Week 6 — Quiz (auto-graded) · Deviance, Crime & Social Control

Course: Introduction to Sociology (SOC 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Adeyemi
Objective tested: Objective 4 — deviance and social control; the three perspectives on deviance; reading crime data.
Points: 10 (1 each) · Assignment group: Quizzes (10% of grade) · Due: end of Module 6.

This is the human-readable quiz with its vetted answer key and feedback. The import-ready Classic QTI is in F-quiz-week-06-qti.xml. The reusable item-bank entries and the Canvas placement block are at the bottom of this file.

Blueprint

No trick questions; distractors target the Week 6 misconceptions named in the lecture outline (deviance ≠ crime; strain modes; labeling vs. differential association; correlation vs. causation and reporting effects in crime stats).

Questions, key, and feedback

Q1 (MC). Sociologists say that deviance is "relative." This means that —
- A. whether an act is deviant depends on the social context (the time, place, and culture) in which it occurs ✅
- B. deviant people are usually related to one another
- C. an act is deviant only if it breaks a written law
- D. deviance is caused entirely by an individual's biology
Feedback: Deviance is a social judgment about an act in a context, not a fixed property of the act. The same behavior (a tattoo, a drink, a gesture) can be normal in one time/place/culture and deviant in another. (C confuses deviance with crime; D ignores the social context.)

Q2 (MC). Émile Durkheim argued that a certain amount of deviance is "normal" and even functional for society. Which of the following is one of the functions of deviance he identified?
- A. Deviance always destabilizes society and serves no purpose
- B. Punishing deviance clarifies and reaffirms a society's shared norms and boundaries ✅
- C. Deviance proves that some groups are biologically inferior
- D. Deviance only occurs in poorly organized societies
Feedback: For Durkheim, the community's response to deviance does social work: punishing a rule-breaker clarifies norms and affirms solidarity, and deviance can even drive social change. (A contradicts his claim; C is false and not sociological; D is the opposite of "deviance is normal in every society.")

Q3 (MC). In Robert Merton's strain theory, a person who fully accepts society's cultural goal of financial success but, lacking legitimate means, pursues it through illegitimate means (such as theft) is using which mode of adaptation?
- A. Conformity
- B. Ritualism
- C. Innovation ✅
- D. Retreatism
Feedback: Innovation = accept the cultural goal, reject or skip the legitimate means. (Conformity accepts both goal and means; ritualism abandons the goal but keeps the means; retreatism rejects both.)

Q4 (Multiple answer — select all that apply). Which of the following are interactionist (micro-level) explanations of deviance?
- A. Labeling theory (Howard Becker) — deviance comes from the label society applies, not the act alone ✅
- B. Differential association (Edwin Sutherland) — deviance is learned through interaction with others ✅
- C. Merton's strain theory — a gap between cultural goals and legitimate means
- D. Conflict theory — the powerful define what counts as deviant
- E. Primary vs. secondary deviance — how a deviant label can reshape a person's identity ✅
Feedback: The interactionist (micro) theories are labeling (Becker; including primary vs. secondary deviance) and differential association (Sutherland) — A, B, E. Strain theory (C) is functionalist and conflict theory (D) is its own macro perspective; both are left unselected.

Q5 (MC). A sociologist argues that laws and their enforcement tend to reflect the interests of the powerful, so that the same behavior is more likely to be labeled criminal when poorer or less powerful groups do it. This explanation of deviance is most characteristic of which perspective?
- A. Structural-functionalism
- B. Conflict theory ✅
- C. Symbolic interactionism
- D. Control theory
Feedback: Conflict theory asks who has the power to define and enforce deviance, and whose interests that serves. (Functionalism asks what deviance does for society; interactionism/labeling focuses on meaning and the label; control theory asks why people conform.)

Q6 (Matching). Match each theorist or term to the core idea associated with it (all factual attributions).
| Theorist / term | Correct core idea |
|---|---|
| Durkheim (functionalist) | A limited amount of deviance is normal and functional — it clarifies norms and can spur social change |
| Merton's strain theory | Deviance arises from a gap between culturally approved goals and the legitimate means to reach them |
| Becker's labeling theory | Deviance is not in the act itself but in society's response — the label that gets applied |
| Sutherland's differential association | Deviant behavior is learned in interaction with others, like any other behavior |
Feedback: Keep the theorists straight — a classic exam trap. Durkheim → functions of deviance; Merton → strain (goals vs. means); Becker → labeling; Sutherland → differential association (learned). (Hirschi's control theory — social bonds — is a fifth idea not paired here.)

Q7 (True / False). "All deviance is crime: any act that violates a social norm is by definition illegal."
- True
- False ✅
Feedback: False. Crime breaks a formally enacted law; deviance breaks a social norm — and norms are broader than laws. Cutting in line or holding an unpopular belief is deviant but not illegal; some illegal acts are widely tolerated. Deviance is broader than crime.

Q8 (True / False). "Suppose a city's police-reported crime counts rise the same year it hires many more officers and launches a campaign urging residents to report crimes. We can conclude from this correlation alone that hiring more police CAUSED more crime to occur."
- True
- False ✅
Feedback: False. This is a reporting effect/artifact, not proof of a cause: more officers and more reporting can raise the amount of crime recorded even if actual offending is flat or falling. A correlation is a clue, not a verdict — the direction and the measurement are confounded.

Q9 (MC). The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program counts crimes reported to police, while the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) asks a national sample of people whether they were victimized, whether or not they told police. Because the BJS NCVS found that only about 2 in 5 (around 42%) of violent victimizations in 2022 were reported to police, which statement is best supported?
- A. The UCR police-reported counts can miss crimes that victims never reported, so the two measures can diverge ✅
- B. The NCVS is always wrong because it does not use police records
- C. A rise in reported crime always means a rise in actual crime
- D. Victimization surveys and police data must always produce identical numbers
Feedback: Because a large share of victimizations are never reported to police, UCR (police-reported) counts can miss crime that the NCVS (a victimization survey) still captures — so the two measures can diverge. (B and D misunderstand what a survey is for; C is the reported-vs-actual confusion from Q8.) The 42%-reported figure is from BJS, Criminal Victimization, 2022.

Q10 (MC). In labeling theory, a teenager shoplifts once (an isolated act) but is publicly caught, labeled a "delinquent," treated as one by teachers and peers, and gradually comes to see and act as a "troublemaker." The later behavior, organized around the deviant label and identity, is called —
- A. primary deviance
- B. secondary deviance ✅
- C. a folkway
- D. conformity
Feedback: Secondary deviance follows after a label is applied and internalized — the label becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The first, isolated act (before any label sticks) is primary deviance. (A folkway is an everyday norm; conformity is following norms.)

Answer key (quick reference)

Quality gate (self-checked): each single-answer item has exactly one correct option; the multiple-answer item (Q4) keys the three interactionist theories (A, B, E) and requires the functionalist (C) and conflict (D) options to be left unselected; the matching item (Q6) pairs four prompts to four distinct ideas; every theorist/term is named factually (Durkheim → functions of deviance & anomie; Merton → strain & the five modes; Becker → labeling & primary/secondary deviance; Sutherland → differential association; the conflict framework rooted in Marx). The two correlation/causation-and-reading-data items are keyed correctly: Q7 (deviance ≠ crime) is False, Q8 (more police → more crime) is False (a reporting artifact, not a cause). The one published statistic in the quiz — the BJS NCVS figure that about 42% of violent victimizations were reported to police in 2022 — was verified live at the BJS source (Criminal Victimization, 2022); it is used to test the read-the-data skill, not to assert a causal claim. No correlation is presented as causation; no figure is fabricated. No computation in this quiz, so no arithmetic to mis-key.

Item-bank entries (for variants + the midterm/final)

All ten items are tagged course=SOC1 · week=6 · objective=4 · topic=deviance-crime-and-social-control and deposited in Item Bank: Week 6 — Deviance, Crime & Social Control. The midterm (Week 8) and the per-term variant updates draw fresh items from this bank. (Tags: q1 deviance-relative, q2 durkheim-functions, q3 merton-strain-innovation, q4 interactionist-theories, q5 conflict-power, q6 theorist-match, q7 deviance-vs-crime, q8 correlation-causation-crime, q9 ucr-vs-ncvs, q10 labeling-secondary-deviance.)

Canvas placement block

canvas_object   = Quizzes::Quiz
title           = "Week 6 Quiz — Deviance, Crime & Social Control"
assignment_group = "Quizzes"
points_possible = 10
grading_type    = points
due_offset_days = 6        # 6 days after module start
published       = true
shuffle_answers = true
provenance      = "~ Prof. Adeyemi's edition · Fall 2026 · built with thecoursemaker.com"