SOC 302 1st EditionFinal Exam Study Guide Lectures: 1 - 23Culture and Social Structure: What it is and how it works- Culture: the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and material objects that are passed from one generation to the next- Material culture- Nonmaterial culture- Values: principles or ideals concerning what is intrinsically desirable- Norms: expectations or rules of behavior that develop from a group’s values.- Sanctions: reactions to adhering to or breaking norms.- Baumeister: Cultures succeed by surviving and providing material needsBasics of research methods- Scientific Method1. Theory2. Operationalization3. Observation and Analysis- Basic research: advances fundamental knowledge- Applied research: addresses specific concerns or offers solutions to particular problems- Hypothesis: a specified testable expectation about empirical reality that follows from a more general proposition or research question.- Surveys- Concept: what it is you want to know about or measure (latent, not directly observable)o Conceptualization: the mental process whereby fuzzy and imprecise notions (concepts) are made more specific. - Dimension: a specifiable aspect of a concept- Indicator: a sign of the presence or absence of the concept we’re studying; the means by which you will tap a dimension of a concept. o Operationalization: spelling out exactly how the indicator will be measured - Measurements in the real worldo Common levels of measurement, from most broad to most specific Nominal Ordinal Interval Ratio- Reliability: whether a particular technique, applied repeatedly to the same object, would yield the same result- Validity: the extent to which an empirical measure adequately reflects the real meaning of the concept under consideration Institutionalization- Institutions: structured mechanisms of sociological order governing social behavior- Institutionalization: the process of making something the norm.Socialization (and plausibility structures)- Socialization: the process of learning norms, values, and behavior patterns transmitted by social groups.- Conformity: a process by which people's beliefs or behaviors are influenced by others within a group. - Cognitive structures: conceptual dimensions on which we scale our experience; they allowus to compare one experience with another.o Cognitive restructuring- Plausibility structures: structures that support normative behavior of a certain kindDemographic transitions, moral hazards- Demographic transition: the theory describing a possible transition from high birth and death rates to low birth/death rates as part of the economic development of a country from preindustrial to industrial. 1. High birth rate and high fluctuating death rate2. Declining death rates and high birth rates3. Declining birth/death rates4. Low death rates and low but fluctuating birth rates.- Moral hazards: situations in which people are insulated from risk.- Neo-Malthusians: argue that over the long-term, fertility of a population depends on the most rapidly reproducing subgroups within the population. In the short-term, overallgrowth rate will slow as most of the existing groups have fewer children, but will pick back upNarratives- Narratives: Broad stories that each of us are embedded ino We all belong to multiple narrativesCharacteristics of social networks- Dyads and triads- Iron Law of Oligarchy: organizations come to be dominated by a self-perpetuating elite- Homophily- Reciprocity- network closure- structural holes- tie strength- bridgesStrong and weak social construction- Social construction of reality: if people define situations as real, then they are real in their consequences- Realistic (weak) social construction: humanity has a particular, essential, and natural constitution, and an objective reality exists independently of our consciousness of it- Unrealistic (strong) social construction: reality itself is a human social construction and is sustained as “real” through ongoing social interactions. Therefore, our knowledge aboutreality is culturally relative, since no human has access to reality “as it really is.”Gender, sexual economics, and mating markets- Baumeister: Culture uses men and women differently- Women are the “gatekeepers” – they set the “price” of sex- Men are the “consumers” – they want sex in exchange for anything from buying a drink to devoting their lives to a woman through marriage- All because men want sex more than women doContemporary patterns of marriage, divorce, and fertility- Drop in price of sexo Pornographyo Online datingo Birth control- Today’s cultural model of individualism emphasizes one’s primary obligation to oneself rather than to a spouse and childreno Drop in marriage