Sociology Test

When you hear someone singing a song with these lyrics, It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade; Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid; Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made. what valuable asset of the proletariat are they describing?

human labor

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

illuminate the connection between the individual and society

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

ethnography

The belief that humans will find ways to overcome any problems posed by pollution and waste is consistent with what attitude?

human exemptionalism

If the only thing you remember about Max Weber is that he described modern people as being trapped in an "iron cage," which of the following quotes from the social theorist Marshall Berman would you think describes his work?

"Modern man as a subject—capable of response, judgment, and action in and on the world—has disappeared."

A research team is curious about the relationship between diet and exercise habits and academic performance among American college students. In order to get their data, the researchers randomly select seventeen colleges by pulling names out of a hat and travel to campuses, where they stand in prominent public places and ask for volunteers until they have ten people from each campus willing to be interviewed. What is the researchers' target population?

American college students

The anthropologist Ruth Behar traveled to San Luis Potosí to learn more about the everyday lives of Mexican women. Instead, she ended up conducting one very long, very intensive interview with a woman named Esperanza and wrote a book based upon more than a year of interview data. Which disadvantage of the interview methodology does this book highlight?

Face-to-face interviewing is time consuming, and interviews are rarely used with large numbers of people. Thus, their representativeness is sometimes questionable.

Which of the following is a basic statement of historical materialist thinking?

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness

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

Which of the following is true about a sample?

It is always smaller than the group it is used to generalize about.

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.

As Tom Ewing put it in the poptimist column we read: "As Eric Harvey's piece concluded, the fallout from the current shifts in music distribution and economics will need to involve a redefinition of music's value. The recorded music industry is waning, and we're passing through an inflection point as stressful and crucial as the 30s and 40s, when publishers and musicians took their stand against "canned music." As it wanes, the modes of thinking it's generated-- of individual engagement with its product as the default form of listening-- will also become less important." This analysis is most like historical materialism because:

It sees changes in the mode of production as the source of ways of thinking about music

Which of the following is the most serious critique of structural functionalism?

It tends to argue that any social feature that exists must serve a function

According to Robert Merton, what is the difference between manifest and latent functions?

Manifest functions are intended and obvious

"There really is something beneath his "death of adulthood" premise, whether or not you like the prejudicial phrase. But to coin a phrase: It's the economy, stupid. Scott's essay appears to treat "culture" as a sealed and self-referential system, one that shapes and reflects human consciousness but has only an incidental relationship with economic, political and social factors that lie outside its purview." Which sociologist is going to get name-checked in the next sentence?

Marx

How does Karl Marx differentiate between members of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie?

Members of the bourgeoisie own the means of production, while the proletariat possess only their own labor.

What does Max Weber mean when he says that modern people are trapped in an "iron cage"?

Most aspects of life are increasingly controlled through rigid rules and rationalization.

In 2005 a commercial research firm carried out a study of hand washing in public restrooms. The researchers observed 6,336 individuals wash their hands, or not, in the public restrooms of major attractions in Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco. Ninety percent of the women observed washed their hands, compared with only 75 percent of the men. Interestingly enough, when asked via a telephone survey, 97 percent of women and 96 percent of men claimed they always washed their hands after using a public restroom. What disadvantage of survey research does this illustrate?

Not all respondents provide honest self-reports, so survey research has comparatively less validity.

A famous social scientist tells you that the most important, though never totally successful, task in her research was to move from "total bewilderment" to "finding her feet" with the people she was studying. What can you say about this researcher?

She's a qualitative researcher

If you possess a sociological imagination and someone asks you to study unemployment rates in a city of fifty million people where fifteen million are unemployed, what would you conclude?

We should consider the economic and political structures of the society.

Clifford Geertz coined the term "thick description" to define good ethnographic fieldnotes. Which of the following is NOT associated with thick description?

a comprehensive list of events

A simple random sample is defined as:

a sample in which every member of the population has a chance of being included.

A sociologist uses a survey to study the attitudes of adults in the United States concerning premarital sex among teenagers. In this study, the target population consists of ____________, and the group that is asked the survey questions is called the ____________.

all adults in the United States; sample

In Emile Durkheim's work Suicide, he reported that suicide rates went up when the economy slumped but also spiked when the economy boomed. Which of Durkheim's concepts from Chapter 1 explain why both positive and negative economic conditions could increase suicide rates?

anomie

A sociologist wants to study popular attitudes and perceptions about astrology among college students in California. She believes that people who have astrological signs identified 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

What are environmental sociologists referring to when they use the term "environment"?

both the natural and the human-made environment

What institutions does Max Weber believe characterize modern industrialized societies?

bureaucracies

If a sociologist watches a lot of television and counts the number of times women play roles with lower status than those played by men, what research method is he using?

content analysis

According to the theoretical position developed by Karl Marx, what is the engine of social change?

conflict between social groups

"Scott's essay appears to treat "culture" as a sealed and self-referential system, one that shapes and reflects human consciousness but has only an incidental relationship with economic, political and social factors that lie outside it. We have moved so far from the old Marxist view of _________________ that we now pretend it's an entirely autonomous force..."

culture as an ideological "superstructure" erected upon the economic base of society

You're conducting research on violence in the media. If you're trying to decide whether "violence" includes words as well as actions, in what part of the research process are you engaged?

defining the variables

What is it called when polluting industries and waste dumps are located near areas where racial minorities reside?

environmental racism

"Bernie Sanders gave perhaps the most interesting answer of the night, responding to Donald Trump's call to bar Muslim immigrants. Trump's decision to exploit anxiety about terrorism is all a big diversion, Sanders said, designed to distract from anxieties about the economy. In short, Sanders was invoking the old Marxist idea of __________.

false consciousness

What term did Karl Marx use to describe the fact that most of the population accepts the pervading ideology, even when it fails to tell the truth about their lives?

false consciousness

If someone starts taking public transportation and riding a bicycle, he would be reducing:

his ecological footprint

Christine Williams looked at patterns of occupational sex segregation, examining the ways large-scale social structures created the constraints within which individuals lived their lives. Based on this information, her work would be characterized as what kind of sociology?

macrosociology

In 2008 Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wadja released his film Katyn, about the massacre of twenty thousand Polish officers by the Soviet Union during World War II. When asked why he had made this movie, Wadja said that he wanted to make a film for "those moviegoers for whom it matters that we are a society and not just an accidental crowd." Wadja believed that it was still possible for people to be bound together on the basis of shared traditions and experiences. In his statement, Wadja was expressing a hope that Poland could still be united by:

mechanical solidarity.

In Sidewalk, the sociologist Mitch Duneier spent a great deal of time interviewing and hanging out with street vendors in New York City. He was especially interested in how power associated with race and class was produced and reproduced in this setting. What sort of sociology was Duneier doing?

microsociology

Which of the following parts of a research project is always free of bias?

no parts

If you observe a group in order to determine its norms, values, rules, and meanings, then what kind of research are you doing?

qualitative research

In her ethnography Wheeling & Dealing, Patricia Adler investigates the social and professional worlds of midlevel cocaine and marijuana smugglers. Her research started serendipitously when she discovered that her next-door neighbor and friend was a drug smuggler; this was a huge advantage for her because it meant that she already had ____________ with one of her informants.

rapport

When he was writing The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture, the ethnographer Walter Williams was always very open about his own sexual orientation because he believed that being open with the people he was studying was the only way to establish a trusting and sharing interaction with them. What was Williams concerned with?

rapport

The sociologist Mitch Duneier wrote his ethnography Sidewalk about street vendors in New York City's Greenwich Village. While writing the book, Duneier was particularly concerned that the people he was studying would alter their behavior when he was present, especially since his background was very different from theirs, causing him to think critically about his action and role as a researcher. What do sociologists call this?

reflexivity

Emile Durkheim argued that even an action as seemingly individual as suicide has important social components. What social factors did he examine?

religious affiliation and marital status

A sociologist wants a major national organization to fund her study of medical marijuana clubs in San Francisco but is turned down because the grant-makers don't see how her study would represent knowledge about anything more than the clubs that would be studied. What is the organization concerned about?

representativeness

"Apparent swings in vote intention represent mostly phantom swings arising from ________ in survey participation. Previous studies have tended to assume that campaign events cause changes in vote intentions, while ignoring the possibility that they may cause changes in survey participation."

selection bias

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 and similar experiences

The study of human populations and their impact on the natural world is called:

social ecology

Someone on yahoo answers asked a for help in understanding a term we read about in this section of the class. The best answer included this bit: The way I explain this to my class is to think of a clock. What makes a clock a clock? First, you have to have certain parts, such as hands, gears, springs, and a power source. But this is not enough. You have to put the parts together, of course. Still, however, you may not have a clock because you cannot put the parts together in any way you choose. Rather, you must put the parts together IN A SPECIFIC RELATIONSHIP TO THE OTHER PARTS. Then, and only then, do you have a clock what was the term being defined here?

structural functionalism

Conflict theorists believe that arguments over values and beliefs have their roots in:

struggles over scarce resources and power.

One of the major problems with slowing greenhouse gas emissions lies in the developing world, where many countries are just now starting to burn fossil fuels at the same rate as the industrialized world. Aside from the pollution produced, this is also a problem because there isn't enough oil left for the world to burn it at its current rate. To solve this problem, many believe that we need:

sustainable development.

Which of the following theories focuses on how our behaviors are dependent upon the ways we interpret, make sense of, and define ourselves, others, and social situations?

symbolic interactionism

When Elton Mayo did his now-classic experiment on worker productivity, he found that he could increase productivity by changing variables in a work environment, but also that changing back variables increased productivity. What did he conclude was the true cause of the increase in productivity?

the effect of being studied

The nature writer Barry Lopez spent time with the Inuit of the Arctic and concluded that hunting societies had different attitudes about the land than industrial ones because "the focus of a hunter in a hunting society was not killing animals but attending to the myriad relationships he understood bound him into the world he occupied with them." What kind of attitude do hunting societies have?

the new ecological paradigm

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

Modern economies require constant growth, and with that growth comes an ever-increasing need for resources, called:

the treadmill of production