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Week 8 · Midterm study guide

Midterm Exam — Study Guide

Introduction to Sociology Free sample edition

Coverage — what the midterm covers

The midterm is cumulative over Weeks 1–7. It opens in the Week 8 module and closes at the due time your instructor sets. There is no time limit, and you get one attempt. The questions appear one at a time, and you cannot go back once you move on.

Format: 25 questions, and every question counts the same. Twenty-three ask you to pick one option, one asks you to judge a statement as true or false, and one asks you to pick every option that applies. Any figure or table a question needs is printed in the question, and the arithmetic is short enough for scratch paper.

What is in scope, with the number of midterm questions on each course objective:

Midterm coverage by course objective: the weeks that teach it, its main skills, and its number of questions out of 25
Course objective Weeks Main skills Questions
The sociological imagination, the three perspectives, and the founders 1, used in every later week Troubles and issues; macro and micro; the founders and their ideas; counts and rates; the three perspectives run on one topic 6
Research methods and reading data 2 The four methods; reliability and validity; population and sample; correlation and cause; percent and percentage points 2
Culture and socialization 3–4 Culture and society; material and nonmaterial culture; norms and sanctions; ethnocentrism and relativism; the agents; Cooley and Mead; total institutions 5
Interaction, groups, and deviance 5–6 Status and role; dramaturgy; primary and secondary groups; Asch and Granovetter; deviance and crime; the three explanations of deviance; crime data 8
Stratification and class 7 Caste and class; income and wealth; median and mean; poverty measures; Marx and Weber; mobility; Davis–Moore and its critics 4

Interaction, groups, and deviance carry the most questions, so put the most review time on Weeks 5 and 6. The imagination and the perspectives come next, and they also run through every other week's topic. Research methods has only two questions of its own, but its habits of reading a figure show up across the course. Week 8's level-of-analysis habit is not scored on its own, and practicing it is still good review, because it runs on the Week 1 and Week 2 ideas the midterm does check.

Topic-by-topic review

Each topic gives the key idea in plain words, the course's own definitions, a course example, and the mistake students make most often with its cure. The deeper review for every topic is that week's chapter, lecture page, and slide deck.

Week 1 — The sociological imagination and doing sociology

  • Key idea: a private life sits inside public patterns, and sociology studies the patterns, testing its claims against evidence.
  • Definitions: sociology is the systematic study of society, groups, institutions, and social structure, which looks for patterns across many people and tests its claims against evidence. The sociological imagination, named by C. Wright Mills in 1959 (The Sociological Imagination), connects a private problem in one person's life to a pattern rooted in the structure of a society. A personal trouble is a private problem within one person's life; a public issue is a problem rooted in the structure of a society that reaches far beyond any one person.
  • Levels: the macro level looks at whole societies, institutions, and large-scale patterns. The micro level looks at face-to-face interaction and the meanings people share in it.
  • The three perspectives, in order: structural functionalism (macro) sees society as interrelated parts, each doing a job; it is rooted in Durkheim and developed by Parsons and Merton. Conflict theory (macro) sees a contest over scarce resources and power and asks who benefits; it is rooted in Marx. Symbolic interactionism (micro) sees society built through everyday interaction and shared meanings; it is rooted in Mead and Cooley, named by Blumer, and extended by Goffman. No lens wins; each answers a different question at its own level.
  • The founders: Comte named and popularized the word sociology (1839). Martineau wrote Society in America (1837). Durkheim gave us social facts, solidarity, anomie (the unsettled, rule-less feeling that spreads when the norms people lived by stop applying), and Suicide (1897). Marx, with Engels, wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) on the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and alienation. Weber gave us rationalization, verstehen (interpretive understanding of the meaning an action has for the actor), and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905). Du Bois wrote The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and named the color line and double consciousness. Addams was among the field's early builders.
  • Course example: in the two-town example (illustrative, not real data), Town A records 12 events among 40,000 residents, so 12 ÷ 40,000 × 100,000 = 30 per 100,000. Town B records 15 events among 30,000, so 15 ÷ 30,000 × 100,000 = 50 per 100,000. The smaller town has the higher rate, and the rate is the fair comparison because the towns differ in size.
  • The four questions for any statistic: what is measured, over what population and period, what it shows and does not, and whether it is a correlation or a cause.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) "sociology is common sense." Cure: common sense says both "birds of a feather flock together" and "opposites attract"; sociology tests the claim. (2) conflict theory credited to Durkheim, or functionalism to Marx. Cure: Marx is the root of conflict theory; Durkheim is the root of functionalism. (3) a society-wide rate read as millions of separate personal failings. Cure: say it is a public issue and look for the structure behind it.

Week 2 — Sociological research methods

  • Key idea: how a study was built decides what it may claim.
  • The research cycle: a question, a hypothesis, a variable defined so it can be measured (to operationalize it), a method, data, and analysis. The independent variable is the presumed cause; the dependent variable is the presumed effect.
  • The four methods: a survey asks many people the same questions and buys breadth. An experiment compares an experimental group that gets a treatment with a control group that does not, and it is built for cause. Field research and ethnography collect firsthand data in natural settings and buy depth. Secondary data analysis reuses data someone else already collected, such as Census tables; Durkheim's Suicide (1897) is the discipline's founding use of it.
  • Measures: reliability is consistency; validity is whether a measure captures what it is meant to capture. A bathroom scale that always reads two pounds heavy is reliable but not valid.
  • Samples: the population is the whole group you want to describe; the sample is the people you actually study. A random sample gives every member a known, equal chance of selection. A large self-selected sample still carries sampling bias, and collecting more responses the same way does not remove it.
  • Cause: a correlation means two variables change together. A third variable can drive both, which makes the link a spurious correlation: ice-cream sales and drownings both climb in summer because of the heat. Only an experiment with random assignment, or a study designed to find a cause, earns the word "cause."
  • Traditions and ethics: positivism studies society with the methods of the natural sciences; interpretivism seeks Weber's verstehen. Quantitative research works with numbers; qualitative research works with words, observations, and meanings. Informed consent, confidentiality, and approval by a review board protect participants, and the Tuskegee syphilis study is named as the reason those rules exist.
  • Course example: Pew Research Center's 2025 survey of 5,022 U.S. adults found that 91% own a smartphone, against 35% in 2011. The change is 91 − 35 = 56 percentage points, and as a percent of the starting share it is 56 ÷ 35 × 100 = 160 percent. One change, two units, so the unit is always written. It is a description, not a cause.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) "a bigger sample is always better." Cure: representative beats big. (2) reliability and validity swapped. Cure: the heavy scale is consistent and still wrong. (3) a percentage read as a percentage point. Cure: subtract the two shares for points; divide by the starting share for percent. (4) correlation read as causation. Cure: name a third variable before you trust the arrow.

Week 3 — Culture

  • Key idea: culture is what a group shares; society is the people who share it.
  • Definitions: culture is the shared values, beliefs, norms, symbols, language, and material objects of a group. Material culture is the physical objects a group makes and uses; nonmaterial culture is the ideas a group shares about how to live. A value is a shared standard of what is good; a belief is a statement held to be true, which can be checked against evidence.
  • Norms by moral weight: folkways are everyday customs with no moral weight; mores (singular mos) carry moral weight; a taboo is the strongest prohibition. Sumner (1906), Folkways, brought the words folkways and mores into sociology.
  • Sanctions sorted two ways: positive (a reward) or negative (a penalty), and formal (an official body under written rules) or informal (ordinary people in daily life). Moral weight and formality are separate questions, so a folkway can carry a formal sanction.
  • Symbols and language: the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis proposes that the language you speak shapes how you experience the world; it is a hypothesis to be tested, not a proven law.
  • Across cultures and time: cultural universals (associated with Murdock), culture shock, and cultural lag (Ogburn, 1922), the gap that opens when material culture changes faster than the norms around it.
  • Judge or understand: ethnocentrism is judging another culture by the standards of your home culture, usually treating your own way as the normal one. Cultural relativism is understanding a custom by the meaning it has in its own context; it is a method of study, not a verdict that anything goes.
  • Groups within: a subculture keeps the dominant culture's main norms and adds its own; a counterculture actively rejects the dominant norms.
  • Course example: the six-norm sort (illustrative) holds 3 folkways + 2 mores + 1 taboo = 6 norms. The store's uniform-shirt rule stays a folkway even though breaking it brings a written warning, because a written rule does not make a norm a mos.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) folkways and mores swapped. Cure: ask "is there moral weight?" before you ask "is it written down?" (2) relativism read as "anything goes." Cure: it is a way of studying a practice. (3) Sapir–Whorf stated as a law. Cure: say "hypothesis." (4) subculture and counterculture conflated. Cure: adding norms versus rejecting them.

Week 4 — Socialization and the self

  • Key idea: a self is learned, through other people, for life.
  • Definitions: socialization is the lifelong process through which a person learns the culture of a group and develops a self, with nature and nurture working together rather than competing. The six agents of socialization are the family, peers, school, media, religion, and the workplace. The hidden curriculum is the set of lessons about obedience, punctuality, and hierarchy that a school teaches without writing them down, alongside its official subjects.
  • Cooley: in Human Nature and the Social Order (1902), Charles Horton Cooley set out the looking-glass self in three steps: you imagine how you appear to others, you imagine their judgment of that appearance, and you develop a self-feeling from it.
  • Mead: in Mind, Self, and Society (1934), George Herbert Mead traced the preparatory stage (imitation), the play stage (taking one other person's role), and the game stage (keeping several roles in mind at once). The generalized other is the broad expectations of the society as a whole. The "I" is the spontaneous, acting part of the self; the "me" sees itself through others' expectations.
  • Rebuilding a self: resocialization is unlearning old ways and learning new ones. A total institution, analyzed in Goffman's Asylums (1961), is a place where one authority controls every part of daily life, and a degradation ceremony at entry strips away the old identity. Anticipatory socialization is learning a role's norms before you hold it, and the life course is the sequence of stages across which socialization continues.
  • Course example: in the socialization scene set (illustrative), a boot camp where recruits live, sleep, eat, and train under one authority is a total institution; a strict office whose workers go home every night is not.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) Cooley's and Mead's ideas swapped. Cure: the mirror (looking-glass) is Cooley's; the stages and the generalized other are Mead's. (2) the generalized other read as one specific person. Cure: it is society's expectations in general. (3) any strict place called a total institution. Cure: ask whether one authority controls every part of daily life. (4) socialization thought to end in childhood. Cure: name a retirement or a new job.

Week 5 — Social interaction, groups, and organizations

  • Key idea: people build reality together, perform for one another, and feel the pull of the groups around them.
  • Building reality: the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) says repeated actions become habits and then feel like "the way things are." The Thomas theorem (Thomas and Thomas, 1928) says that when people define a situation as real, it becomes real in its consequences.
  • Positions and scripts: a status is a social position. An ascribed status is given without choice, an achieved status is earned or chosen, and a master status dominates how others see and treat a person. A role is the behavior expected of someone in a status. Role conflict is a clash between two roles; role strain is tension inside one role.
  • Dramaturgy: Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) treats interaction as a performance, with impression management on a front stage and relaxation on a back stage.
  • Groups: a primary group is small, intimate, face-to-face, and lasting (Cooley, 1909); a secondary group is larger, more impersonal, and organized around a shared task or goal. The criterion is the depth and purpose of the relationship, not size alone. Sumner drew the line between the in-group ("we") and the out-group ("they"). Simmel noted that a dyad ends if either member leaves, while a triad survives one departure.
  • Organizations: Weber's ideal type of bureaucracy, a classroom model, has a hierarchy of offices, written rules, impersonality, specialization, and appointment by technical qualification; the iron cage is people trapped in the rules they built. Michels's iron law of oligarchy (1911) says large organizations drift toward rule by a few. Ritzer's McDonaldization (1993) names efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control.
  • Course examples: in Asch's 1951 study, 37 of 50 participants went along with a plainly wrong unanimous majority at least once, yet about one-third (32%) of critical-trial answers were pro-majority errors, and one dissenting partner cut that share to 10.4%. In Granovetter's 1973 survey of 54 job-finders who used a contact, 16.7% saw that contact often, 55.6% occasionally, and 27.8% rarely.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) role conflict and role strain swapped. Cure: two roles clash, or one role pulls two ways. (2) a master status read as "the status a person likes best." Cure: it is the one that dominates how others see the person. (3) groups sorted by size alone. Cure: ask about depth and purpose. (4) Asch read as "most people always conform." Cure: most people yielded at least once, but most answers stayed correct. (5) weak ties read as worse ties. Cure: they are bridges to new information.

Week 6 — Deviance, crime, and social control

  • Key idea: a norm, not the act alone, makes something deviant, and who reacts matters.
  • Definitions: deviance is behavior that violates the norms of a group, whether or not it breaks a law; whether an act counts as deviant changes across time, place, and culture. Crime is behavior that violates a formal law, a narrower category. Social control is the set of ways a group encourages conformity; it is informal (ordinary people) or formal (official bodies under written rules).
  • The functionalist account: Durkheim argued that crime is normal in every society and can prepare the way for moral change (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895), and that punishing it reaffirms shared norms and strengthens social solidarity (The Division of Labor in Society, 1893). He described these functions; he did not endorse deviance.
  • Strain theory: Merton ("Social Structure and Anomie", 1938) placed deviance in the gap between cultural goals and approved means. His five responses, a classroom model: conformity (goal and means), innovation (goal, disapproved means), ritualism (means without the goal), retreatism (drops both), and rebellion (rejects both and pushes to replace them).
  • The conflict account: who has the power to define deviance, and who gets defined by it?
  • The interactionist accounts: labeling theory (Becker, Outsiders, 1963) says whether an act counts as deviant depends less on the act than on how others react to it. Lemert (1951) separated primary deviance, an act that leaves the self-image intact, from secondary deviance, the behavior and self-concept that follow a label. Sutherland's differential association says deviance is learned in close personal groups. Hirschi's control theory (1969) names four social bonds: attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief.
  • Crime data: a victimization survey asks people directly about crimes against them, reported or not; police-reported crime data miss what no one reported. The reporting effect lets police counts move when reporting changes, even if crime does not.
  • Course example: the National Crime Victimization Survey counted 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 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization, 2024).
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) deviance and crime treated as the same. Cure: a norm versus a law. (2) "a rise in reported crime means a rise in crime." Cure: reporting can move on its own. (3) counts compared across places of different sizes. Cure: compare rates on a named base. (4) innovation read as a compliment. Cure: it means approved goals by disapproved means. (5) labeling theory read as "labels cause all deviance." Cure: it explains secondary deviance.

Week 7 — Social stratification and class

  • Key idea: inequality is a layered pattern built into a society, and every figure about it carries a measure, a source, and a year.
  • Systems: social stratification is a society's ranking of people into layers by wealth, income, education, family background, and power. Slavery, the caste system (closed: standing fixed at birth), the estate system, and the class system (open: achievement as well as birth shapes standing). Meritocracy is a hypothetical system where rank rests entirely on effort and ability; the conflict tradition reads the belief that the system already works that way as a legitimating ideology.
  • Income and wealth: income is a flow of money over a period; wealth is a stock, everything owned minus everything owed at one point in time. Wealth is more concentrated than income, and this course pins no wealth share. Income is reported as a median, the middle case, because a few very large values pull the mean up.
  • Poverty: absolute poverty is lacking the basics needed to live; relative poverty is having far less than most people around you. The official poverty measure and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) draw the line and count resources differently, so they give two numbers for the same year.
  • Class theories: Marx saw two classes, the bourgeoisie who own the means of production and the proletariat who sell their labor. Weber separated class (economic position), status (social honor or prestige), and party (power through organized groups). Life chances are the opportunities a position makes more or less likely.
  • Mobility: intergenerational (compared with your parents), intragenerational (across your own working life), and structural (caused by a change in the economy itself, moving many people at once).
  • The ladder debated: the Davis–Moore thesis (1945) says more functionally important positions must carry more reward to attract qualified people. Tumin's critique (1953) and the conflict view answer it. The course states each at full strength and gives no verdict.
  • Course example: the Census Bureau's figures for 2024 give a median household income of 83,730 dollars, an official poverty rate of 10.6% (35.9 million people), and an SPM of 12.9%.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) income and wealth used interchangeably. Cure: a paycheck is a flow; a balance is a stock. (2) mean and median confused. Cure: the median is the household in the middle of the line. (3) the poverty rate read as "the share who are poor, full stop." Cure: it is the share below a named line under a named measure. (4) meritocracy stated as a description. Cure: call it a hypothetical ideal.

Week 8's new habit (not scored on its own)

The level-of-analysis habit asks three questions of any pattern and any explanation. At what level is the pattern: macro structure or micro interaction? At what level does the explanation work: an individual explanation (the traits, choices, or efforts of particular people) or a structural explanation (the arrangements of a society that shape many people's situations at once)? And is a group figure being applied to one person, the ecological fallacy?

Representative practice

These are fresh variants, not the midterm's questions. Work each worked example yourself first, then compare your steps. Every number below is computed and checked in advance, and every made-up figure is labelled illustrative.

Worked example — a count, a rate, and the four questions (Week 1)

Two counties track emergency-room visits for heat illness over one summer (illustrative numbers made up for this guide, not real data). County P records 54 visits among 120,000 residents. County Q records 26 visits among 40,000 residents.

  • By count: County P has more visits, because 54 is more than 26.
  • County P's rate: 54 ÷ 120,000 × 100,000 = 45 per 100,000.
  • County Q's rate: 26 ÷ 40,000 × 100,000 = 65 per 100,000.
  • Comparison: County Q is higher by 65 − 45 = 20 per 100,000, and 65 ÷ 45 ≈ 1.4, so its rate is about 1.4 times County P's. Here the count and the rate point opposite ways, and the rate is the fair comparison because the counties differ in size.
  • Four questions: what is measured (heat-illness visits recorded in one summer); over whom (each county's residents, one summer); what it shows and does not (County Q's rate is higher; it does not say why); correlation or cause (neither; it is a description).

Why it matters: the bigger count belonged to the county with the lower rate, which is the exact trap a rate exists to catch.

Worked example — one trouble, one issue, three lenses (Week 1)

An illustrative case: a commuter's bus route is cut, and the trip to work now takes an extra hour. In the same year, transit agencies across a whole region cut dozens of routes, and thousands of riders lose service.

  • Trouble or issue? The one commuter has a personal trouble. Thousands of riders losing service across a region is a public issue, rooted in how transit is funded and run, not in thousands of separate bad choices.
  • Three lenses on remote work: structural functionalism (macro) asks what jobs remote work does for society, such as keeping firms running and cutting commute time. Conflict theory (macro) asks who gets to work from home and who must be on site, since working from home is open to some jobs and closed to others. Symbolic interactionism (micro) asks what "camera on" or "camera off" means between coworkers in a video meeting.

Why it matters: the same topic yields three different questions, each at its own level, and no lens is declared the winner.

Worked example — match the method, check the measure (Week 2)

Four illustrative studies, each matched to the method that fits its question:

  • How adults across a state get their local news: a survey, because the question needs breadth across many people.
  • Whether a reminder text raises turnout at a blood drive: an experiment. Donors are randomly assigned to get a reminder or no reminder; the reminder is the independent variable, and turnout is the dependent variable.
  • How regulars at a city skate park decide whose turn is next: field research, or ethnography if the researcher spends months at the park, because the question needs depth in a natural setting.
  • How marriage rates differ across counties, from records the state already keeps: secondary data analysis.

Now the measure and the sample:

  • A step counter that counts every arm swing as a step, the same way every time, is reliable (consistent) but not valid (it does not capture steps).
  • A feedback kiosk at a street fair collects 2,000 taps (illustrative) about a new festival schedule. Visitors chose to tap, so the sample is self-selected, and 2,000 taps do not remove the sampling bias. A random draw from a list of every resident could speak for the town.
  • Percentage points (illustrative): in one town, the share of households that compost rises from 15% to 24%. That is 24 − 15 = 9 percentage points, and 9 ÷ 15 × 100 = 60 percent.
  • A third variable (illustrative): across summer weeks, sunscreen sales and bee stings rise together. Warm weather drives both, so the correlation is spurious.

Why it matters: the method, the measure, and the sample each limit what a study may claim.

Worked example — sort four norms two ways (Week 3)

Ask two separate questions of each norm: how much moral weight does it carry, and how is it enforced? (Illustrative scenes made up for this guide.)

  • Escalator: standing to one side so others can pass. No moral weight, so it is a folkway. A rider who blocks the way gets a loud sigh: a negative, informal sanction.
  • Running club: showing up on time for the group run. No moral weight, so it is a folkway. The club's rules award a patch for a season of on-time arrivals: a positive, formal sanction.
  • Market stall: handing back extra change a vendor gave by mistake. Moral weight, because it is about honesty, so it is a mos. The vendor thanks you warmly: a positive, informal sanction.
  • Hiking club: never leaving a hiking partner alone on the trail. Moral weight, so it is a mos. Under the club's safety rules, a member who does it is barred from club trips: a negative, formal sanction.
  • Tally: 2 folkways + 2 mores = 4 norms, and 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 4 sanctions, one of each kind.

Two more sorts:

  • Material or nonmaterial? A food truck's menu board is material culture; the expectation that customers form a line is nonmaterial culture.
  • Ethnocentrism or relativism? A visitor from a place where restaurant tipping is expected calls servers in another country "unappreciated" because no one tips there. That judges by home standards, so it is ethnocentrism. Cultural relativism asks first how servers are paid there and what a tip would mean.

Why it matters: moral weight and formality are two different questions, and a written rule settles only the second.

Worked example — trace one self (Week 4)

Illustrative scenes made up for this guide:

  • Looking-glass self: at a first open-mic poetry reading, a performer pictures how she looks at the microphone (step 1, imagined appearance). She imagines the audience thinking "nervous, but brave" (step 2, imagined judgment). She walks off feeling proud (step 3, self-feeling). That is Cooley.
  • Mead's stages: a toddler taps on a laptop the way a parent does, without knowing why (preparatory stage). A child plays veterinarian with a stuffed dog (play stage). A volleyball player keeps the setter, the hitters, and the blockers in mind before every touch (game stage), and the shared rules in her head are the generalized other.
  • Total institution test: a merchant ship's crew spends months at sea, sleeping, eating, and working under the captain's authority. One authority controls every part of the crew's daily life, so the ship is a total institution. A hospital's night-shift staff go home after every shift, so the hospital is not one for them.
  • Anticipatory socialization: an apprentice electrician watches how licensed electricians talk with clients before earning a license.

Why it matters: "who is teaching, what is learned, and which idea names it?" sorts every scene.

Worked example — read the room and the group (Week 5)

Statuses and roles (illustrative):

  • A person who is 70 years old holds an ascribed status (age). The same person, a licensed pilot, holds an achieved status.
  • A bus driver who coaches a youth swim team has a meet that overlaps a shift. Two roles clash: role conflict.
  • A teacher who must both encourage each student and give honest low grades feels tension inside one role: role strain.
  • A museum guide is front stage in the galleries and back stage in the staff room.
  • An extended family of 40 that gathers every month and shares its members' lives is a primary group, despite its size, because the relationships are deep and lasting.

Asch, recomputed from the course's figures:

  • Yielded at least once: 37 ÷ 50 × 100 = 74%.
  • Never yielded: 50 − 37 = 13 participants, and 13 ÷ 50 × 100 = 26%, about one-quarter.
  • Answers that stayed correct: 100 − 32 = 68%, about two-thirds.
  • One ally: 32 − 10.4 = 21.6 percentage points fewer errors, and 32 ÷ 10.4 ≈ 3.1, so errors were about three times as common without an ally.

Granovetter, recomputed: 55.6 + 27.8 = 83.4% found work through a contact seen only occasionally or rarely, and 83.4 ÷ 16.7 ≈ 5.0, so that route was about five times as common as the often-seen route. As people, 54 × 55.6 ÷ 100 ≈ 30 of the 54 job-finders used a contact they saw occasionally.

Why it matters: in words, a group can move a judgment about a plain fact and one ally largely undoes it; and acquaintances, not close friends, carried most of these job leads.

Worked example — deviance, Merton, and crime data (Week 6)

Deviance or crime? (illustrative) Talking loudly on a phone in a train's quiet car breaks a norm and no law: deviance, not a crime. Crossing against a signal on an empty street late at night breaks a law, and no one around reacts: a crime that draws little sense of deviance.

Merton's five responses (illustrative). A city's food-delivery couriers are told that top earners reach a bonus tier.

  • A courier who works long, honest hours to reach it: conformity.
  • A courier who logs fake deliveries to hit the tier: innovation, the goal by disapproved means.
  • A courier who keeps every route rule but gave up on the bonus long ago: ritualism.
  • A courier who stops logging in and drops out of the work: retreatism.
  • A courier who organizes others to replace the tier system with a cooperative: rebellion.

The victimization survey, recomputed:

  • Share reported to police: 11.2 ÷ 23.3 × 100 ≈ 48%, fewer than half.
  • Not reported: 23.3 − 11.2 = 12.1 per 1,000, and 12.1 ÷ 23.3 × 100 ≈ 52%, about half.
  • The base: 23.3 per 1,000 is the same rate as 23.3 × 100 = 2,330 per 100,000.
  • The reporting effect (illustrative): a city adds an online form for reporting package thefts, and police-recorded package thefts rise. Reporting got easier, so the rise in records does not by itself show a rise in theft.

Why it matters: the survey and police records count different things, and no single figure is the "true" number.

Worked example — read the ladder (Week 7)

Median and mean (illustrative). Five households on one block earn 38,000, 46,000, 52,000, 61,000, and 303,000 dollars a year.

  • Total: 38,000 + 46,000 + 52,000 + 61,000 + 303,000 = 500,000 dollars.
  • Mean: 500,000 ÷ 5 = 100,000 dollars.
  • Median: the middle household, 52,000 dollars.
  • Reading: one very high income pulls the mean far above the middle household, which is why income is reported as a median.

Income and wealth (illustrative). Two households each earn 70,000 dollars a year.

  • Household 1 owns a home worth 250,000 dollars with 100,000 left on the mortgage, and has 20,000 in savings: wealth = 250,000 + 20,000 − 100,000 = 170,000 dollars.
  • Household 2 rents, has 5,000 in savings, and owes 35,000 in student loans: wealth = 5,000 − 35,000 = −30,000 dollars.
  • Same income, and the wealth gap is 170,000 − (−30,000) = 200,000 dollars.

The course's poverty figures, recomputed:

  • Two measures: 12.9 − 10.6 = 2.3 percentage points, and 2.3 ÷ 10.6 × 100 ≈ 21.7 percent higher.
  • Rate to base: 35.9 ÷ 10.6 × 100 ≈ 339, so the official measure covers about 339 million people.
  • The 2023 rate: down 0.4 percentage points to 10.6%, so the rounded figures put the 2023 rate at about 10.6 + 0.4 = 11.0%.

Weber and mobility (illustrative). A tenant organizer with a modest income who leads a large tenants' association ranks high on party, power through an organized group. A person whose parents both worked in a warehouse becomes an accountant: upward intergenerational mobility. A line cook who later owns the restaurant: intragenerational mobility.

Why it matters: a median, a measure, and a dollar year travel with every class figure.

Worked example — the level-of-analysis habit (Week 8)

  • Question 1, on the poverty rate: 10.6% is a macro pattern, a share of the population the measure covers, not a fact about any one household.
  • Question 2, on the victimization survey: "each victim decided whether to report" is an individual explanation. "The way reporting to police is arranged shapes who reports" is a structural one. The survey shows the gap, about 48% reported, and tests neither explanation.
  • Question 3, on Granovetter: 55.6% describes 54 job-finders in one 1973 survey. Reading it as a promise that your own next job will come through an acquaintance is the ecological fallacy.

Why it matters: the habit keeps a society-wide figure from turning into a story about one person's choices.

Self-check questions

Try each one, then read the check and the one-line why.

  1. A researcher compares how marriage ages differ across thirty countries. Is this macro or micro? Check: macro. Why: it looks at whole societies, not face-to-face interaction.
  2. Which founder is known for verstehen and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism? Check: Weber. Why: the course places interpretive understanding and rationalization with Weber.
  3. A researcher records a neighborhood group chat for a study and never tells the members. Which ethics rule is broken? Check: informed consent. Why: people must agree to take part after learning what the study involves.
  4. A club of competitive crossword solvers has its own slang but otherwise follows mainstream norms. Subculture or counterculture? Check: subculture. Why: it adds distinctive norms without rejecting the dominant ones.
  5. A residents' council founded to give every member a voice ends up run by the same three officers for a decade. Which idea fits? Check: Michels's iron law of oligarchy. Why: large organizations tend to drift toward rule by a few.
  6. A teen who has a part-time job, a close family, and a place on a team rarely gets into trouble. Which account fits? Check: Hirschi's control theory. Why: strong bonds of involvement, attachment, and commitment hold a person to conventional society.
  7. A family has food and shelter but far less than most households around it. Absolute or relative poverty? Check: relative poverty. Why: the basics are covered, and the gap is measured against others in the same society.
  8. A surgeon is paid far more than most workers, and someone explains that the job is important and few people can do it. Which account is that? Check: the Davis–Moore thesis. Why: it ties reward to functional importance and scarce talent; Tumin and the conflict view would ask other questions of the same fact.

Check yourself — choose one. Write two or three sentences to a friend.

  • (a) Explain why County P's larger count of heat-illness visits did not make it the county with the higher rate.
  • (b) Explain why the two households with the same income ended up 200,000 dollars apart in wealth.

Either one rehearses an explain-why skill the midterm checks.

Watch before the exam

These seven videos come from the course's Readings & Resources pages for Weeks 1 to 8, and every one has captions. Use them to review and to connect weeks, not to learn anything new.

Study plan

A short countdown. Count back from the day you plan to sit the midterm.

  • Two weeks out: as you finish Week 6, start a one-page list of the course's swapped pairs: troubles and issues, reliability and validity, folkways and mores, Cooley and Mead, role conflict and role strain, deviance and crime. Add income and wealth when Week 7 arrives.
  • One week out: as you finish Week 7, reread the topic reviews above for Weeks 1 to 3, the weeks furthest back.
  • At the start of Week 8: take the practice exam once, cold and closed-note. Note which objectives cost you the most.
  • Three or four days before you sit it: reread the topic reviews for your two weakest objectives, and redo the matching worked examples from scratch without looking.
  • Two days before: run the paired exam-prep tutorial (the copy-and-paste chatbot tutor, or its no-AI route) for active recall. Tell it which areas the practice exam exposed.
  • The day before: retake the practice exam, explain every miss out loud, and work the self-check questions above.
  • Right before: skim the "predictable mistakes → cures" lines for all seven weeks. Then stop studying.

This guide is for review. The exam-prep tutorial and the practice exam are where you rehearse. Pulling ideas back out of memory, not rereading, is what makes them stick.

Exam format

Every one of the 25 questions counts the same, and the midterm checks your own understanding without AI. The questions come one at a time, and there is no going back, so settle each one before you move on.

Test-taking strategies for this material:

  • Name the pair before you choose. Most questions turn on two neighboring ideas, such as folkway and mos, status and role, or income and wealth. Say which pair is in play first.
  • Find the base before you compare. When two places or groups appear, ask whether you have counts or rates, and on what base.
  • Write the unit for any change. A gap between two percentages is in percentage points; a change divided by the starting share is in percent.
  • Match the thinker to the idea, then the year. The looking-glass self, the stages, the five responses, and the label each belong to one name.
  • Ask what the figure does not show. A rate describes a population; it does not explain itself, and it says nothing about any one person in it.
  • For a "select every option" question, judge each statement on its own, as if it were a true-or-false question.

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