Soc 201 Midterm

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Altruistic Suicide: Suicide where the individual will sacrifice themselves for the betterment of the group or community.
Anomic Suicide: Suicide where the individual feels hopeless and or despair as a result of an unstable or weakened society (ie. through war, famine, etc.).
Egoistic Suicide: Suicide where the individual lacks a support network (family ties, friends, or lives in a community that stresses individual achievement) that serves as a buffer against personal difficulties.
Comparative Method: A research technique that compares existing official statistics and historical records across groups to test a theory about some social phonomenon.
Individualistic Explanation: Tendency to attribute people's achievements and failures to their personal qualitites - their failures or success.
Sociological Imagination: Ability to see the impact of social forces on our private lives.
Sociological Perspective: A way of interpreting human behaviors, utilizing social imagination: that is relating how typically individual issues and interactions can be influenced by social forces.
Achieved Status: Social position acquired through our own efforts or accomplishments or taken on voluntarily.
Ascribed Status: Social position acquired at birth or taken on involuntarily.
Coalition: Subgroup of a triad, formed when two members unite against the third member.
Conflict Perspective: Theoretical perspective that views the structure of society as a source of inequality, which always benefits some groups at the expense other groups.
Culture: Language, values, beliefs, rules , behaviors, and artifacts tha characterize a society.
Dyad: Groups consisting of two people.
Feminist Perspective: Theoretical perspective that focuses on gender as the most important source of conflict and inequality in social life.
Globalization: Process through which people's lives become economically, politically, environmentally, and culturally interconnected.
Latent Function: Unintended, unrecognized consequences of activites that help some part of the social system.
Manifest Function: Intedned, obvious consequences of activities designed to help some part of the social system.
Norm: Culturally defined standard or rule of conduct.
Organization: Large, complex network of positions, created for a specific purpose and characterized by a hierarchial division of labor.
Primary Group: Collection of individuals who are together over a relatively long period, whose members have direct contact with and feel emotional attachment to one another.
Role: Set of expectations -- rights, oblicgations, behaviors, duties -- associated with a particular status.
Role Conflict: Frustration people feel when the demands of one role they are expected to fulfill clash with the demands of another.
Secondary Group: Relativey impersonal collection of individuals that is established to perform a specific task.
Social Institution: Stable set of roles, statuses, groups, and organizations -- such as the instituion of education, family, politics, etc. that provides a foundation for behavior in some major area of social life.
Society: Population of people living in the same geographic area who share a culture and a common identity and whose members fall under the same political authority.
Status: Any named social position that people can occupy.
Structural-functionalist Perspective: Theoretical perspective that posits that social institutions are structed to maintain stability and order in society.
Symbol: Something used to represent or stand for something else.
Symbolic Interactionism: Theoretical perspective that explains society and social structure through an examination of the micro-level, personal, day-to-day exchanges of people as individuals, pairs, or groups.
Triad: Group consisting of three people.
Value: Standard of judgement by which people decide on desirable goals and outcomes.
Scientific Method (6 Step Process): 1. Develop a research question.
2. Review the existing literature.
3. Select a research method.
4. Collect data.
5. Analyze it - what does it mean?
6. Publish the results/findings.
How to differentiate good vs. bad research (10 Questions): 1. How were the variables measured?
2. Who was studied?
3. Were the procedures reasonable?
4. Who sponsored the study?
5. Is correlation being confused with causation?
6. How generalizable are the research findings?
7. Do the researchers report all their data?
8. What assumptions did the researcher make?
9. Do the conclusions of study make sense?
10. Determine truth from fabrication and biased studies.
Analysis of Existing Data: Type of unobtrusive research that relies on data gathered earlier by someone else for some other purpose.
Conctent Analysis: Form of unobtrusive research that studies the content of recorded messages, such as books, speeches, poems, songs, television shows, web sites, and advertisements.
Dependent Variable: Experimental variable that is assumed to be caused by, or to change as a result of, the independent variable.
Independent Variable: Experimental variable presumed to cause or influence the dependent variable.
Empirical Research: Research that operates from the ideological position that questions about human behavior can be answered only through controlled, systematic observations in the real world.
Experiment: Research method designed to elicit some sort of behavior, typically conducted under closely controlled laboratory circumstances.
Field Research: Type of social research in which the researcher observes events as they actually occur.
Historical Analysis: Form of social research that relies on existing historical documents as a source of data.
Hypothesis: Researchable prediction that specifies the relationship between two or more variables.
Incorrigible Proposition: Unquestioned cultural belief that cannot be proved wrong no matter what happens to dispute it.
Indicator: Measureable event, characteristic, or behavior commonly thought to reflect a particular concept.
Moral Entrepreneurs: Groups that work to have their moral concerns translated into law.
Nonparticipant Observation: Form of field research in which the researcher interacts with subjects, sometimes hiding his or her identity.
Probalistic: Capable of identifying only those forces that have a high likelihood, but not a certainty, of influencing human action.
Qualitative Research: Sociological research based on nonnumerical information (text, written words, phrases, sybmols, observations) that describes people, actions, or events in social life.
Quantitative Research: Sociological research based on the collection of numerical data that uses precise statistical analysis.
Representative: Typical of the whole population being studied.
Sample: Subgroup chosen for a study because its characteristics approximate those of the entire population.
Self-fulfilling Prophecy: Assumption or prediction that in itself causes the expected event to occur, thus seeming to confirm the prophecy's accuracy.
Survey: Form of social reserach in which the reseracher asks subjects a series of questions, either verbally or on paper.
Theory: Set of statements or propositions that seeks to explain or predict a particular aspect of social life.
Unobtrusive Research: Research technique in which the researcher, without direct contact with the subjects, examines the evidence of social behavior people create or leave behind.
Variable: Any characteristic, attitude, or behavior, or event that can take on two or more values or attributes.
Visual Sociology: Method of studying society that uses photographs, video, and film either as means of gathering data or as sources of data about social life.
Ethnocentrism: Tendency to judge other cultures using one's own as a standard
Folkway: Informal norm that is mildy punished when violated.
Heteronormative Culture: Culture in which heterosexuality is accepted as the normal, taken-for-granted mode of sexual expression.
Institutionalized Norm: Pattern of behavior within existing social institutions that is widley accpeted in a society.
Intersexuals: Individuals in whom sexual differentiation is either incomplete or ambiguous.
Material Culture: Artifacts of a society, which represent adaptations to the social and physical environment.
More: Highly codified, formal, systematized norm that brings sever punishment when violated.
Nonmaterial Culture: Knowledge, beliefs, customs, values, morals, and symbols that are shared by members of a society and that distinguish the society from others.
Sanction: Social response that punishes or otherwise discourages violations of a social norml.
Sexual Dichotomy: Belief that two biological sex categories, male and female, are permanent, universal, exhaustive, and mutally exclusive.
Sick Role: Set of norms governing how one is supposed to behave and what one is entitled to when sick.
Subculture: Values, behaviors and artifacts of a group that distinguish its members form the larger culture.
Transsexuals: People who identify with a different sex and sometimes undergo hormone treatment and surgery to change their sex.
Anticipatory Socialization: Process through which people acquire the values and orientations found in statuses they will likely enter in the future.
Collectivist Culture: Culture in which personal accomplishments are less important in the formation of identity than group membership.
Game Stage: Stage in the development of self during which a child acquires the ability to take the role of a group or community (the generalized other) and to conform his or her behavior to broad, societal expectations.
Gender: Psychological, social, and cultural aspects of malness and femaleness.
Generalized Other: Perspective of the larger society and its constituent values and attitudes.
Identity: Essential aspect of who we are, consisting of our sense of self, gender, race ethnicity, and religion.
Individualist Culture: Culture in which personal accomplishments are a more important component of one's self-concept than group membership.
Looking-glass Self: Sense of who we are that is defined by incorporating the reflected appraisals of others.
Play Stage: Stage in the development of self during which a child develops the ability to take a role, but only from the perspective one person at a time.
Reflexive Behavior: Behavior in which the person initating an action is the same as the person toward whom the action is directed.
Resocialization: Process of learning new values, norms, and expectations when an adult leaves an old role and enters a new one.
Role Taking: Ability to see oneself from the perspective of others and to use that perspective in formulating one's own behavior.
Self: Unique set of traits, behaviors, and attitudes that distinguishes one person from the next; the active source and passive object of behavior.
Sex: Biological maleness or femaleness.
Socialization: Process through which one learns how to act according to the rules and expectations of a particular culture.
Total Institution: Place where individuals are cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period and where together they lead an enclosed, formally administered life.
Tracking: Grouping of students into different curricular prgorams, or tracks, based on an assessment of their academic abilities.
Account: Statement designed to explain unaticipated, embarrassing, or unacceptable behavior after the behavior has occurred.
Aligning Action: Action taken to restore an identity that has been damaged.
Back Stage: Area of social interaction away from the view of an udience, where people can rehearse and rehash their behavior.
Cooling Out: Gently persuading someone who has lost face to accept a less desirable but still reasonable alternative identity.
Disclaimer: Assertion designed to forestall any complaints or negative reaction to a behavior or statement that is about to occur.
Dramafurgy: Study of social interaction as theater, in which people ("actors") project images ("play roles") in front of others ("audience").
Embarassment: Spontaneous feeling that is experienced when the identity someone is presenting is suddenly and unexpectedly discredited in front of others.
Front Stage: Area of social interaction where pepole perform and work to maintain appropriate impressions.
Impression Management: Act of presenting a favorable public image of oneself so that others will form positive judgements.
Performance Team: Set of individuals who coooperate in staging a performance that leads an audience to form an impression of one or all team members.
Stigma: Deeply discrediting characteristic that is viewed as an obstacle to competent or morally trustworthy behavior.

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