Sociology Midterm
What did W.E.B. Du Bois have in common with Harriet Martinau?
Both were intrigued by America's democratic promise, but disappointed in its hypocritical injustices.
Which of the following describes how deviance can be explained from the functionalist perspective?
Deviance clarifies moral boundaries and affirm norms.
Which of the following is an advantage of using ethnography to study social life?
Ethnography allows the researcher to gather abundant data on a small population.
Why is playing organized games an important part of an older child's development of the self according to the symbolic interactionist George Herbert Mead?
Game playing involves learning to anticipate and coordinate with other players' actions.
What is the danger of too much group cohesion?
It can lead to groupthink, which dissenting opinions are strongly discouraged.
Which of the following is one of the functions of symbolic culture?
It enables people to communicate.
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.
The Amish have neither the resources nor the desire to use prison as a sanction against members of their community who violate the rules. What sanction do they use instead?
Meidung or shunning is used, which is a process whereby community members will not associate with a rule breaker for a set period of time.
What is the term used to describe sociological research that is intended to solve social problems, such as the research done by Jane Addams?
NOT practical sociology TRY applied sociology
What do sociologists call informal rules and guidelines for behavior that are considered acceptable within a group?
NOT taboos TRY all of the above (laws, folkways, mores, taboos) TRY mores
How is the study of culture different for sociologists than anthropologists?
Sociologists usually study a society to which they belong.
Why do high schools often use surveys rather than a more direct form of communication like interviews when they ask students about sensitive subjects like drug use or sexual health?
Surveys allow students to answer the questions in private and assure the confidentiality of their responses.
According to symbolic interactionism, what is the relationship between the self and society?
The self is shaped by society, but society is also shaped by the self.
Which of the following statements helps describe how Jack Katz's book Seductions of Crime explained deviance in a new way?
The social science literature contains only scattered evidence of what it means, feels, sounds, tastes, or looks like to commit a particular crime.
When studying deviance, sociologists often focus on the most obvious and extreme forms of deviant behavior. What are the consequences of this approach?
The values and norms of the powerful are left unexamined while the deviance of the poor is scrutinized.
Why are adults unable to be completely socialized?
There will always be new situations and roles to learn.
Which of the following is true of expressions given off as defined by Erving Goffman?
They are typically nonverbal, but they are observable in various ways.
Why are respondents often more comfortable addressing sensitive subjects on surveys than in other research contexts?
They can answer in private and are usually assured of anonymity.
Charles Darwin suggested that, rather than being superior to the rest of the animal kingdom, human beings are simply one part of a larger system governed by natural laws. This radically changed how people thought about almost everything. What would we call this?
a paradigm shift
What is the Uniform Crime Report (UCR)?
an official measure of crime in the Unites States
Research has been conducted regarding why teens engage in smoking and other deviant behaviors. The most important factor in statistically predicting whether a teen will take up a particular deviant behavior is the presence or absence of peers who also engage in that behavior. This is probably because the other teens are acting
as agents of socialization
A sociologist wants to study popular attitudes and perceptions about astrology among college students in California. She believes that people who have astrological signs associated with fire will have a greater knowledge of astrology because fire signs tend to have more interesting and attractive symbolism. What are the variables in this study?
astrological signs and knowledge of astrology
Max Weber believed that modern industrialized societies were characterized by which of the following institutions?
bureaucracies
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 and has operationalized the variables he will study. What is the next step Jai should take in the scientific method?
choose a research design or method
You want to conduct some sociological research on whether people on social networking sites are less likely to meet in person as a result of their online community participation. What is the next step in the scientific method?
conduct a literature review
Sociologists use which of the following terms to describe a group with values and norms that oppose the dominant culture?
counterculture
The French social theorist Jean-François Lyotard described contemporary culture in this way: "One listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong." He was writing about postmodernism, but what concept can help explain this mishmash of activities?
cultural diffusion
Because of their economic strength, Western companies are powerful enough to impose their products on markets worldwide. This phenomenon is known as
cultural imperialism
A reality television show called Wife Swap exchanged the mothers from two very different families and filmed the result as the participants are exposed to radically different ways of life. Although the television network was simply trying to be entertaining, the show also demonstrates the sociological principle of
culture shock
In 2010, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law. Fox News and CNN presented vastly different viewpoints of the ACA, appealing to either conservative or liberal viewers, respectively. The media's handling of this law is an example of
culture wars
You are conducting research on violence in the media. In what part of the research process are you engaged if you are trying to decide whether "violence" includes words as well as actions?
defining the variable
A man is listening to loud music and singing along in public. The people around him glare and frown at him, hoping that he will stop. The man ignores them, indicating that he
doesn't seem to care about negative sanctions
What sort of group dynamic may have led officials at NASA to ignore warnings and launch the space shuttle Challenger, which exploded shortly after takeoff?
groupthink
The ________ of white supremacy in the United States was a system of beliefs and attitudes that maintained the status quo of racism.
ideology
Erving Goffman theorized social life as a kind of con game in which we work to control the impressions others have of us. What did Goffman call this process?
impression managment
Many people today argue that convicted sex offenders should be chemically castrated or held in protective custody beyond their original sentences. What is the logic of these punishments?
incapacitation
Sociologists who conduct interviews an only gather data from a limited number of people because
interviews are too time-consuming
Taking the sociological approach to everyday life has strengths and weakness. One of the weakness of this approach is that it
labors to grasp things that everyday actors understand implicity.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that
language can structure our perception of reality
Emile Durkheim suggested that in traditional societies, people were bound through mechanical solidarity. What was the basis of these sorts of bonds?
shared traditions and similar experiences
Which of the following phenomena is a reason why group efficiency declines as groups increase in size?
social loafing
A position in a social hierarchy that comes with a set of expectations is called a
status
Alejandra believes that religion is the basis for good values and that promoting religion in society promotes social order. What perspective best describes Alejandra's views?
structural functionalism
What school of social theory believes that society is a stable system of structures, which contribute to the equilibrium of the whole?
structuralism functionalism
A space shuttle, graffiti, a new coding language, and a new instrument are all examples of
technology
What is the sociological imagination?
the ability to understand the connections between biography and history, or the interplay of the self and the world
Max Weber believed that as the Industrial Revolution progressed, society became increasingly rationalized. How did he define rationalization?
the application of economic logic to all aspects of social life
According to George Herbert Mead, the dual nature of the self refers to the idea that
we experience the self as both subject and object
Which of the following is an example of something that would be part of a person's or a society's material culture?
weapons of war
Max Weber helped lay the groundwork for sociologists who would develop symbolic interactionism as a theory because he believed that a social scientist should approach the study of human action
with verstehen (understanding), which emphasizes empathy with individuals' experiences.
