Sociology Test 1

Julie Bettie wrote her ethnography Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity to examine the role of race and class in the lives of girls in California's Central Valley. She did most of her work at a high school, hanging out with students and writing down her observations. What do ethnographers call her written observations?

field notes

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.

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

reviewing the literature

In 2007, the richest 1 percent of the American population owned 35 percent of the country's wealth and the bottom 80 percent of the population owned 14 percent. Karl Marx would call this

social inequality.

Sociologists assert that there is a close relationship between the individual and society. How does Pam Fishman's research on gender and power in heterosexual couples characterize this relationship?

Fishman's data show how macro-level phenomena like gender and power manifest themselves in everyday interactions.

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.

Which of the following statements best characterizes microsociology?

It is an approach that examines interactions between individuals and how those interactions reflect larger societal patterns.

Many everyday cultural practices such as greeting a friend, giving someone flowers, or using the thumbs-up sign seem like natural ways of acting. Why does having an awareness of how these practices vary across cultures demonstrate a healthy sociological imagination?

It reminds us that everyday interactions are connected to larger societies and norms.

Symbolic interactionism argues that people act toward things on the basis of their meaning. According to this perspective, how does meaning arise?

Meaning is negotiated through interaction with others.

When conducting experiments, how is the experimental group different from the control group?

The experimental group is administered the independent variable while the control group is not.

Some Marxists believe that conflict between small merchants and the nobility led to the creation of modern capitalism, which was distinct from either of the opposing forces. What would Marx call this model of historical change?

a dialectical model

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

interviews are too time-consuming.

Imagine that you are trying to rewrite a survey. You find a multiple-choice question that asks, "What is your favorite recreational activity?" and gives three response options: watching television, shopping, or sports. You add a fourth response option, "other," and invite respondents to write an activity of their choice. What kind of question have you just made?

open-ended

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

The divorce rate has steadily increased over time and now more than a quarter of all marriages end within the first four years. What sort of factors would C. Wright Mills suggest investigating to explain this increase?

structural

What school of social theory believes that society is a stable system of structures, which contribute to the equilibrium of the whole?

structural functionalism

Every four years, when it is time to elect a new president, we pay much attention to surveys, which we usually call "polls." Even though there are more than 300 million people in the United States, most political pollsters ask about a thousand people who they plan to vote for and use that information to predict how the election will turn out. Who is the sample for a presidential poll?

the 1,000 people who are asked whom they will vote for

What is the sociological imagination?

the ability to understand the connections between biography and history or the self and the world

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

value-free sociology.