Final Exam Study Guide
Introduction to Sociology
Spring 2009

The final exam will be given at 2:00 p.m. on Friday, May 8th. Please arrive and time and bring a #2 pencil. As before, some questions will be taken from the online tutorial quizzes at the text website. If you are familiar with the following, you should do well. Remember that if an emergency forces you to miss the exam, it is your responsibility to contact me via email (preferably) or office phone (856-225-6013) that day to arrange a make-up . Failure to do so may result in a grade of F.

From earlier parts of the text and associated lectures:

Have a general idea of who Marx, Weber and Durkheim were and what their central ideas were
Be familiar with the basic differences between functionalist, conflict, and interactionist perspectives in sociology
Understand the criteria of causation: time order, correlation, non-spuriousness
Population and sample
Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism

From the MicroCase workbook and exercises:

Independent and dependent variables
Operationalization
Statistical significance
Correlation coefficients (Cramer's V and Pearson's r)
The proper format of hypotheses
Testing hypotheses using cross-tabulations and scatterplots
Control variables
Spurious correlations

Be familiar with what is involved in each of the steps in the Do-Your-Own Exercise.

From the Ferrante text and associated lectures since the last exam:

Be familiar with Ferrante's core concepts in Chapter 10.
Sex and gender.
The sociological significance of Samoa: a third gender plus Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa
Why biological sex is not a clear-cut category: intersexed babies; discrepancies between sex chromosomes and anatomy; transsexuals
Gender as a social construct
Gender polarization
The significance of fa'afafine in Samoa. Ferrante's discussion of how its existence may be explained. Understand the difference between cultural and socio-economic factors, as discussed in class.
Mechanisms for perpetuating gender ideals: be familiar with the basic research findings that Ferrante discusses for 1) socialization; 2) structural constraints; 3) sexist ideologies.
Ferrante's argument about the relationship between gender equality and family stability.
Know what the gender pay gap is, what its trend is, and what explains the trend.
Feminism as a social movement and as a sociological perspective.

Understand why the family is so difficult to define. Be familiar with the problem of universality.
Be familiar in a general way with how Japan and US compare in terms of infant mortality, single-parent households, domestic abuse, child abuse, divorce, marital satisfaction, and fertility rates.
Be familiar with the terms for describing family characteristics on page 333. Understand how they apply to different societies.
Understand the difference between functionalist and conflict approaches to understanding the family
Be familiar with Ferrante's discussion of the rise and decline of the breadwinner system, including the factors that undermined and transformed it.
The concept of "family wage"
Understand the structural nature of Ferrante's analysis of changing family structures. Be familiar with the factors behind declines in total fertility, increased life expectancy, increased divorce rates, and increased employment opportunites for women, as well as the decline in parental authority, the latered economic status of children, and the increasingly-important issue of care-giving. Know roughly what porportion of older people are in nursing homes. Be familiar with the consequences of longer life for marriage and family.
Understand the position of most sociologists on the question of whether the family institution is in decline.

Films: 1-800-India. Be familiar with BPO (business process outsourcing) and how it is changing gender concepts and family relations in India. Beyond Beijing: Women and Economic Development: Micro-credit and family change in Bangladesh. Grameen Bank and Muhammed Yunus

April 22, 2009 8:10 PM