SOC-101 Ch. 2 Q

If changing one variable seems to lead to a change in another variable, this shows ________ but does not necessarily prove ________.

correlation; causation.

What does it mean if a sample of sociological research is representative?

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

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.

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.

Some researchers suggest that interviews give "voice" to people who may never have been heard before and offer privileged access to authentic experience, private worlds, and true selves. How do interviews do this?

Interviews allow respondents to speak in their own words, which can reveal their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

In her research for The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild interviewed married couples to find out how they dealt with changing family roles as more women entered the workforce. What advantages came from her decision to use interviews as a research method?

It allowed her to gather direct quotations and construct an intimate portrait of married couples.

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.

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.

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

content analysis.

In the 1980s, many politicians argued that listening to heavy metal music led teenagers to die by suicide. Though you might find this belief silly, it is a(n)

hypothesis.

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 sociologist performs an experiment designed to investigate the effect of marriage counseling on divorce. He or she divides research participants into two similar groups of troubled couples, provides only one group with counseling, and observes whether, over time, the two groups eventually divorce at different rates. What is the independent variable in this experiment?

marriage counseling.

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

open-ended.

A research team is curious about the relationship between 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. They travel to campuses and stand in prominent public places asking for volunteers until they have ten people from each campus willing to be interviewed. What is the researchers' target population?

the 170 students who were interviewed.

An ideal whereby researchers identify facts without allowing their own personal beliefs or biases to interfere is known as

value-free sociology.

You are doing a research project on the effects of contemporary media. What are your variables if your hypothesis is "watching violence on television causes an increase in violent behavior"?

violence on television and violent behavior.

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 to test its sewage?

collecting data.

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

paradigms.