The first exam in this course will be held on Tuesday, Feb. 24th. Be sure to arrive on time and to bring a pencil and eraser. You are responsible for Ferrante chapters 1-5 and MicroCase exercises 1-3, as well as other assigned readings, class lectures, and discussions. If you are familiar with the subjects below, you should do well. Some questions will be taken from the tutorial quizzes at the text website and from the MicroCase workbook.

Please Note: If an emergency prevents you from taking the exam, you must contact me no later than the day of the exam itself and be prepared to provide documentation. Otherwise you may not be eligible to take a make-up exam.

Ferrante Chapters 1-5: Understand the general meaning of each core concept
Being familiar with the following will help in this:

The sociolgoical imagination
How sociologists define society and what sociologists study
Social facts
The characteristics of suicide rates that convinced Durkheim that they were social facts
C. Wright Mills: the sociological imagination. Biography and history; troubles and issues
Peter Berger: the debunking motif in sociology
The importance of the industrial revolution in the development of sociology
August Comte's significance for sociology
Sociology's three main classic theorists:
Marx: inequality, class conflict, change
Durkheim: a focus on social solidarity and social order. Suicide as a classic case for the potential of sociology. His basic argument about suicide rates. Be familiar with the difference between "egoistic" and "altruistic" suicide.
Weber: multiple sources of social action and multiple types of inequality and conflict; his pessimism and the metaphor of the "iron cage"
W.E.B. Dubois: his study of The Philadelphia Negro as the first major emprical sociological work in the U.S.
Globalization and the importance of a global perspective. The idea of "sociology beyond societies."

Mexico and the border wall/fence
Theories as part of a sociologist's toolkit
The two major components of theory: concepts and propositions
Be familiar with the basic tenets of the three broad perspectives in sociology: Functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism

the organic analogy
manifest vs. latent functions
functions and dysfunctions
the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in today's language
the importance of classes
social conflict as the engine of social change
facades of legitimacy
symbolic interactionism's focus on meaning
negotiated order and definition of the situation

Be able to recognize applications of these ideas and theories in terms of the research on the border wall

Be familiar with the steps in the research process (you need not memorize them)
Understand why we say that theories are supported or not supported by data, not proven or disproven
Units of analysis
population and sample
random samples and representativeness
methods of data collection
Hawthorne effect
independent and dependent variables (be able to recognize them in a hypothesis)
the proper way to state a hypothesis
operational definitions the proper statement of hypotheses (the higher/lower of [one thing], the higher/lower of [another]
reliability and validity
the three criteria of causation: time order, correlation, non-spuriousness
spurious correlations
coefficients of correlation--their range and how to interpret them
the issue of generalizability

North and South Korea through the lens of culture (be aware of the influence of China, Japan, and the US)
Why Ferrante says that defining culture is a "challenge"
Material and non-material (ideal) culture
Beliefs, values, norms
folkways and mores
the importance of language
subcultures: degrees of separation. Institutionally-complete subcultures
cultural diffusion
ethnocentrism
cultural relativism
moral relativism
the "samurai baseball" video clip--what it tells us about cultural diffusion. The distinctiveness of Japanese baseball: groups and concepts of fairness
Horace Miner's main point in his study of the Nacirema
Emic vs. etic approaches
"defamiliarization as an observational strategy"
The Sapir-Whorf (linguistic relativity) hypothesis
The Colonel Comes to Japan video: a case study in glocalization as a business strategy

Socialization: basic meaning and processes
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of "socialization"
Ferrante's position on the nature vs. nurture debate
What cases of social isolation demonstrate
Individual and collective memory
Mead: The development of the social self: the I and me, the importance of mimicking, play, and games. The generalized other.
Cooley: looking-glass self
Jean Piaget: his central argument about cognitive development
Agents of socialization
primary and secondary groups
ingroups and outgroups
resocialization
Total institutions

Ferrante's focus on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and AIDS in Ch. 5: what is her main point?
Durkheim: mechanical vs. organic solidarity
How the division of labor has become global
Why societies based on extensive divisions of labor become more vulnerable
Statuses and social roles
Ascribed vs. achieved statuses
Master statuses
Role strain and role conflict
Goffman: role performance, dramaturgical perspective, impression management
The Thomas theorem and its significance
The social construction of reality
Attribution theory: dispositional causes and situational causes. Its relevance for the history of AIDS.
The main point about the Ugandan "success" story

From the MicroCase workbook:

Sociological perspective
Cross-tabulations: how to read them
Scatterplots and regression lines (know how to interpret them)
Correlation coefficients and tests of statistical significance (know how to interpret them)
Be able to interpret cross-tabulations or scatterplots from Exercises 1-3
Be able to identify the unit of analysis in a given table

February 13, 2009 9:31 AM