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Week 1 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 1 — Reading Two Towns: Counts, Rates, and the Sociological Imagination — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Sociology Free sample edition
Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 1 of the term — read a first statistic the way a sociologist does, and explain it to someone new to sociology.

This week you learned to see a private problem as part of a public pattern, and to compare places by rate rather than count. In this assignment you work four short problems on a small comparison of two towns, interpret each one, and explain the comparison to someone who has never studied sociology. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Sociology in Action Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

The two-town example is an illustrative dataset constructed for this course (not real data). Town A records 12 events among 40,000 residents in one year. Town B records 15 events among 30,000 residents in the same year. A neighbor sees only the counts and concludes that Town B must have the bigger problem. Your job is to check that conclusion the way a sociologist would.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

  1. Town A records 12 events among 40,000 residents in one year. What is Town A's rate per 100,000 residents?
  2. Town B records 15 events among 30,000 residents in the same year. What is Town B's rate per 100,000 residents?
  3. Town B's rate is 50 per 100,000 and Town A's rate is 30 per 100,000. By how many events per 100,000 residents is Town B's rate higher?
  4. Town B recorded 15 events and Town A recorded 12 events in the same year. How many more events did Town B record than Town A?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: say what the rate measures (events for every 100,000 residents in one year), and explain why dividing by the number of residents matters, using the words count and rate.
  • Problem 2: say which town has the higher rate, and answer the first two of the four questions: what is measured, and over what population and period.
  • Problem 3: answer the last two of the four questions: what the comparison shows and what it does not show, and whether it is a correlation or a cause.
  • Problem 4: explain why the count difference and the rate comparison can tell different stories when towns differ in size. Then use the sociological imagination: tell one Town B resident's experience of the event (a personal trouble) apart from the town-wide rate (a pattern), and name one question a sociologist might ask next about Town B's higher rate, saying whether it works at the macro or the micro level. Do not answer that question or invent a reason; ask it.

Explain it to a non-expert

The neighbor who saw only the counts asks you, "So is Town B the worse place to live?" Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains the difference between a count and a rate, reports both towns' rates in everyday words, and names one limit, including that the numbers are illustrative and that a town's rate says nothing about any one resident. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine two public libraries, where the larger one reports more overdue books. Model answer: "The bigger library has more overdue books, but it also has many more members, so the raw number is not a fair comparison. To compare them, divide each library's overdue books by its number of members, which turns each count into a rate. The rate tells you how common overdue books are at each library; it does not tell you why, and it says nothing about whether any one member returns books late."

Use that pattern for the two-town example, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the counts and residents without guessing which values or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

  • the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
  • your message to the neighbor, explaining count versus rate, reporting both rates, and naming one limit; and
  • a one-line restatement of the counts and residents you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch comparing the two towns' rates with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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