Week 6 Discussion — Is Rule-Breaking Ever Good for a Group? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Hook

Every group you belong to has rules, and someone always breaks them: a teammate bends a rule to win, a coworker ignores a policy everyone else follows, a neighbor defies a new ordinance. Sometimes the group pulls together afterward, sometimes it splinters, and sometimes the rule itself changes. Durkheim argued that deviance does real work for a society; others ask who wrote the rule in the first place.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: Is deviance ever functional? Pick one real moment of rule-breaking in a group you know — a team, a workplace, a club, an online community, a neighborhood. Take a position: did the rule-breaking and the group's response mostly strengthen the group, mostly harm it, or prepare the way for a change in the rule? Use Durkheim's functions of deviance, ask the conflict account's question of who wrote the rule and whose behavior it falls on, and name each perspective's level of analysis.

Option B: What would you trust to tell you whether crime is changing where you live? The Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey reported 23.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older in 2024, of which 11.2 per 1,000 were reported to police, about 48%. Take a position: when someone says "crime is up," should a reader lean more on police-reported data, more on a victimization survey, or insist on both? Use the reporting effect and the difference between a rate and a count, and say what your choice of source can and cannot show.

There is no single right answer. Rule-breaking can unite a group, divide it, or move its norms, and each crime source answers a different question, so either option can be argued well in more than one direction. Pick one you actually care about, and tell us your reasoning.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, describe the rule-breaking moment and the group's response; for Option B, describe the crime claim or headline you are weighing.
• State your position in one clear sentence and give your reason.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (deviance, crime, relativity of deviance, social control, informal social control, formal social control, functions of deviance, social solidarity, strain theory, labeling theory, primary deviance, secondary deviance, police-reported crime data, victimization survey, reporting effect, rate, count) correctly.
• Name one thing that complicates your position: for Option A, who wrote the rule and whose behavior it falls on; for Option B, what the source you lean on cannot show.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: ask whether a poster's example is deviance, crime, or both, point out who holds the power to define the rule in their case, or ask whether a figure they cite is a rate or a count and which source it comes from. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option A. On my recreational volleyball team, one player kept skipping the warm-up rule, and after a tense team meeting everyone agreed the rule mattered. A functionalist would say, at the macro level, that the response reaffirmed a shared norm and pulled the team together. But the conflict account asks who wrote the rule: the captains did, and the player who skipped it works a late shift, so the rule fell hardest on the one person with the least control over the schedule.

Notice how it separates the group's norm from any law, reads the case through two perspectives with their levels, and takes a position without pretending the other side has nothing to say. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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