Week 15 — Readings & Resources · Population, Urbanization & Social Change/Movements

Course: Introduction to Sociology (SOC 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Adeyemi
Objective covered: Objective 8 — Explain how populations, cities, and societies change over time, and analyze social movements with the major movement theories.

How to use this page

Everything here is a link to an external resource — open it in your browser, the same way you'd open a YouTube link. Nothing needs to be downloaded, and there is nothing to buy.

This week's load is moderate: a short video + a few brief readings, grouped by the ideas from the lecture. Read or watch one item per group and you're ready for the quiz; do all of them and you'll be very comfortable. Total time is roughly 45–55 minutes if you do everything, far less if you pick one per group.

Reading order that matches the lecture: ① demography & the demographic transition → ② urbanization & the Chicago School → ③ collective behavior, social movements & social change → ④ the data behind the headlines (real population/urban figures).

A habit to carry into the final: before you trust any claim about population, cities, or movements — in these readings, in the news, or from a chatbot — ask the sociologist's questions from class: What's the evidence? Is this a pattern or just an anecdote? Correlation or causation? What type of movement, and which theory?

① Demography & the Demographic Transition

Maps to Lecture Segment 2. Demography studies populations through fertility, mortality, and migration; the demographic transition explains why rapid growth is a temporary phase (death rates fall first, birth rates fall later).

Video — "How Populations Grow and Change: Crash Course Geography #33"
🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpAiBg0hrfQ
Why it earns the click: a clear, lively tour of carrying capacity, Malthus's prediction (and why it didn't fully come true), and the Demographic Transition Model stage by stage — exactly Segment 2. Hosted by Alizé Carrère.
⏱ ~13 min

Reading — "Demography and Population" (OpenStax, Introduction to Sociology 3e, §20.1)
🔗 https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/20-1-demography-and-population
Why it's assigned: the cleanest plain-language version of what we drew in class — fertility, mortality, migration, the crude birth/death rate, the population pyramid, Malthusian theory, and the four-stage demographic transition — all with their real, well-documented definitions. Free to read online in your browser.
⏱ ~12 min

② Urbanization & the Chicago School

Maps to Lecture Segment 3. Urbanization is the rural→urban shift; the Chicago School founded urban sociology — Park & Burgess (the concentric-zone model) and Wirth ("urbanism as a way of life").

Reading — "Urbanization" (OpenStax, Introduction to Sociology 3e, §20.2)
🔗 https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/20-2-urbanization
Why it's assigned: walks through the growth of cities, suburbs and exurbs, and the concentric-zone model (Burgess) built on Park's human ecology — the same Chicago-School ideas from class — plus functionalist vs. conflict readings of the city.
⏱ ~12 min

③ Collective Behavior, Social Movements & Social Change

Maps to Lecture Segments 5–7. Tell collective behavior (spontaneous, short-lived) from an organized social movement; classify movements with Aberle's types; match the theories (resource mobilization, framing, new social movements, and others).

Reading — "Collective Behavior" (OpenStax, Introduction to Sociology 3e, §21.1)
🔗 https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/21-1-collective-behavior
Why it's assigned: defines collective behavior and the crowd / mass / public, the exact distinction the quiz tests against an organized movement.
⏱ ~8 min

Reading — "Social Movements" (OpenStax, Introduction to Sociology 3e, §21.2)
🔗 https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/21-2-social-movements
Why it's assigned: lays out Aberle's types of movements, the stages/life cycle, and the major theories — resource mobilization, framing (diagnostic / prognostic / motivational frames), and new social movement theory — the same map from Segments 5–7. (Relative deprivation and political-process theory are added in the lecture/tutorial.)
⏱ ~12 min

④ The Data Behind the Headlines — real population & urban figures

Maps to Lecture Segments 2–4 and the Workshop. These are the authoritative data pages we read in class. The Workshop has you verify a figure here at the source, so it's worth a look before then.

Data page — "Fertility Rate" (Our World in Data)
🔗 https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
Why it earns the click: this is the page behind the week's headline figure — the global total fertility rate was 2.3 children per woman in 2023, down from 4.9 in the 1950s. It also explains exactly what the total fertility rate measures (and what it doesn't). This is the page you'll verify your number against in Workshop 15.
⏱ ~8 min (browse the first chart + the "what you should know about this data" note)

Data page — "Population Growth" (Our World in Data)
🔗 https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth
Why it's here: shows that the world reached 8 billion people in 2022 (1 billion in ~1800), that the growth rate peaked in the 1960s (~2.3% in 1963; ~0.9% in 2023), and that the world has passed "peak child" — the perfect illustration of population momentum from class.
⏱ ~8 min

Data page — "Urbanization" (Our World in Data)
🔗 https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization
Why it's here: the page behind the urban figures we read — more than 4 billion people, over half the world, now live in urban areas (the UN dates the crossover to 2007), with a projection toward ~7 in 10 by 2050 — and a candid section on why richer-and-more-urban is a correlation, not a proven cause.
⏱ ~8 min

Pick-one quick path (≈25 min total)

In a hurry? Do exactly these and you'll be ready for the quiz:
1. Watch Crash Course Geography #33 — How Populations Grow and Change (group ①, covers Malthus + the transition).
2. Read Social Movements (group ③) for the types, stages, and theories.
3. Skim the Fertility Rate page (group ④) so the Workshop figure is already familiar.

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell Prof. Adeyemi and use one of the other resources in the same group in the meantime. These links are provided for access only — no claim is made about their licensing or reuse terms, and you should always check each site's own terms before reusing anything from it.