Sociology

In April 2015, Olympic gold medalist and former "World's Greatest Athlete" Bruce Jenner announced that "for all intents and purposes, I am a woman." Jenner discussed transitioning with Diane Sawyer in a special two-hour edition of the ABC News show 20/20. In the interview, Jenner stated, "As of now, I have all the male parts, but I still identify as female." What does this tell you about gender identity?

For many people, primary sex characteristics do not define gender.

Although they make very little money, priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, and clergy are often prestigious members of their communities. Which social theorist first suggested that this is an important element of class status?

Max Weber

Most sociologists argue that gender is a social construction and they acknowledge the possibility that binary male-female categories are not the only way of classifying individuals. This perspective is called

a constructionist perspective.

How do sociologists define ethnicity?

a group with a shared ancestry or shared cultural heritage

Patriarchy can be defined as a society

in which men dominate women.

The folk-pop singer Jewel is famous for having lived in her van when she first moved to San Diego and started performing in a coffee shop. Soon after Atlantic Records signed her, her advance allowed her to rent a house and buy a new car. Of what class-based phenomenon is this an example?

social mobility

What does Pierre Bourdieu call the tendency of social class to be passed down from one generation to the next and consequently remain relatively stable over time?

social reproduction

An accountant with a college degree and a license from the state accounting board works for the Department of Defense as a senior auditor. He makes about $100,000 a year and will soon retire with benefits and a pension. To what class would you expect him to belong?

upper-middle class

What criteria does a social class system use to stratify its members?

wealth, property, power, and prestige

Which of the following is one of the basic principles of social stratification?

It is maintained through beliefs that are widely shared in a society.

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.

How is prejudice different from discrimination?

Prejudice is an attitude; discrimination is an action.

Pablo lives in the United States, where most people assume that he is Arab until they learn his name and hear his accent. They are surprised when Pablo tells them that he is from Spain and identifies as white, not Hispanic. Some even tell Pablo that he isn't really white. What does this suggest about race?

Race is socially defined and the criteria used to determine a person's race varies.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Alfred Kinsey surveyed Americans to find out about their sexual behavior. His findings were important because they

challenged the view that Americans were either exclusively heterosexual or homosexual.

What might an individual be trying to gain if he or she takes adult education classes, attends lectures and concerts, or travels to Europe?

cultural capital

Karl Marx spent much of his life attempting to understand and describe how capitalism works. In one particularly vivid passage, he described the turbulence he saw as inherent in capitalism: "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind." What sort of relationships did he think his readers had with other people?

economic relationships

The belief that the lived experiences of women and men differ as a result of biological differences is called

essentialism.

When customers have low credit scores, banks often offer them subprime loans that have higher than normal interest rates. If a bank gives three times as many subprime loans to black Americans than to white Americans, even when they have the same credit scores, the bank is guilty of

institutional discrimination.

What is a state called when whites are less than half the population?

majority-minority

Oscar Lewis was the first to suggest that the poor develop a way of life with fundamentally different values and goals because they are excluded from mainstream social life. Consequently, they are much less likely to join the middle class. This way of life is usually called

the culture of poverty.