Exam 1: The Sociological Perspective

Sociologists use the term "social marginality" to refer to:

Sociology is useful training for any job that involves working with people.

What did C. Wright Mills mean by "the sociological imagination"? How does this point of view change the way we see personal problems?

Which theoretical approach would highlight the fact that, on average, African American families have less income than white families?

Sociological research shows that all categories of people have had the same opportunities to participate in sports.

Societies around the world are more interconnected than ever before.

Almost all of Latin America and Asia falls within which of the following categories?

The meaning people find in competitive sports would be one focus of a symbolic-interaction approach.

A simplified description unfairly applied to every person in some category is referred to as:

Briefly explain the difference between a macro-level and micro-level theoretical orientation.

Do you see any dangers in adopting the sociological perspective too intensely? For example, if we say that society is at work in all our choices about how to live, do we lose any sense of personal responsibility for our actions?

People rarely recognize all of the functions of social structure.

According to Emile Durkheim, a category of people with a higher suicide rate typically has:

Social-exchange analysis is one micro-level approach to understanding social interaction.

According to Comte's approach, the kind of thinking favored by people such as Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, becomes common in a society at which stage of societal development?

To say that a social pattern is "dysfunctional" means that it has more than one function for the operation of society.

In several sentences, explain the focus of the social-conflict approach.

The basic idea of the symbolic-interaction approach is that society is:

Durkheim documented that categories of people with weaker social ties have lower suicide rates.

A symbolic-interaction analysis focuses not on how individuals perceive a social setting but how what happens in that setting involves social inequality.