Sociology 101 Chapter 2

What does it mean for a sociologist to control for a variable?

All factors except for the independent variable are taken into account.

Which of the following is a disadvantage of using existing sources of data for research?

Researchers often seek answers to questions the data doesn't directly address.

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.

When high schools want to ask students about sensitive subjects like drug use or sexual health, they often use surveys rather than a more direct form of communication like interviews. Why?

Surveys allow students to answer the questions in private and assure the confidentiality of their responses.

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.

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 it mean if ethnographers are overt about their roles?

They openly admit that they are doing sociological research.

Which of the following is an advantage of using interviews as a research method?

They reveal attitudes and beliefs a researcher has no access to without talking to people.

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 professor has been commissioned by a college to do research on its new academic system. The college has moved from a semester system to block scheduling. He asks, "How have teachers and students responded to the new intensive block scheduling system?" This is an example of:

a double-barreled question.

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 Jai should take in the sociological research or approach or method?

choose a research design or method

In recent years, sociologists who study deviance have learned that they can measure the quantities of narcotics consumed by a community by testing its sewage before treatment. What part of the research process would the sociologists be carrying out when they visit the sewage treatment plant?

collecting data

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 sociological research method?

conduct a literature review

A study showed a fairly high correlation between not smoking and having a high college grade point average. Although some people used this study as evidence that smoking is bad, if you accept that smoking doesn't cause someone to lose brain cells or study less, you would probably conclude that the study:

employed a spurious correlation.

The analysis of documents—such as medical records, photographs, diaries, letters, newspapers, and song lyrics—uses which of the following types of data?

existing sources

A university decides to conduct a survey to learn if students like the lasagna and garlic bread in the cafeteria. It distributes questionnaires in three English classes and two sociology classes. This will produce a simple random sample of the student body.

false

Codes of ethics in the social sciences provide very strict, step-by-step guidelines for researchers to follow.

false

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

interviews are too time consuming.

Survey research tends to produce quantitative data. One key advantage of this kind of data is that:

it is easy to transmit to the public.

A closed-ended question is one that:

limits the possible responses.

For many years, researchers struggled to find a biological explanation for sexual orientation. However the vast majority of studies have focused on gay men and excluded lesbians, which might lead sociologists to question the ____________ of such research.

objectivity

When writing questions for a survey, researchers must avoid all of the following EXCEPT:

open-ended questions.

A social research methods class wants to study smoking. First the professor asks how many people in the class are smokers. Two people say yes. Then she asks how many people have smoked a cigarette in the past week, and ten people say yes. From this the class decides that, for the purposes of its survey, a smoker will be anyone who has had a cigarette in the past week and currently owns a pack of cigarettes. This is a(n):

operational definition.

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. To the extent that this radically changed how people thought about almost everything, we would call it a(n):

paradigm shift.

Karl Marx was influenced by the philosopher Georg Hegel but argued that in some fundamental ways Hegel's theories were mistaken about how the world worked. Marx said he needed to "stand Hegel on his head" because Marx believed that "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." For many who came afterward, Marx's argument represented a:

paradigm shift.

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

A graduate student is almost done with his dissertation when he is informed that twenty years ago someone did a very similar project and already demonstrated what he had hoped to be the first to discover. What basic step of the scientific method could have saved him from this problem?

reviewing the literature

Any time a social researcher is going to use sampling, they must first identify their target population. What is this target population?

the larger group of people they wish to generalize about

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 the primary goal of comparative and historical research methods?

to understand relationships between parts of society in different times and different places

Market research is probably one of the most common uses of sociological research methods for nonacademic purposes.

true

Some "facts" sociologists once believed to be unambiguously true are now treated as opinions, biases, or speculation.

true

When researchers use a social networking site like Facebook to obtain data, they are:

using existing sources.

One of the key methods used to do political polling is random-digit dialing, in which every phone number in an area code has an equal chance of being selected to take part in a survey. However researchers have noticed that young people are more likely to only use a cell phone, and people with cell phones are less likely to answer a call from an unknown number. As a result, polling organizations often count responses from young people as being worth "more" than those from older people. What is this technique called?

weighting

When do sociologists most often use statistical tools to analyze their data?

when they use surveys