theory, developed by the psychologist John B. Watson, claims that human behavior is not instinctive but learned within a social environment?
Behaviorism
Which sociologist developed the approach called dramaturgical analysis?
Erving Goffman
T/F According to dramaturgical analysis, a role operates like a part in a play and a status serves as a script.
F
T/F According to sociologists, human behavior reflects our personal "free will."
F
T/F Cultural relativism means using your own cultural standards to evaluate another culture.
F
T/F Despite the fact that the world's people live in different cultures, humor "travels well" because it is a universal element of human culture.
F
T/F Durkheim documented that categories of people with weaker social ties have lower suicide rates.
F
T/F Erik H. Erikson emphasized that almost all important socialization takes place during childhood.
F
T/F In everyday conversation, men tend to maintain more eye contact than women.
F
T/F Sociological research may be interesting, but it is of little use in shaping public policy, including legislation.
F
T/F Subculture is more at odds with dominant culture than counterculture.
F
_______ are rules about everyday, casual living; ________ are rules with great moral significance. Group of answer choices
Folkways; mores
________ had an important influence on the development of the social-conflict approach.
Karl Marx
Compared to college students of the late 1960s, more of today's college students are concerned with ________
Making money
Cars, computers, and iPhones are all examples of which of the following?
Material culture
Which item in the following list is best thought of as an achieved status?
Occupation
________ is a way of understanding the world based on science.
Positivism
For Jean Piaget, at which stage of development do individuals first use language and other cultural symbols?
Preoperational stage
Which concept is involved when a surgeon chooses not to operate on her own son because the personal involvement of motherhood could impair her professional objectivity as a physician?
Role conflict
What is the term for the process by which people disengage from important social roles?
Role exit
Which of the following concepts defines a social position that a person holds?
Status
In Freud's model of personality, what represents the presence of culture within the individual?
Superego
T/F "Role conflict" refers to the conflict or incompatibility among the roles linked to two or more statuses.
T
T/F A cohort is a category of people who have something important in common, usually their age.
T
T/F A person's racial or ethnic identity is largely an ascribed status.
T
T/F Among all academic disciplines, sociology is one of the youngest.
T
T/F Auguste Comte was a positivist who believed that there were laws of society in the same way that there are laws of physics that describe the operation of the natural world.
T
T/F Culture refers to the values, beliefs, behavior, and material things that form a way of life.
T
T/F Emotions have both a biological and cultural foundation.
T
T/F Of all social institutions, the family has the greatest impact on socialization
T
T/F The Harlow studies found that six months of social isolation was sufficient to permanently damage infant rhesus monkeys.
T
T/F The emergence of computer-based instant messaging shows us that new symbols are being created all the time.
T
T/F The structural-functional, social-conflict, and symbolic-interaction approaches are three basic theoretical approaches in sociology.
T
T/F Through the use of symbols, people make sense of their surroundings.
T
T/F While many researchers have studied outward behavior, George Herbert Mead focused on symbolic meaning—specifically the meaning people attach to behavior.
T
Communities differ in terms of the racial composition of the population. In which of the following regions of the United States is there a relatively high number of people who claim to be multiracial?
The Southwest, including Arizona and southern California
Which theoretical approach states that the stability of U.S. society rests on core values shared by most people? Group of answer choices
The structural-functional approach
Based on what you have read in this chapter, how would sociologists explain the fact that many young people in the United States experience adolescence as a time of confusion?
There are cultural inconsistencies in the definition of this stage of life as partly childlike and partly adultlike.
Standards by which people who share culture define what is desirable, good, and beautiful are called ________
Values
When people model themselves after the members of peer groups they would like to join, they are engaging in a process that sociologists call ________
anticipatory socialization.
Looking at humor from a structural-functional viewpoint, jokes ________
are often used to relieve tension—"lightening" a situation.
Cultural universals are elements of culture that ________
are part of every known culture.
Learning more sociology can help you ________
assess the opportunities and constraints in our lives.
The social-conflict approach sometimes receives criticism for ________
being openly political.
From a social-conflict point of view, jokes ________
can be a way of making one category of people feel good at the expense of another.
Humor is created when people ________
create and contrast two different realities.
The concept of ________ refers to a shared way of life, and the term ________ refers to a political entity.
culture; nation
Following the thinking of C. Wright Mills, we would expect the sociological imagination to be more widespread in a population ________
during times of social crisis.
Low-income countries have cultures that value ________
economic survival.
Sociology differs from the older discipline of philosophy by focusing on ________
how society actually operates.
In the historical perspective, the importance of the mass media to the socialization process has ________
increased over time.
Assume you have a business that provides products to older people. Looking ahead, you have reason to expect ________
increasing sales, because your target population is increasing in size.
Ethnocentrism refers to ________
judging another culture using the standards of your own culture.
According to Emile Durkheim, categories of people with a higher suicide rate typically have ________
lower levels of social integration.
Julie is a police officer who finds that wherever she goes in her small town, people seem to think of her as a "cop." Julie is experiencing the effects of ________
master status.
The careful observer can notice clues indicating that someone is telling a lie. People give off these clues because ________
nonverbal communication is hard for most people to control.
Thinking about how patterns of child-rearing vary by class, lower-class parents generally stress ________, while well-to-do parents typically stress ________.
obedience; creativity
The Sapir-Whorf thesis states that ________
people see the world through the cultural lens of their language
When Cooley used the concept of the "looking-glass self," he claimed that ________
people see themselves as they think others see them.
Sociologists use the term "social marginality" to refer to ________
people who are defined by others as an "outsider."
When it comes to what triggers emotions in people and how those emotions are displayed, culture ________
plays an important role.
Cultural patterns that are widespread among a society's population are referred to as ________
popular culture.
The fact that some married men and married women are sexually unfaithful to their spouses is an example of ________ culture, while the fact that most adults say they support the idea of sexual fidelity is an example of ________ culture.
real; ideal
Among all forms of life, humans stand out as the only species that________
relies on culture to ensure survival.
The Thomas theorem states that ________
situations defined as real are real in their consequences.
The reality we construct through social interaction is likely influenced by our ________
social class background.
If you were to put together the lesson learned from the cases of Anna, Isabelle, and Genie, you would correctly conclude that ________
social experience plays a crucial part in forming human personality.
The theoretical approach that highlights the link between culture and social inequality is the ________
social-conflict approach
Based on what you have read in this chapter, you would correctly conclude that ________
society shapes how we think, feel, and act.
The theoretical approach in sociology that assumes society is a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability is the ________
structural-functional approach
According to Mead, social experience involves ________
the exchange of symbols.
Agrarian technology developed based on the use of ________
the plow, animal power, and the development of metals.
The basic idea of the symbolic-interaction approach is that society is ________
the product of people interacting in countless everyday situations.
A statement that explains how and why specific facts are related is called a(n) ________
theory
A setting where a staff tries to radically change someone's personality through carefully controlling the environment is called a(n) ________
total institution.
Based on the text's survey of the life course, you might conclude that ________
while we link life-course stages to biology, they are largely a social construction.
