Lecture: Midterm Review & Exam
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 8
Opening
Picture three people. A nursing student hears someone in their care blame themselves for losing a job. A business major reads that one region's poverty rate climbed. A neighbor on a community forum is arguing about crime. Each of them faces the question this lecture is about: is this pattern about one person, or about how a whole society is arranged?
You've done seven weeks of work to get here. Week 1 gave you the sociological imagination and three perspectives. Week 2 gave you four questions for any figure. Weeks 3 and 4 showed how culture and the self are learned. Week 5 read groups, Week 6 read deviance, and Week 7 read the ladder of class. In this lecture I want to walk back through all seven, one distinction at a time, rerunning a figure you already know. Then I'll hand you one new tool, the level-of-analysis habit. Next week, in Week 9, the course opens its second half with global inequality, and that habit goes with you.
Let's start with one person who loses a job.
1. Connect a trouble to an issue
Picture one person in a city who loses a warehouse job. Now picture a whole economy where a great many people are out of work at once. The first is a story about one life. The second is a story about how the economy is arranged.
That's the distinction Week 1 started with. Mills, in 1959, in The Sociological Imagination, gave it names. A personal trouble is a private problem within one person's life and immediate surroundings, such as one person losing a job. A public issue is a problem rooted in the structure of a society that reaches far beyond any one person.
Week 1 also gave you a move to make with any phenomenon. You run it through three lenses, one sentence each. Structural functionalism works at the macro level and asks what job a pattern does for society. Conflict theory also works at the macro level and asks who benefits. Symbolic interactionism works at the micro level and asks what the pattern means to people face to face. None of them wins. Each answers a different question.
And there was a data move. In the two-town example, which is illustrative and not real data, Town A had 12 events among 40,000 residents, a rate of 30 per 100,000. Town B had 15 events among 30,000 residents, a rate of 50 per 100,000. You compare places by rate, never by count, because the towns differ in size.
Pause and try this. Town B's rate is 50 per 100,000 and Town A's is 30. How much higher is Town B's rate?
Subtract one rate from the other, and keep the base.
Here's the answer. Town B's rate is higher by 20 per 100,000. Both rates sit on the same base, so the difference keeps that base too.
2. Check how we know
Picture a bathroom scale that always reads two pounds heavy. Step on it five times and you get the same number five times. It's consistent. It's also wrong every time.
That scale holds Week 2's first distinction. Reliability is the consistency of a measure. Validity is whether a measure captures what it is meant to capture. The scale is reliable but not valid, so reliability does not guarantee validity.
Week 2's second distinction was about whom a study can speak for. The population is everyone you want to describe, and the sample is the people you actually study. A representative random sample beats a large self-selected one, because a bigger pile of opt-in answers is still a biased pile.
The third distinction is the one this course leans on hardest. A correlation is two variables changing together. Causation is the stronger claim that a change in one produces a change in the other. Ice-cream sales and drownings both climb in summer because of the heat. The heat is a third variable, and neither one causes the other.
Then you read a real figure four ways. Pew Research Center found that 91% of U.S. adults own a smartphone in its 2025 survey, against 35% in 2011. What's measured is self-reported ownership. Over whom is U.S. adults, at two times. What it shows is a rise of 56 percentage points. And correlation or cause? Neither. It's a description.
Pause and try this. Someone calls the rise from 35% to 91% "a 56 percent increase." What unit should they have used?
Think about what you get when you subtract two percentages.
Here's the answer. Percentage points. The difference between two percentages is measured in percentage points, so the rise is 56 percentage points.
3. Sort the rules and the self
Picture a family dinner where someone starts eating before everyone is served. A few people raise an eyebrow. Now picture someone copying a classmate's exam. The reaction is much stronger. Both broke a rule, but the rules weigh differently.
That's Week 3. Folkways are everyday customs that carry no moral weight, like how fast you answer a message. Mores are norms that carry moral weight, like honesty on an exam. Week 3 also asked how you judge other people's rules. Ethnocentrism is judging another culture by your own culture's standards. Cultural relativism is understanding a custom in its own context. It's a method of study, not a verdict that anything goes.
Week 4 asked how you became a self at all, and it gave you two thinkers you must keep apart. The looking-glass self is Cooley's, from 1902, in Human Nature and the Social Order. You imagine how you appear to others, you imagine their judgment, and you build a self-feeling from it. The stages and the generalized other are Mead's, from 1934, in Mind, Self, and Society. The generalized other is the broad expectations of the society as a whole.
Here's an image to hold. Cooley hands you a mirror. Mead hands you a staircase: imitation first, then playing one role, then keeping a whole team's roles in mind. Both live at the micro level, in symbolic interactionism.
Pause and try this. A new hire pictures how the shift lead sees them and feels proud by closing time. Is that Cooley or Mead?
Ask whether you're hearing a mirror or a staircase.
Here's the answer. Cooley. Imagining how you appear, imagining the judgment, and feeling pride from it are the three steps of the looking-glass self.
4. Read the room and the group
Picture a night-shift nurse who is also a parent with a school concert the same evening. Now picture a team captain who has to cheer teammates on and also decide who sits out. Both feel pulled two ways. The pulls come from different places.
That's Week 5. A status is a social position, and a role is the behavior expected of someone in it. Role conflict is a clash between two different roles, like the nurse's job and the nurse's family. Role strain is tension inside a single role, like the captain's. Week 5 also sorted groups by the depth and purpose of the relationship, not by size alone. A family is a primary group; a work department is a secondary group.
Then you read two studies. In Asch's 1951 study, 37 of 50 participants went along with a plainly wrong majority at least once. That's 74%. But only about one-third of the answers, 32%, were errors, so most answers stayed correct. And when one partner answered correctly, the error share fell from 32% to 10.4%. One ally undid much of the group's pull.
In Granovetter's 1973 survey of 54 job-finders who used a contact, 55.6% saw that contact only occasionally. Acquaintances carried most of these people to work.
Pause and try this. Does Asch's 74% mean that most answers in the study went along with the wrong majority?
Ask whether the figure counts people or answers.
Here's the answer. No. The 74% counts people who yielded at least once. About one-third of answers were errors, so most answers stayed correct.
5. Tell rule-breaking from law-breaking
Picture someone cutting into a long line at a food truck. People glare, but nobody calls the police. Now picture a driver going a little over the limit on a highway where nearly every car does the same. A law is broken, and nobody reacts.
That's Week 6. Deviance is behavior that violates the norms of a group, whether or not it breaks a law. Crime is behavior that violates a formal law. The two overlap, but they don't match.
Week 6 gave you three explanations, one per perspective. The functionalist account comes from Durkheim, who described what deviance does for a group, and from Merton's strain theory, which reads deviance as a response to a gap between cultural goals and approved means. The conflict account asks who has the power to define deviance. The interactionist account includes labeling theory, from Becker in 1963: whether an act counts as deviant depends less on the act than on how others react to it.
Then you read the National Crime Victimization Survey for 2024. It counted 23.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, and 11.2 per 1,000 were reported to police. That's about 48%. Fewer than half reached police records.
Pause and try this. If police-recorded violent crime rose next year, does that prove violent crime itself rose?
Remember how much never reached police records.
Here's the answer. No. Police records can rise because more victims report, even if victimization stays the same. That's the reporting effect.
6. Read the ladder
Picture two coworkers who earn the same paycheck. One goes home to a paid-off house. The other sends part of every check to a student loan. On paper they're equal. Their lives aren't.
That's Week 7. A caste system is closed: standing is fixed at birth. A class system is open: achievement as well as birth shapes standing. Income is a flow of money that comes in over a period of time. Wealth is a stock: everything a household owns minus everything it owes, at one point in time.
Week 7 also staged a debate. The Davis–Moore thesis, from 1945, argues that the more functionally important a position is, the more reward it must carry to attract qualified people. Tumin's critique, from 1953, answers that importance is hard to measure and that stratification blocks talent. The conflict view reads the whole ladder as advantage passed down. This course declares no winner.
Then you read the Census Bureau's 2024 figures. The median household income was 83,730 dollars, the household in the middle of the line. The official poverty rate was 10.6%. The Supplemental Poverty Measure, which draws the line and counts resources differently, was 12.9%.
Pause and try this. The official rate is 10.6% and the supplemental rate is 12.9%. How far apart are they, and in what unit?
Subtract, then name the unit for a gap between two percentages.
Here's the answer. They're 2.3 percentage points apart. Same people, same year, two definitions of the line.
7. Build the level-of-analysis habit
Now the one new tool. Picture a family dinner where a cousin says, "If people are poor, they made bad choices." Someone else answers, "No, the economy put them there." Both sound sure. Neither has said what level the figure lives at.
The level-of-analysis habit is a three-question check you run on any social pattern and any explanation of it. First, where's the pattern: macro structure across a whole society, or a micro moment of face-to-face interaction? Second, where's the explanation? An individual explanation points to the traits, choices, or efforts of particular people. A structural explanation points to the arrangements of a society, its economy, its institutions, its rules, and the way it draws its measures, which shape many people's situations at once. Third, who's the figure about? The ecological fallacy is the error of applying a group figure, like a rate or a share, to one person in the group as if it described that person.
Let's run it on the poverty rate. The 10.6% is a macro pattern, a share of the whole population, not a fact about any one household. Saying everyone counted made poor choices is an individual explanation, and it's a claim, not a finding. And the data themselves show one structural fact. The same people, in the same year, count as 10.6% or 12.9% poor depending on where the line is drawn. That gap of 2.3 percentage points came from a definition. Nobody chose it.
Now run the third question on Town B. Its rate of 50 per 100,000 describes the town. It says nothing about any one person who lives there. Reading it as a fact about your neighbor is the ecological fallacy.
I want you to see the habit's limit, too. It doesn't tell you which explanation is true. It tells you what kind of claim you're making, so you know what evidence would test it.
Pause and try this. Granovetter found that 55.6% of his 54 job-finders saw their contact only occasionally. A friend says, "So my next job will come through an acquaintance." Which question of the habit does that break?
Ask who the figure is about.
Here's the answer. The third question. The 55.6% describes 54 job-finders in one survey, so pinning it on one person's next job is the ecological fallacy.
Closing
Let me pull it together. A personal trouble lives in one life, and a public issue lives in a society's structure. Reliability isn't validity, and a correlation isn't a cause. A folkway carries no moral weight, and a mos does. Cooley owns the mirror, and Mead owns the stages. Role conflict is between roles, and role strain is inside one. Deviance breaks a norm, and crime breaks a law. Caste is closed, class is open, income flows, and wealth is owned. And the new habit asks three questions: where's the pattern, where's the explanation, and who's the figure about?
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the practice set, and the discussion, then the midterm study guide, the practice exam, and the midterm itself. Next week, in Week 9, Global Inequality carries the level-of-analysis habit from one country to the whole world.
Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com