Exam 2: Asking and Answering Sociological Questions

Robert Park's vision of sociology included:

Philip Zimbardo's prison experiment involved setting up a make-believe jail and randomly assigning male student volunteers to the roles of guards and prisoners. The researcher concluded that:

Scientific activity combines the creation of bold new modes of thought with the careful testing of hypotheses and ideas.

What kind of research method would be best if your goal was to learn how the residents in a gated community feel about racial desegregation?

Tom develops a questionnaire for his study on Facebook usage that allows subjects to indicate whether they strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree with various statements. These types of questions are known as:

Compare and contrast two of the major research methods discussed in the text (survey, experiment, field research, comparative-historical). What are the advantages and disadvantages of each method? Write a research question on the topic of divorce using each of the three methods.

In order for a sample to be representative, it must be selected with __________.

What issues may arise when following the scientific research process to study human behavior?

MATCHING -The middle of any set of figures

The main purpose of sampling is to:

MATCHING -The average

Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions is an example of what type of research?

Sociologists studying a population to which they do not belong-for example, a white researcher studying Chinese Americans or a male researcher studying women-should employ which research standard?

In one or two sentences, summarize ethnographer Alice Goffman's findings about young black men.

What are the four basic standards that establish social research as scientific?

What would the correlation coefficient be if two variables are not at all correlated?

For a sample to accurately reflect the characteristics of the study population, it must be:

Who are sociologists able to study by employing the method of ethnography?

What are the characteristics of good puzzle-solving questions?

In her 1986 book Uncoupling, Diane Vaughn uses what kind of research to focus on the rich details of how individuals dissolve their relationships?