Sociology Final Review

Little League baseball and other organized community sports are examples of what phenomenon?

The formalization of recreation.

When group members withhold their reservations and criticisms for the sake of consensus, they are engaging in:

groupthink

What do sociologists ask you to consider regarding health and illness?

how health and illness are shaped by social factors.

When a large group is asked to complete a task, individual members often neglect their responsibilities, because it is impossible for any one person to receive credit or blame. This phenomenon is called:

social loafing.

The economic system based on collective ownership of the means of production and collective distribution of goods and services is called:

socialism.

The idea of the American Dream is most closely related to which of the following?

vertical mobility

Even though a small number of people have been trained academically as sociologists, we can all be described as "everyday sociologists" because:

we are all members of society and therefore we have a great deal of background knowledge about how society works

How do sociologists define race?

a social category based on real or perceived biological differences.

Workers in large department stores usually are paid on commission, which means that they are in direct competition with their fellow employees. According to Karl Marx, this makes them:

alienated.

You are observing children on an elementary school playground and find some girls playing sports with boys but almost no boys playing jump rope with girls. Why?

Children are mocked by their peers for crossing gender lines, and boys are mocked more than girls.

What does a sociological perspective tell us about education in the United States?

Educational success often has as much to do with social stratification as it does with individual ability.

Which of the following strategies could be used as a way to minimize social loafing?

Finding ways to recognize individual effort

A five-year-old boy hurts himself while playing with his toys and immediately begins to cry. His father walks over to him and says: "Don't be a sissy, boys don't cry." This is an example of:

Gender role socialization

When a politician is caught cheating on his spouse, there are usually serious consequences, and sometimes the politician is forced to resign from his office when his constituents loudly express their unhappiness with such behavior. According to Emile Durkheim, what function does this reaction serve?

It helps to clarify moral boundaries, reinforcing the idea that marital infidelity is wrong.

What is the principal sociological critique of the culture of poverty?

It tends to blame the victims of poverty for their own misfortunes, while ignoring the structural causes of inequality.

The Brazilian census has traditionally only had four racial categories: preto, branco, amarelo, and pardo. However, in everyday life, Brazilians have many other racial categories, including moreno, mulato, neguinho, and pretinho. Most of these terms do not have an equivalent in the United States. What does this tell you?

Race is a social construct.

According to sociologists like Howard Winant and Michael Omi, what is the relationship between race and class?

Race is not a side effect of class; rather, it permeates every aspect of daily life.

Jorge recently learned that he has a mental illness. Since then, he has begun to act according to the illness, in ways that he thinks others expect someone with a mental illness to act. Which theory of health and illness best explains his situation?

Symbolic interactionism

How could telecommuting increase worker productivity?

Telecommuters must usually provide a concrete measure of their accomplishments, not just show up.

Many of us have fond memories of kindergarten, perhaps because there was more time for activities like making art from macaroni and singing songs. However, a sociologist might point out that kindergartners are not just being taught about arts and crafts. They're also being taught how to be students: how to sit still, take orders, remain in their seats, and behave in school. In other words, they are learning skills that will be necessary for the rest of their education. What are these other things that are taught in kindergarten called?

The hidden curriculum

If an upper-middle-class, white college student is sentenced to rehab for the same drug crime that a lower-class, black man is sentenced to jail for committing, what might a conflict theorist conclude about deviance?

The rules are applied unequally, and those with power or influence are punished much less harshly.

Why do ethnocentric people tend to view other cultures as abnormal?

They use their own culture as a standard of judgment.

How do sociologists define ethnicity?

a group with a shared ancestry or shared cultural heritage

In the 1960s Timothy Leary famously advised everyone to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," and, although he insisted that it meant more, most people assumed he was telling them to "get stoned and abandon all constructive activity." How would Robert Merton's structural strain theory classify someone who took this advice?

as a retreatist

Sociologists observe society:

by studying the various parts of a society, and the ways they interact and influence each other.

In the 1990s, legal researcher Erin Brockovich helped win a lawsuit against Pacific Gas and Electric Company because it had been poisoning the water in the small town of Hinkley, California, for thirty years. Toxic Chromium 6 leached into the water system and sickened many Hinkley residents with ailments like liver damage and cancer. How would the illnesses of the Hinkley residents be classified?

chronic diseases

A neighborhood where there is no grocery store but there are more liquor stores, convenience and drug stores, and fast food outlets than most other locations is referred to as a:

food desert.

The Solomon Asch experiment, in which groups of participants were asked to compare the lengths of lines, demonstrated that:

groups have great power to induce conformity.

Coca-Cola was first marketed in the 1860s as a patent medicine, designed to offer the energy boost of cocaine without the vices of alcohol. The new beverage was invigorating and popular. Today, however, cocaine is not just banned but widely demonized. This is an example of:

mainstream culture once approving of behaviors that are now considered deviant.

Howard Becker said that sociology can best be understood as the study of people "doing things together." This definition reminds us that:

neither society nor the individual exists in isolation; each is dependent on the other

On any given day, within ten minutes of waking up, you probably depend on more than 100 strangers to provide electricity, water, natural gas, weather forecasts, and other services. According to Durkheim, this interdependence gives rise to:

organic solidarity.

According to Karl Marx, the most important factor in social life is a person's:

relationship to the means of production.

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.

In August 2009, House Republican leader John Boehner asked rank-and-file Republicans to use social media like Twitter to get out their message about America's health-care system. Given that a Twitter post can only be 140 characters long, what feature of modern politics closely resembles Twitter posts?

soundbites

Drugs and alcohol are used as an escape from the strains of the social system. Which theory takes this approach to understanding addiction?

structural functionalism

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 and traveling 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?

students at the seventeen colleges they visited

In Schooling in Capitalist America, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis argued that schools train a labor force in the skills and attitudes necessary for the health of a modern economy. What are these skills and attitudes?

taking orders and performing repetitive tasks

What large-scale social change has made celebrity politicians more popular and successful?

the increasing importance of television

Brooke is a Ph.D. candidate in the field of nanophysics. She is aware that only 4 percent of physics professionals are women. Many assume this is due to women having an inability to comprehend complex mathematics. Knowing this, Brooke actually scores below her male counterparts on exams, thus affirming the idea that women have difficulty with physics. Brooke is experiencing:

the stereotype threat.