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| A status that is bestowed upon an individual, regardless of his or her efforts or wishes, In the United States, sex, race, and ethnicity are ascribed statuses. |
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Visible clues to an individual's status
Ex: A police officer's badge, a wedding ring, a priests collar. |
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The sum total of expectations about the behavior of people who occupy a particular status.
Ex: a teacher's role is to teach. He or she is suppose to stand up in front of the room and say things that will help kids learn the material that they need to learn. |
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The strain on a specific role.
Ex: The strain a student has to juggle all the work for all of his or her classes and still maintain a social life. |
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Occurs when an individual's ascribed and achieved statuses are deemed (by others) to be inconsistent.
Ex: When different roles or statuses mesh together. For instance, an older man goes back to college and has an older man role but has to address a younger professor as Sir, or Mr. |
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When a role conflicts with the norms of a job or a different role or status.
Ex: if a judge has children and their children are brought in to their court to be tried on a crime. The judge would be assumed to be impartial towards his or her own kids. |
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The status that others deem most telling about an individual; acts as a filter through which the individual's actions are judged.
Ex: A female professor may have the master status as a Female, this will set a idea in her students minds as being a female professor that should act like a female professor. Not just like a normal professor. |
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Two or more individuals who regularly interact with one another, share goals and a sense of identity.
Ex: Family, clubs, fraternities, any organization of people like yourself. |
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Thing of interest in a particular piece of research
Ex: Murder is said to be affected by gun control and gun control is said to be affected by the number of murders. This this particular scenario murder and gun control are both variables because they both affect one another. |
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A characteristic or quality that describes a thing.
Ex: attributes of the effects of murder may be ages of the pope whom are committing the murders. For instance, if a study were to be conducted the the ages of murders, then the categories of ages are attributes of age |
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A testable statement about the relationship between two or more variables.
Ex: A hypothesis on who is more likely to commit murders between male and females would be: Males are more likely to commit murders. |
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a variable that is thought to be influenced by another variable.
Ex: murder could be a dependent variable because murder may be influenced by the amount of gun control there is. The more gun control the less murder. The less gun control the more murders there are. |
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A variable that is thought to cause change in another variable.
Ex: gun control affect the number of murders in an area. The higher the gun control the less murders. The lower the gun control the more murders. |
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A type of relationship between variables in which they vary in the same direction. If variable A gets bigger or faster, variable B gets bigger or faster, the relationship between A and B is positive.
Ex: the relationship between education adn salary is a positive one. The higher the level of education the more a person gets paid. |
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A type of relationship between two variables in which they vary in opposite ways. If as variable A gets bigger or faster, variable B gets slower and smaller. The relationship between A and B is negative.
Ex: Spending amount for a particular person has a negative relationship with that persons over all monetary worth. |
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defining a variable in such a way that it can be observed and measured; often accomplished by listing the variable's attributes.
Ex: if a study is being done on income and religion a possible hypothesis might be that income depends on a persons religion. in this example operational definitions may be breaking up religions into groups. for instance, we may make a list of: Judaism, Christianity, Catholicism, Protestant, Other, and None. |
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Research approach that gathers data that is easily expressed in numbers; meausre behavior with little or no meaning attach to those behaviors.
Ex: an example of quantitative research is anything that can be taken down as a statistic. For instance, mathematical facts are known as quantitative measures. |
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interpretative research; seeks to gain an understanding of things from the point of view of the people being studied.
Ex: qualitative Research is research that focuses on more than just facts. It takes the facts and puts meaning to them. For instance, a sociologist can do quantitative research on suicide rates and get actual facts, but if he truly wanted to study suicide rates and why people commit suicide he or she would probably do qualitative research. |
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research technique that involves asking a series of questions of a set of people.
Ex: surveys are taken for many reasons. it could be a survey to see if people like coke better then pepsi. or it could be a survey that asks if a person would prefer to live in Ohio or California. Either way a survey is getting some sort of feedback on a specific issue from a general population. |
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Statistical data relating to the population adn particular groups within it.
Ex: demographics can be broken up into different categories. For instance, age, gender, religion, race, marital status, income and education are all considered demographics. |
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Research technique that involves manipulating the independent variable and then observing the effects on the dependent variable.
Ex: a sociological experiment would be if a sociologist were to hire an actore or actress to be a slob and a horrible person to go on a date with. Thits person would be known as the independent variable. Then randomly selected people go on a date with this person. The random person would be the dependent varialbe. THen the sociologist would take notes on how the random person behaved. |
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In a group experiment, the group that does not receive the experimental treatment.
ex: in the example of a bad date. The control group would be the group of random people chosen that go on a date with a regular non jerk person. |
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Changes that occur in people's behavior because they are involved as research subject; can occur when any obtrusive research technique is used.
Ex: in an experiment if a person is told that taking an experimental diet pil will make them lose weight. A hawthorne Effect to this experiment might be that people change their eating habits because they know they are taking a diet pill. They may exercise more or less and skew the actual results. |
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Research strategy in which different research methods are brought to bear on a single research problem; different methods are chosen so that their respective strength and weaknesses complement on another.
Ex: a sociologist could research suicide rates during a specific year in american history and find that there was a surprising amount of suicides during a specific year. A sociologist then could research the history of that year and see what was happening in society. There could have been a major depression that caused so many suicides. |
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a portion of the population that is studied in order to make inferences about the entire popualaion.
Ex: a sample of the students at BG might be the first 100 students that walk into the union will be surveyd on a particular topic. The first 100 students would be knows as the sample and they would represent all of BG in this scenario. |
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Diverse
Ex: in heterogeneous experiment a sample of 20 different people may be taken. 10 boys and 10 girls may be surveyed and in that 10 of each group there would be an equal number of faces and religions. |
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a sample in which each element of the population has he same chance of being included.
Ex:if a sociologist wanted to do a random survey in BG then each student in Bg should have an equal opportunity of getting the survey. |
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The set of ideas and things handed down from generation to generation in a particular group or society; culture is both a product of people's actions and a constraint on their actions.
Ex: Judaisms, American, Mexican... |
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Things that humans make or adapt from raw stuff of nature.
Menorah for Judaism |
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Intangible elements of culture
Ex: customs, stories, norms |
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Anything that represents something else to more than one person
Ex: the middle finger for americans |
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Socially accepted rules for behavior.
Ex: Being quiet in a library. Standing and facing the elevator door hwne in an elevator. |
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The most gentle of norms
Ex: standing and facing the door when stepping into an elevator. |
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Important norms
Ex: beating someone up is wrong. Yelling fire in a crowded room. |
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Society's most impotant socail norms; even the thought of violating a taboo is deeply repugnant.
Ex: genocide, serial killing |
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Positive response to behaviors
Ex: Formal Negative Sanctions include Prison Sentences and Fines. Getting a parking ticket and having to pay a fine. |
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Negative response to behaviors
Ex: Getting a parking ticket and being laughed at by friends and family. |
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General or abstract ideas about what is good and desirable, as opposed to what is bad and undesirable, in a society.
Ex: living life. having kids. Getting married. are all values of American culture. |
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Shared ideas about what is real.
Ex: Christians believe in Jesus. Muslims believe in Allah. |
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Shared beliefs that are distorted by economic or political condition.
Ex: gay marriage is illegal in most American states, therefore it is commonly believed that gay marriage is a bad thing. |
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| A set of ideas about the proper social response to an important societal problem. An accepted and persistent constellation of statuses, roles, values, and norms that respond to important societal needs. |
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Occurs when different cultures come to seem alike as a result of a great deal of cultural diffusion.
Ex: having Mcdonalds all over the world starts to bring our cultures onto the same level. |
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Process by which people of different cultures borrow elements of material or non material culture from one another.
Ex:Americans adapting Sushi bars into american culture. |
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A group of people whose shared specialized values, norms, beliefs, or use of material culture sets them apart from other people in society.
Becoming very wealthy can make a subculture. The wealthy may not feel as comfortable or want to be around the lower class as much. |
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Subculture whos values and beliefs set it not only apart from but also in oposition to the dominant culture.
Ex:KKK is an example of a counterculture. America beliefs that everyone is equal but the KKK still discriminate. |
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Knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and customs shared by members of a small group, used by group members to facilitate interaction.
Ex: Fraternities each develope their own socials and norms per campus that separate them not only from other fraternities on campus but from their own fraternities else where. |
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non intimate group of people whose relationships tend to be gesellschaft type.
Ex: A company. A class in school. |
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Group created and formally organized to achieved some specific goal or set of goals.
Ex: Bureaucracy. A company with a president, vice president, worker bee... |
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A methodological strategy made famous by Max Weber. An idea type is an "analytic construct" (it exists only in the abstract).
Ex: The most pure kind of business, President, vice presidents, supervisors, workers... |
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A type of formal organization that is characterized by distinct lines of authority, a hierarchy of positions, record keeping, rules against nepotism, and so forth.
Ex: any business that has a president and a line of command throughout the company. |
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Term used by weber to refer to situation in which people in organizations become so wrapped up in following ruls and procedures that they forget why they work so hard.
Ex: When work is done so much people forget why they are doing it. paperwork is used to communicate something...but doing so much paperwork may force the person doing the paper work to forget how to communicate what he is actually working on. |
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When the work becomes more important than the job.
Ex: when filling out papers for a doctor becomes more important than actually treating the patient. |
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