...1) How might sociologists operationalise the following concepts i) Educational achievement (2 marks) By searching people’s exam grades and or highest-level qualification that person has. ii) Involvement in housework (2 marks) Ask couples who stays at home and record all the results then compare them to see whether more women or men stay at home and do housework. 2) Examine the problems sociologists face when selecting a sample for the purposes of sociological research (16 marks) Sociologists face many problems; firstly they may find it hard to decide which ethnic group to study as some ethnic groups you might not be able to enter and study e.g. ISIS as they are dangerous. Furthermore, some ethnic groups are very dangerous and could be hard to study depending on what ethnicity you are. Secondly, sociologists need to make the decision on whether they want to make the sample representative, which means they use random numbers or systematic sampling. Thirdly, you need to decide how many people you want in you sample whether it’s a big number or a small number but usually you use a small number that can reflect on a country. Moreover, you need to decide a sampling frame, which is the list of members of the total population of interest. Finally you need to decide the sampling technique, there are many techniques; there is the random sample which is to make it representative. There is also the stratified sample, quota sample, panel sample, cluster sample...
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...essay Examine the advantages for sociologists in using unstructured interviews for their research. Sociologists use different types of interviews in their research, these ranging from structured to unstructured interviews. The difference between them lies in how free the interviewer is to vary the questions and how they are asked. In its simplest form, a structured interview involves one person asking another person a list of predetermined questions about a specific topic. This involves minimal conversation between the interviewee and interviewer. An unstructured interview however has a specific topic, but there are no set questions, allowing the interviewer to gain an insight on the interviewee and their answers. The main difference is that in unstructured interviews, there is usually no set time limit, and the interviewer is free to ask any questions relevant to the topic, and these are usually asked as open questions. A theoretical advantage of using open questions is that the answers you get are more detailed, and therefore increases validity. However a disadvantage of using open questions may be that it is much more harder to draw conclusions from the findings – linking it back to the time consumption issue. Unstructured interviews are useful when exploring unfamiliar topics, as you have an idea of the subject, but you use unstructured interviews to gain a deeper understanding on the topic itself. This allows sociologists to use unstructured interviews as a starting...
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...A questionnaire is a list of a research or survey questions asked to respondents, and designed to extract quantitative date. Questionnaires are easily distributed to the community and can be completed and collected on the spot or be emailed or posted back to the researcher. Self completed questionnaires are the most common survey as they are cheap and can be passed to a lot of people. Some sociologists tend not to use questionnaires because of their low response rate and lack of validity. Also, some people may give false information so some researchers like to stick to interviews and experiments for increased accuracy. I will explore why sociologists shy away from using questionnaires. Positivists favour questionnaires because they achieve the main positivist goals of reliability, generalisability and representativeness. However, questionnaires present a range of practical disadvantages that damage the reliability. Hites study of ‘Love, passion and emotional violence’ is an example of how these questionnaires have a low response rate. Hites sent out 100,000 questionnaires to Americans, only 4.5% were returned, merely 4,500 people. The major problem with this is that the people who have a lot more time on their hands, such as the unemployed or socially isolated, will return them, and the full-time working people will not have time to fill it out, so the researcher will only get a minimal perspective on the society he’s viewing. A higher response rate could be achieved if follow-up...
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...their immediate, personal social settings and the remote, impersonal social world is called A. the sociological imagination. B. anthropology. C. a theory. D. verstehen. Answer: A Type: D 5. ____________ is most closely associated with the concept of the sociological imagination. A. Émile Durkheim B. Max Weber C. Karl Marx D. C. Wright Mills Answer: D Type: S 6. A key element in the sociological imagination is the ability to view one’s own society A. from the perspective of personal experience. B. from the perspective of cultural biases. C. as an outsider. D. as an insider. Answer: C Type: I 7. A sociologist observing behavior at a college football game would probably focus on A. what books the coach of the team has read during the past year. B. a “fan” who has fallen asleep during...
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...Outline and asses the three measurements of crime When measuring crime and deviance sociologist tend to look at the different types of ways that we can measure crime; this includes, Official statistics, Victim survey and lastly self report studies. Each of these methods focuses on very different things, they also have strong and weak points but by combining them, a possible general picture of crime and deviance could be drawn. Firstly, official statistics show that public fear of being a victim of crime is rising. This stark difference between the level of crime and fear of crime has been attributed to the way of crime is reported in the media. Tabloid papers often use alarmist headlines about crime and deviance to grab the attention of readers causing a moral panic. It’s been argued that these exaggerate the chances of being victim of crime. Official statistics have strong points such as they are relatively cheap and readily available. They are published annually and they provide data on crime across the whole of the UK and also provide insight into regional differences in crime. This means that sociologists would be able to compare between different parts of the UK for example rural and urban areas. Positivist sociologists such as Functionalists are very supportive of the Official statistics; they see that this method of measuring crime is reliable, representative and valid. It also provides a true picture of the extent and nature of crime. However, this method does come...
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...Crime is a matter of interest for sociologist. There aren’t any many higher priorities for society than fighting crime, and any insights sociologists are able to contribute might help. For this reason, sociologists often receive funding to collaborate with other scholars and law enforcement authorities to investigate why crimes occur and how it can be minimized or prevented. (site source, sociology for dummies) Crime is an interesting subject to study because it represents the absolute edge of what is socially acceptable. Societies may be incredibly diverse and tolerant of a wide range of behavior, but those behaviors defined as crimes are where societies draw a line and say you may not. Different societies draw that line in different places. They also have different strategies for keeping people from crossing it—as well as punishing them when they do. Understanding how and why those lines are drawn can tell you a lot about how a society works in general. When someone violates any social norm, sociologists call it deviance. If someone doesn’t behave in the way they are expected to behave, they are acting in a deviant manner. It may sound harsh, but it’s okay—we are all deviant. No one person behaves in a manner exactly like they’re supposed to. We sometimes get rude to a friend and feel bad about it. Sometimes, we are proud of violating social norms like having friends who are gay. Deviance is just a part of social life. Crime is a specific type of social deviance. Everything...
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...M2A1 Assignment: Critical Thinking Questions: Zimbardo and Miligram If viewing this through the Assignment tool, click the title above to go to the Submissions area. By the end of this activity, you will be able to: • List and describe the basic steps for conducting scientific research, and know and discuss the research methods that sociologists use and the strengths and limitations of each. • Summarize the core concepts of sociology and recognize and explain the “sociological imagination” when viewing social phenomena and your own life. View the Zimbardo Stanford Prison experiment: • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0jYx8nwjFQ Watch Derren Brown reenactment of the Milgram experiments: • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6GxIuljT3w&feature=related As you complete this activity, think about the following: • Where do we draw the line between ethical and unethical research? • How can sociological research help us to better understand the world around us? The Stanford Prison Experiment The Stanford prison experiment is a fairly well-known sociology study. Please go through the experiment slide show online at http://www.prisonexp.org/and answer the following questions. The slide show provides a number of video and audio clips that you may want to check out for additional information. Due to the nature of the experiment, you may want to avoid listening or watching these in the presence of small children. After viewing the slide show, please respond to the following critical...
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...describe and support unequal social arrangements; the second category captures those whose narratives work instead to identify inequality and disrupt it. Building on Griswold’s methodological approach to literary fiction, this project examines how children’s novels describe, challenge, or even subvert systems of inequality. Through a sociological reading of three sampled texts – Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, A Wrinkle in Time, and Hitty: Her First Hundred Years – readers learn how these analytical categories work and how the sociology of literature might be enriched by attention to structural forms of inequality within literary fiction. This essay investigates children’s books in order to reinvigorate the discussion and use of novels by sociologists. Keywords: childhood, fiction, gender, literary analysis, literary narrative, power relations, social inequalities, Sociology, Sociology of literature Acknowledgments: I...
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...‘Assess’ Essay Planning Sheet Name: Essay Title: Assess the view that, in today’s society, the family is losing its functions (24 marks) | Underline or highlight the key concepts, terms and instructions, by identifying these key elements it will allow you to focus on answering the question. It is important to use relevant sociological terminology within the context of you essay. List the key sociological terms that will be appropriate for this essay. Industrial family, pre-industrial family, unit of production, unit of consumption, nuclear family, lone parent family, social policies, state intervention, symmetrical family, privatised, joint and segregated conjugal roles, commercialisation of housework | IntroductionSignpost to the question and clearly explain the key concepts /terms of the question | Functionalists such as Murdock and Parsons say that the family is losing its functions; they, and other functionalists, see the family as a particularly important, basic building block within society. Murdock argues that the family only performs four essential functions to meet the needs of society, whereas Parsons states that the functions that a family performs depends upon the kind of society in which it is found. | Paragraph 1PointThe point must be appropriate in answering the question. | The traditional pre-industrial family is seen to be the extended family, where there are three generations of the family...
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... Name: Essay Title: Using material from Item A and elsewhere, assess sociological explanations of changes in the status of childhood (24 marks) | Underline or highlight the key concepts, terms and instructions, by identifying these key elements it will allow you to focus on answering the question. It is important to use relevant sociological terminology within the context of you essay. List the key sociological terms that will be appropriate for this essay. Privileged time, social construct, golden age, separateness, toxic childhood, child-centred, march of progress, conflict view, child liberationists, globalisation, information hierarchy | IntroductionSignpost to the question and clearly explain the key concepts /terms of the question | In today’s society, childhood is seen to be socially constructed in that this idea of childhood has been created by society and its institutions rather than being a natural occurrence; it is society’s perception of what childhood is. Sociologists argue that childhood and the position that children have in society is not fixed, and that it differs between times, places, and cultures. However, children all have different experiences of what childhood is to them based on class, gender, and ethnicity so no one would experience childhood in the same way. | Paragraph 1PointThe point must be appropriate in answering the question. | The modern western notion of childhood is that in today’s...
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...‘Examine’ Essay Planning Sheet Name: Essay Title: Examine the reasons for changes in birth rates and family size since 1900 (24 marks) | Underline or highlight the key concepts, terms and instructions, by identifying these key elements it will allow you to focus on answering the question. It is important to use relevant sociological terminology within the context of you essay. List the key sociological terms that will be appropriate for this essay. Birth rates, family size, baby boom, total fertility rate, economic liability, child centeredness, socially constructed childhood, infant mortality rate | IntroductionSignpost to the question and clearly explain the key concepts /terms of the question | The birth rate is the number of live births per 1000 of the population per year. There has been a decline in the number of births since 1900. In that year, England and Wales had a birth rate of 28.7, but by 2007 it had fallen to around 10.7. However there have been changes in births, with three baby booms (after the two wars and in the mid-1960s) The family size is the number of people living in the same house as a child. There has also been a change in family sizes since the 1900’s - it has decreased from an average of 3 to 1.8 children in a household. | Paragraph 1PointThe point must be appropriate in answering the question. | Changes in the position of women has affected the birth rates in the UK since 1900; | Explain the point...
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...Sociologists use different types of interviews in their research, these ranging from completely structures to completely unstructured interviews. The difference between them lies in how free the interviewer is to vary the questions and how they are asked. In its simplest form, a structured interview involves one person asking another person a list of predetermined questions about a carefully-selected topic. The person asking the questions (“the interviewer”) is allowed to explain things the interviewee (or “respondent” - the person responding to the questions) does not understand or finds confusing. Moreover structured interviews are like questionnaires; the interviewer is given strict instructions on how to ask the questions. The interview is conducted in the same way each time, asking each interviewee precisely the same questions, word for word, in the same order and tone of voice. Both a questionnaire and structured interviews involve asking people a set of prepared questions. In both cases, the questions are usually closed-ended with pre-coded answers. The main difference is that in the interview, the questions are read out and the answers are filled in by a trained interviewer rather than by the interviewee. There are many practical advantages for the use of a structured interview for example training interviewers is relatively straightforward and inexpensive, since all they really required to do is follow a set of instructions. Moreover surveys that use structured interviews...
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...A Helping Experiment Introduction to Sociology, Summer II 2010 Rationale Students will experience and explore the challenge of creating knowledge about social life through an important research method used by sociologists: experiments. Students can also work with the scientific process, the steps through which sociologists and other scientists conduct their investigations. This experiment explores whether attachments between people affect whether help is offered. People are "attached" when they like each other or when they have affection for each other. Sociologists consider attachments crucial for social life and have explored their importance in many areas of social behavior, such as conversion to religious groups and deviant behavior. Instructions 1. Decide on some objects to be dropped, such as books, notebooks, coins, or whatever. Several or more items should be dropped. 2. Drop the items in front of a stranger as the stranger passes by. Do so in a way that appears natural. 3. Below describe the circumstances (what you dropped and where) and record whether the stranger helps you pick up the dropped items. Note any other interesting observations as well. 4. Drop these same items in front of a friend. Do so in a way that appears natural. 5. Below describe the circumstances (what you dropped and where) and record whether the friend helps you pick up the dropped items. Note any other interesting observations as well. . Were friends more or less likely...
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...new complex component of sociology, It gained awareness around the 1970's. Before this time, the field of sociology concentrated more on cognition emotions, although emotions have often remained a subtext in important works. Emotions were seen as the turf of psychologists and biologists. Sociologists began to systematically study emotions because they realized that emotions are fundamentally social, and that emotions have always figured as causal mechanisms in sociological theory. They are necessary to the theories of some of the most influential figures in sociology Like as Emile Durkheim and Erving Goffman. Which we learned about their views on different things though the past weeks of class. Emotions are of sociological interest because they are a primary human motivation, they help in rational decision-making, and they link the biology of the body with classic sociological questions about social construction and social control. I feel emotions are very important. Without these emotions we feel Human and animal life would have no purpose. I feel one purpose is to have feeling and disgutinush the moments when u feel happy, sad, mad confused etc. List list of emotion goes on and on.. For example, modern marriage is, on one hand, based on the emotion of love and on the other hand the very emotion is to be worked on and regulated by it. Modern science could not exist without the emotion of curiosity but it...
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...CARIBBEAN EXAMINATIONS COUNCIL CARIBBEAN ADVANCED PROFICIENCY EXAMINATION (CAPE) CARIBBEAN STUDIES For Self-Study and Distance Learning This material has been developed for The Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) With assistance from The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) Copyright © 2004 CXC/COL Prepared by Dr Jennifer Mohammed Mr. Samuel Lochan Dr. Henderson Carter Dr. David Browne CARIBBEAN STUDIES TABLE OF CONTENTS Study Guide 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. Titles Society, Culture and the Individual Geography, Society and Culture History, Society and Culture Cultural Diversity in Caribbean Society and Culture Impact of Societal Institutions on Caribbean People Caribbean - Global Interaction Concepts and Indicators of Development Contribution of Sports to Development in the Caribbean Regional Integration and Development Factors Promoting or Hindering Development Intellectual Traditions The Mass Media Social Justice Investigating Issues in the Caribbean Pages 1 – 21 22 – 51 52 – 87 88 – 116 117 – 146 147 – 170 171 – 187 188 – 195 196 – 207 208 –222 223 – 247 248 – 255 256 – 262 263 – 303 INTRODUCTION Purpose The Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), in collaboration with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), has developed Self-Study Guides for a number of Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) subjects. The main purpose of the Guides is to provide both in-school and out-of-school...
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