Sociology Test 1

I am a politician and I want to know if a policy of withdrawing soldiers from a particular region of the world - a region that is characterized by high levels of terrorism - is supported by the public. Which of the following questions is most helpful to getting an accurate view of how the public feels about this?

"Some people feel that we should keep our troops in the region to protect us from terrorism but other feel we should remove our troops because they do not reduce terrorist activities. Do you feel we should keep our troops or remove our troops from that area?"

True or false: Your instructor differentiates between two types of terrorism, revolutionary versus state or repressive terrorism. State or repressive terrorism is intended to upset the status quo and bring change.

False

Suppose I want to sample a military base to see how many soldiers are using illegal drugs. Which of the following methods would be the best way to get a representative sample?

Get a complete listing of all of the soldiers on the base and select every 10th soldier to be contacted and interviewed.

Unrecognized and unintended favorable consequences of a social pattern are called ________

Latent functions

According to Emile Durkheim, categories of people with a higher anomic suicide rate typically have

Lower levels of social integration

__________, one of the founding sociologists, urged sociologists to understand a social setting from the point of view of the people in

Max Weber

In deciding what kinds of questions to ask in their research, sociologists are guided by ________

One or more theoretical approaches

The social-conflict approach draws attention to ________

Patters of social inequality

A manifest function of sports is ________

Providing recreation and physical conditioning

Among the historical changes that stimulated the development of sociology as a discipline was ________

Rise of industrial economy and growth of cities

Which sociological research method saves the time and expense of data gathering, but the researcher has no control over possible data bias?

Secondary analysis of existing sources

The "framework for building theory that sees society as an arena of inequality that generates conflict and change" is the _______

Social conflict approach

Social structures sometimes have negative consequences for the operation of society as a whole. Which of the following concepts refers to these negative consequences?

Social dysfunctions

The theoretical approach in sociology that assumes society is a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability is the ________

Social-conflict approach

Peter Berger describes using the sociological perspective as seeing the ______ in the _______

Specific ; general

A simplified description unfairly applied to every person in the same category is called ________

Stereotypes

Which theoretical approach claims that it is not so much what people do that matters as much as what meaning they attach to their behavior?

Symbolic-interaction approach

What concept refers to any change in a subject's behavior that is caused by the awareness of being studied?

The Hawthorne effect

If you were to conduct sociological research that closely follows the logic of science, which research method would you most likely use?

The experiment

Which of the following factors is important to understanding revolutionary terrorism?

The high level of solidary or social cohesion of their group helps reinforce each other's self-righteousness. The group leaders tend to be perceived as legitimate by group members, thus fostering trust and obedience to their wishes.

Herbert Spencer described human society as a complex system having much in common with _______

The human body

True or false: A random sample is likely to represent the population from which it is drawn.

True

Which of the following examples illustrates a micro-level focus?

Two people on an airplane getting to know one another

Which German word meaning "understanding" or "subjective understanding" was used by Max Weber to describe his approach to sociological research?

Verstehen

In the United States today, the suicide rate is highest for which of the following categories of people?

White men

Which of the following demographic patterns do we find regarding revolutionary terrorism in the Middle East?

Younger people are more likely to engage in it than older people. Males are more likely to engage in it than females. Social marginals are more likely to engage in it than upstanding citizens.

An apparent, although false, association between two variables that is caused by a third variable is called ________

a spurious correlation.

Imagine that you were going to measure the age of a number of respondents taking part in a survey. As you record the data, you are using the concept "age" as ________

a variable.

The ability to neutralize the effect of one variable in order to assess the relationship between two other variables is called ________

control, or making use of controls.

Sociologists cannot precisely predict any person's behavior because ________

human behavior is highly complex and has many causes.

A theory states that increasing a person's formal higher education results in increased earnings over the individual's lifetime. In this theory, "higher education" is the ________

independent variable

Sociologists use the term "empirical evidence" to refer to ________

information we can verify with our senses.

Science can be defined as a ________

logical system that bases knowledge on direct, systematic observation.

Regarding ethical research guidelines, the American Sociological Association states that researchers ________

must protect the privacy of subjects taking part in a research project.

Looking at the operation of U.S. schools guided by the social-conflict approach might lead a sociologist to conclude that ________

our society provides some students with far better schooling than others

By stating that the sociological perspective shows us "the strange in the familiar," the text argues that sociologists ________

reject the familiar idea that people simply decide how to act in favor of the initially strange idea that society shapes our lives

In survey research, a small number of people that are used to represent a much larger population is called a ________

sample.

The ________ approaches are macro-level, describing societies in broad, structural terms.

structural-functional and social-conflict

Understanding marriage using the structural-functional approach might prompt you to consider ________

the consequences of marriage for the operation of society.

Three researchers wish to test the effects of playing soft music during an exam on the test performance of their sociology students. They conduct an experiment in which one test-taking class hears music and another does not. In experimental terms, the class hearing the music is called ________

the experimental group.

In a cause-and-effect relationship

the independent variable must come before the dependent variable in time.

The basic idea of the symbolic-interaction approach is that society is ________

the product of people interacting in countless everyday situations.

The early sociologists Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim used the ________

the structural-functional approach.

Two variables are said to display correlation if ________

they vary together.

The ideal of objectivity means that a researcher must ________

try to adopt a stance of personal neutrality toward the outcome of the research.