Week 1 Quiz

Which of these questions is a sociological question rather than a psychological question or a common-sense claim?

Select one.

• Why does one shopper feel anxious in crowded stores?
• Why do some neighborhoods have longer commutes than others?
• Birds of a feather flock together, so friends are always alike.
• What makes one student enjoy solving math puzzles?

In C. Wright Mills's own example from The Sociological Imagination (1959), millions of people out of work across an economy is best described as which of these?

Select one.

• a personal trouble, because each person lost a job
• a social fact Durkheim measured in Suicide
• a public issue rooted in the structure of a society
• a micro-level pattern of face-to-face interaction

Which founder, writing with Friedrich Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), described society splitting into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat?

Select one.

• Émile Durkheim
• Max Weber
• W. E. B. Du Bois
• Karl Marx

Which term did W. E. B. Du Bois use in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) for the sense of always seeing oneself through the eyes of others?

Select one.

• double consciousness
• anomie
• alienation
• verstehen

A researcher studies how coworkers on a night shift decide who takes the hardest task. At which level of analysis does this question work?

Select one.

• macro, because a workplace is an institution
• micro, because it looks at face-to-face interaction
• psychological, because it looks inside one mind
• macro, because night shifts exist across the economy

Looking at going to college, which perspective asks who benefits when access and cost are unequal, so that college can pass advantage along?

Select one.

• structural functionalism
• symbolic interactionism
• conflict theory
• the sociological imagination

In the two-town example (illustrative, constructed for this course, not real data), Town B records 15 events among 30,000 residents in one year. What is Town B's rate per 100,000 residents?

Select one.

• 50 per 100,000
• 15 per 100,000
• 30 per 100,000
• 20 per 100,000

In the two-town example (illustrative), Town A records 12 events among 40,000 residents and Town B records 15 events among 30,000 residents. Which statement reads the comparison correctly?

Select one.

• Town B's larger count alone shows it has the bigger problem.
• Town A has the higher rate because it has more residents.
• The two towns cannot be compared because they differ in size.
• Town B's rate is higher, and the rate is the fair comparison.

Select every perspective below that works at the macro level of analysis.

Select every option that applies.

• structural functionalism
• conflict theory
• symbolic interactionism
• the micro level

True or false: because Town B's rate in the two-town example (illustrative) is 50 per 100,000, we can conclude that any one resident of Town B behaves differently from any one resident of Town A.

True or false.

• True
• False