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Week 16 · Final study guide

Final Exam — Study Guide

Introduction to Sociology Free sample edition

Coverage — what the final covers

The final is cumulative: its questions reach all eight course objectives, across the fifteen teaching weeks. It is given in Week 16, the finals week, which has no new material. The exam has 40 questions, and every question counts the same. Most are multiple choice with one best answer; four ask you to select every choice that fits, and two are true/false statements. There is no time limit, and you get one attempt. It opens in Week 16, in Canvas, when your instructor sets it to open.

The questions were drawn from the course's question bank, and every objective appears at least once. The draw leans hard on the second half of the term. Here is what this form actually contains:

The final's 40 questions by the week whose material each question comes from, with the objectives those questions assess
Week Topic Questions Objectives assessed
6 Deviance, crime, and social control 1 Objective 4 (1)
9 Global inequality 5 Objective 5 (4), Objective 2 (1)
10 Race and ethnicity 8 Objective 6 (6), Objective 2 (2)
11 Sex, gender, and sexuality 6 Objective 6 (4), Objective 1 (2)
12 Family and marriage 4 Objective 7 (3), Objective 6 (1)
13 Education and religion 6 Objective 7 (5), Objective 3 (1)
14 Economy, work, and politics 6 Objective 7 (5), Objective 5 (1)
15 Population, urbanization, and social change 4 Objective 8 (4)
The final's eight objectives, the weeks that teach each one, and the number of the exam's 40 questions on each
Objective What you do Weeks Questions on this exam
Objective 1 Apply the sociological imagination and the three perspectives, naming the level of analysis 1 2
Objective 2 Read research methods and social statistics critically 2 3
Objective 3 Analyze culture and socialization 3, 4 1
Objective 4 Explain interaction, groups, organizations, and deviance 5, 6 1
Objective 5 Analyze stratification, class, and global inequality 7, 9 5
Objective 6 Analyze race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and sexuality as socially constructed categories 10, 11 11
Objective 7 Explain the major social institutions through the three perspectives 12, 13, 14 13
Objective 8 Analyze population, urbanization, and social change 15 4

That is 39 of 40 questions from Weeks 9–15 and one from Week 6. The institutions (13 questions) and race, ethnicity, sex, and gender (11 questions) carry 24 of the 40 between them, so put most of your review there. The Week 1–7 ideas still earn their place: seven questions assess Objective 1 through Objective 4, each inside a later week's material, and the three lenses and the four data questions run through nearly everything.

Topic-by-topic review

Each unit gives the idea in plain words first, then the course's exact definitions, then the mistakes students make most often and the cure for each. The "deeper review" line tells you where to look in that week's materials. Units 5–11 carry the weight of the exam, so they get the most space.

Unit 1 — The tools you use everywhere (Weeks 1, 2, and 8)

  • Key idea. Sociology is the systematic study of society, groups, institutions, and social structure. It looks at the pattern across many people, not the mind inside one person, and it tests claims against evidence instead of trusting common sense.
  • The sociological imagination. Mills (1959), The Sociological Imagination, named the habit of connecting a personal trouble to a public issue. One jobless person in a city is a trouble; millions out of work across an economy is an issue.
  • Two levels. The macro level is whole societies, institutions, and large-scale patterns. The micro level is face-to-face interaction and the meanings people share in it.
  • Three perspectives, always in this order. Structural functionalism (macro) sees society as interrelated parts, each doing a job (rooted in Durkheim, developed by Parsons and Merton). Conflict theory (macro) sees society as competition over scarce resources and power (rooted in Marx). Symbolic interactionism (micro) sees society built from everyday interaction and shared meanings (rooted in Mead and Cooley, named by Blumer, extended by Goffman). They are lenses, not rivals, and no lens wins.
  • Methods. A survey buys breadth, an experiment compares an experimental group with a control group and is built for cause, field research and ethnography buy depth, and secondary data analysis reuses data someone else collected. A reliable measure gives consistent results; a valid measure captures what you meant to measure. The population is everyone you want to describe; the sample is the people you actually study.
  • Correlation versus causation. A correlation means two variables change together. A third variable can drive both, which makes the link spurious. Only an experiment with random assignment, or a study designed to find a cause, earns the word "cause."
  • The four data questions. Ask of any figure: what is measured, over whom and when, what it shows and does not show, and whether it is a correlation or a cause. A rate is a count divided by a population, with its base named. A change from one percentage to another is measured in percentage points. A median is the middle case.
  • The level-of-analysis habit (Week 8). Ask three questions. At what level is the pattern, macro or micro? Is the explanation individual (the traits, choices, or efforts of particular people) or structural (the arrangements of a society that shape many people's situations at once)? Is a group figure being applied to one person, the ecological fallacy?
  • Predictable mistakes → cures. Calling one perspective right and the others wrong: they answer different questions at different levels. Reading a correlation as a cause: ask whether anything was manipulated. Writing "2%" for the gap between 10% and 12%: it is 2 percentage points. Reading a town's rate as a fact about one resident: that is the ecological fallacy.
  • Deeper review: the Week 1, Week 2, and Week 8 chapters and slides.

Unit 2 — Culture and the self (Weeks 3 and 4)

  • Key idea. The rules you follow and the self you have were learned from the people around you.
  • Culture. Culture is what a group shares: its values, beliefs, norms, symbols, language, and material objects. Society is the people who share it. A value is a shared standard of what is good; a belief is a statement people hold to be true.
  • Norms and sanctions. Folkways are everyday customs with no moral weight; mores carry moral weight; taboos are the strongest prohibitions. A sanction is a reward or a penalty that enforces a norm, positive or negative, formal or informal.
  • Across cultures and time. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis proposes that language shapes how you experience the world; it is a hypothesis, not a proven law. Cultural lag (Ogburn, 1922) is the gap that opens when material culture changes faster than the norms around it. Ethnocentrism judges another culture by your own culture's standards; cultural relativism is the method of understanding a practice in its own context. A subculture adds norms of its own; a counterculture actively rejects the dominant culture's norms.
  • Socialization. Socialization is the lifelong process of learning a culture and becoming a self, with nature and nurture working together. The agents are family, peers, school, media, religion, and the workplace. The school's hidden curriculum is the unwritten lessons about obedience, punctuality, and hierarchy that a school teaches alongside its subjects; Week 13 brings it back.
  • The self. Cooley (1902), Human Nature and the Social Order: the looking-glass self, in three steps (imagine how you appear, imagine the judgment, develop a self-feeling). Mead (1934), Mind, Self, and Society: the preparatory, play, and game stages and the generalized other, the broad expectations of the society as a whole. A total institution (Goffman, 1961, Asylums) controls every part of daily life under one authority.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures. Swapping folkways and mores: ask whether breaking the norm feels morally wrong. Swapping Cooley and Mead: the looking-glass self is Cooley's; the stages and the generalized other are Mead's. Reading cultural relativism as "anything goes": it is a way of studying, not a verdict.
  • Deeper review: the Week 3 and Week 4 chapters and slides.

Unit 3 — Interaction, groups, and deviance (Weeks 5 and 6)

  • Key idea. You act differently in different rooms, and who decides what counts as breaking the rules is itself a sociological question.
  • Interaction. The Thomas theorem (Thomas and Thomas, 1928): situations defined as real are real in their consequences. A status is a social position and a role is the behavior expected in it. Role conflict is a clash between two roles; role strain is tension inside one role. Goffman's dramaturgy (1959) reads interaction as a performance with a front stage and a back stage.
  • Groups. A primary group is small, intimate, and lasting; a secondary group is larger, impersonal, and organized around a task. The criterion is depth and purpose, not size alone. In Asch's 1951 study, 37 of 50 participants went along with a plainly wrong majority at least once, yet about one-third of critical-trial answers were errors, so most answers stayed correct.
  • Deviance and crime. Deviance is behavior that breaks a group's norms; crime is an act that breaks a formal law. The two overlap without matching. Social control is the set of ways a group encourages conformity.
  • Three explanations. Functionalist: Durkheim argued that crime is normal in every society and that punishing it reaffirms shared norms; Merton's strain theory gives five responses (conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, rebellion), a classroom model. Conflict: who has the power to define deviance. Interactionist: labeling theory (Becker, 1963), with Lemert's primary and secondary deviance.
  • Crime data. Compare places by rate, never by count. The 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 (Bureau of Justice Statistics). Police records and a victimization survey measure different things.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures. Treating deviance and crime as one thing: ask whether a law or only a norm is broken. Reading Merton's "innovation" as praise: it means pursuing approved goals by disapproved means. Reading Durkheim as endorsing deviance: he described its functions.
  • Deeper review: the Week 5 and Week 6 chapters, and the Week 6 crime-data walkthrough.

Unit 4 — Stratification and class (Week 7)

  • Key idea. Social stratification is a society's ranking of people into layers by wealth, income, education, family background, and power. It is a pattern built into the whole society.
  • Systems. A caste system is closed: standing is fixed at birth. A class system is open: achievement as well as birth shapes standing. A meritocracy is a hypothetical ideal; the conflict tradition reads the belief that the system already works that way as a legitimating ideology.
  • Income and wealth. Income is a flow, what comes in over a period. Wealth is a stock, what is owned minus what is owed at one point in time. The course pins no wealth share.
  • Poverty. Absolute poverty is lacking the basics needed to live; relative poverty is having far less than most people around you. The Census Bureau reported a median household income of 83,730 dollars and an official poverty rate of 10.6% in 2024.
  • Explanations. Marx saw owners against workers. Weber added status and party to class, and named life chances. The Davis–Moore thesis (1945) argues that important positions need greater rewards; Tumin's critique (1953) and the conflict view answer that stratification passes advantage down. No verdict.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures. Using income and wealth interchangeably: ask "flow or stock?" Reading a median as "average income": a median is the middle household.
  • Deeper review: the Week 7 chapter, which Weeks 9 and 14 build on.

Unit 5 — Global inequality (Week 9)

  • Key idea. The layering you met inside one country also runs across the whole world. Global stratification is the ranking of the world's countries into layers by wealth, power, and well-being.
  • Income groups. The World Bank sorts countries into four groups by gross national income (GNI) per capita and resets the thresholds every year. For fiscal year 2027, on 2025 data: low income at 1,175 dollars or less, lower-middle from 1,176 to 4,635, upper-middle from 4,636 to 14,375, and high above 14,375. A group is a classification of a country, not a description of its typical resident.
  • Measuring development. GNI per capita and GDP per capita are averages that hide how the total is shared. Life expectancy and years of schooling measure health and education directly. The Human Development Index combines life expectancy, schooling, and income into one score.
  • The poverty line. Extreme poverty is living below the International Poverty Line, 3.00 dollars a day in 2021 prices since 2025. A poverty line is a definition, not a natural fact.
  • Three explanations, no verdict. Modernization theory (Rostow, 1960) holds that low-income countries can develop through stages; critics call it ethnocentric. Dependency theory holds that wealthy core nations prosper by drawing resources from poorer ones. World-systems theory (Wallerstein, 1974) places countries in a core, a semi-periphery, and a periphery, linked in one world economy.
  • Globalization. Globalization is the growing flow of goods, money, people, and ideas across borders. A multinational corporation owns or controls production in more than one country.
  • The Gini index. It measures how unequally income or consumption is spread, on a 0-to-100 scale where 0 is perfect equality. High-income countries' figures measure income after taxes; most low- and middle-income countries' figures measure consumption, so compare with care.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures. Reading GDP per capita as the typical person's income: it is an average. Reading the wealth-and-life-expectancy link as a one-way cause: the association does not say which way the arrow runs. Reading a Gini value as how rich a country is: it measures spread, not level.
  • Deeper review: the Week 9 chapter's garment-factory case and Gini walkthrough.

Unit 6 — Race and ethnicity (Week 10)

  • Key idea. Race is a set of categories people built, and those categories have real consequences.
  • Race and ethnicity. Race is a socially constructed way of grouping people by perceived physical or social traits. Its categories differ across societies and change over time. Ethnicity is shared culture, such as language, religion, customs, and ancestry.
  • Minority and dominant groups. Wirth (1945) defined a minority group by its unequal treatment and subordinate position, not by its numbers. The dominant group has more power and advantage.
  • Attitude, generalization, action. Prejudice is an attitude, the beliefs and feelings held about a group. A stereotype is an oversimplified generalization applied to everyone in a group. Discrimination is an action, treating people unequally because of their group. Merton (1949) crossed prejudice with discrimination to get four types.
  • Individual and institutional. Individual racism is prejudice or discrimination carried out by a person. Institutional racism, also called systemic racism, is disadvantage built into the rules and routine procedures of organizations, whatever the individuals in them believe.
  • Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk (1903) names the color line and describes double consciousness. The Philadelphia Negro (1899) is one of the first empirical community studies in American sociology.
  • Intergroup relations. Pluralism, assimilation, segregation, and genocide. The contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954) proposes that contact between members of different groups can reduce prejudice under some conditions; which conditions matter is what researchers test, so treat the prediction as something to test.
  • Census data. Race and Hispanic origin are two separate self-identified questions. "Alone" counts people who reported one race; "alone or in combination" counts that race with or without others, so the two overlap and are never added.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures. Reading race as biology: the categories change across censuses and countries. Defining a minority by size: ask who holds the power. Swapping prejudice and discrimination: attitude or action? Reading institutional racism as "prejudiced people inside institutions": look at the procedure. Stacking the Hispanic share onto the race shares: they answer different questions.
  • Deeper review: the Week 10 chapter's census walkthrough and the warehouse-referral case.

Unit 7 — Sex, gender, and sexuality (Week 11)

  • Key idea. Sex is about bodies; gender is about what a society expects and assigns.
  • Definitions. Sex refers to physical and physiological characteristics, such as anatomy, chromosomes, and hormones. Gender refers to the behaviors, traits, and social positions a society associates with being a woman or a man. Gender identity is a person's own inner sense of their gender. A gender role is the set of behaviors a society expects because of gender.
  • Learning and doing gender. Gender socialization runs through the same agents as Week 4. West and Zimmerman (1987), "Doing Gender": gender is something people continually do in interaction, and because others notice and respond, it is not a costume you can take off.
  • Structure. Patriarchy is a social system in which men as a group hold more power and resources than women as a group. The gender order is the society-wide pattern of gender arrangements across institutions.
  • Three lenses. Structural functionalism (macro), in the tradition of Parsons, reads traditional gender roles as complementary. Conflict theory (macro), joined by feminist theory, reads gender as a structure of unequal power. Symbolic interactionism (micro) reads gender meanings as created in everyday interaction.
  • Sexuality. Sexuality involves sexual desire, attraction, and relationships; sexual orientation is the pattern of a person's attraction. Sociologists treat both as social categories as well as personal experience.
  • The earnings ratio. Women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings that were 83% of men's in 2024, against 62% in 1979 (Bureau of Labor Statistics). It is a raw ratio of medians across all full-time jobs. A controlled estimate matches women and men on named factors, so it answers a different question. The documented explanations, presented as competing accounts, are occupational segregation, hours, the motherhood penalty, the devaluation of women's work, and discrimination.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures. Using sex and gender interchangeably: bodies or expectations? Reading 83% as "the same job pays women 83 cents": it compares medians across all full-time jobs. Using the raw number alone to explain the gap away or to prove discrimination: the number describes, and the explanations compete.
  • Deeper review: the Week 11 chapter's dress-code case and the earnings-ratio walkthrough.

Unit 8 — Family and marriage (Week 12)

  • Key idea. Who counts as family is something a society defines, and the definition changes.
  • Definitions. A family is a group a society recognizes as kin, linked by birth, marriage, partnership, or adoption. Kinship is the web of relationships a society counts as relatives. The family of orientation is the one you are born or adopted into; the family of procreation is the one you form as an adult. A nuclear family is one or two parents and their children; an extended family adds other relatives.
  • Marriage patterns. Monogamy is one spouse at a time. Polygamy is more than one, as polygyny (one husband, several wives) or polyandry (one wife, several husbands). Endogamy is marriage within your own social group; exogamy is marriage outside it. The incest taboo prohibits sex and marriage between close relatives.
  • Three lenses. Structural functionalism (macro): socialization, regulation, and economic and emotional support. Conflict theory (macro): patriarchy and inequality passed down through the household. Symbolic interactionism (micro): what family roles mean, and how partners "do gender" at home.
  • Household and family. The Census Bureau's figures count households, the people who share one home, and a household is not the same thing as a family, the group a society recognizes as kin. A person living alone makes a household but not a family. Cohabitation is living together as a couple without being married.
  • Decline or change. The decline view reads the trend as a weakening of the family; the change view reads it as new and more varied forms. The data describe; the views interpret. No verdict, and the course pins no divorce rate.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures. Using household and family interchangeably: ask whether the figure counts homes or kin, and remember that the Week 12 figures are shares of households. Reading a later median age at first marriage as "people no longer marry": it says when, not whether. Treating polygamy as one arrangement: polygyny and polyandry differ.
  • Deeper review: the Week 12 chapter's household walkthrough.

Unit 9 — Education and religion (Week 13)

  • Key idea. Education and religion each do jobs for a society, and each can also pass on advantage.
  • Education, functionalist. Manifest functions are the intended, openly stated ones: transmitting knowledge and values, and sorting. Latent functions are unintended: childcare during the working day, and friendship networks.
  • Education, conflict. The hidden curriculum returns from Week 4. Tracking sorts students into separate ability or program groups. Credentialism (Collins, 1979) is the reliance on degrees as stand-ins for skill; it does not say credentials are worthless. Social reproduction passes advantage down a generation: Bourdieu's cultural capital and Bowles and Gintis's correspondence principle (1976).
  • Education, interactionist. A self-fulfilling prophecy is an expectation that brings about the outcome it predicts. Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968), Pygmalion in the Classroom, is the classic teacher-expectancy study; its size is debated and later studies only partly reproduced it, so it is taught in words.
  • Religion. Religion is a shared system of beliefs and practices about sacred things that binds believers into a community. Durkheim (1912) set the sacred against the profane and read religion as social cohesion; he studied what religion does, not whether it is true. Weber (1904–1905) argued an elective affinity between a Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, not a one-way cause. Marx called religion the opium of the people; that line is his, not Weber's or Durkheim's.
  • Organizations, a classroom model. An ecclesia is tied to the state and counts nearly everyone as a member. A denomination is large, established, and accepts the wider society. A sect breaks away and sets itself apart, with stricter demands. A cult, now usually called a new religious movement, sits outside the society's established traditions.
  • Public life. Secularization is the decline of religion's influence. Civil religion (Bellah, 1967) gives a nation's public life a sacred character. Both can hold at once.
  • The "nones." Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study found 29% of U.S. adults religiously unaffiliated in 2023–24. Affiliation is self-reported identity, not belief or attendance, and most "nones" describe themselves as "nothing in particular."
  • Predictable mistakes → cures. Reading the hidden curriculum as a secret syllabus: it is unwritten lessons. Crediting the opium line to Weber or Durkheim: it is Marx's. Reading the "nones" as atheists: most are "nothing in particular."
  • Deeper review: the Week 13 chapter and its religious-landscape walkthrough.

Unit 10 — Economy, work, and politics (Week 14)

  • Key idea. The economy and the state organize who produces what and who decides.
  • The economy. The primary sector draws raw materials from nature; the secondary sector turns them into manufactured goods; the tertiary sector provides services. A post-industrial economy employs most workers in services.
  • Systems. Capitalism rests on private ownership of productive property and production for profit. Socialism rests on collective or state ownership, with production aimed at shared needs. Each is a classroom model stated at full strength; actual economies, the United States included, are mixed.
  • Work. Automation, the gig economy, and the line between an employee (paid on an employer's payroll, under direction) and an independent contractor (self-employed, selling a service under a contract). Marx's alienation (1844) describes workers estranged from their product, the work process, one another, and their own potential; it is a claim about how work is organized, not a measure of one worker's feelings.
  • Power and authority. Power, in Weber (1922), is the chance of carrying out your own will even against resistance. Authority is power people accept as legitimate. Traditional authority rests on custom, charismatic on followers' belief in extraordinary qualities, and rational-legal on laws and the offices they create. Charismatic does not mean charming.
  • The state. The state makes and enforces laws for a territory; forms of government include monarchy, democracy, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. The pluralist model says power is shared among many competing groups; the power-elite model (Mills, 1956) says a small, interlocking elite holds decisive power. No verdict.
  • Union figures. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 10.0% of wage and salary workers were union members in 2025, against 20.1% in 1983. It is a rate of workers, not of people.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures. Using power and authority interchangeably: ask whether people accept it as legitimate. Reading the union rate as a share of the population: the base is wage and salary workers. Declaring one economic system or one power model correct: each is a perspective with evidence on its side.
  • Deeper review: the Week 14 chapter's coffee supply chain and union walkthrough.

Unit 11 — Population, urbanization, and social change (Week 15)

  • Key idea. Populations grow, cities form, and societies change for reasons you can name.
  • Demography. Demography is the scientific study of human populations. The three drivers are fertility, mortality, and migration. Natural increase is the crude birth rate minus the crude death rate. A push factor drives people out of a place; a pull factor draws them in.
  • Fertility. The total fertility rate is the average number of children a woman would have at the current age-specific birth rates. It is a synthetic rate, not a count of any real woman's children. Population momentum keeps a population growing for decades after its fertility falls, because a large young generation is entering its childbearing years.
  • The demographic transition, a classroom model. Stage 1: high birth and death rates. Stage 2: death rates fall, birth rates stay high, and growth is fast. Stage 3: birth rates fall too. Stage 4: both low and stable. Malthus (1798) predicted that population would outrun food and that positive checks (famine, disease, war) would raise death rates; that is a different idea from the transition.
  • Cities. Urbanization is the growth in the share of a population living in cities. Burgess (1925) proposed the concentric-zone model, a classroom model of rings around a central business district. Wirth (1938) linked a city's size, density, and diversity to urbanism, a way of life marked by impersonal, segmented relationships.
  • Movements. Collective behavior is relatively spontaneous and short-lived; a social movement is an organized, sustained effort to bring about or resist change. Aberle (1966) sorted movements by whom they aim to change and how much: alterative (partial, individuals), redemptive (total, individuals), reformative (partial, society), and transformative (total, society).
  • Movement theories. Relative deprivation, resource mobilization (McCarthy and Zald, 1977), political process, framing (Snow and Benford, 1988: diagnostic, prognostic, motivational), and new social movements.
  • Social change. The four engines are technology, conflict, ideas, and social movements, each readable through the three lenses.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures. Reading the total fertility rate as today's family size: it is a synthetic rate. Reading a falling birth rate as a falling population: momentum. Swapping Malthus and the transition. Classifying a movement by its size: classify it by its aim.
  • Deeper review: the Week 15 chapter's illustrative rate and momentum cases.

Representative practice

These are fresh variants, not the exam's questions. Where a worked example reads a real figure, it uses the course's pinned data with a new question; the rest use new everyday scenes, labelled illustrative. Work each one, then check it.

Worked example 1 — three lenses and a level on a market (Unit 1)

An illustrative neighborhood farmers' market starts accepting food-assistance benefit cards. Run it through the three lenses, one sentence each, and name the level.

  1. Structural functionalism (macro): the market links nearby farms to households and helps feed the neighborhood, one part doing a job for the whole.
  2. Conflict theory (macro): ask which vendors can afford a stall fee and whose customers were left out before the change.
  3. Symbolic interactionism (micro): ask what paying with a benefit card means to the shopper and the vendor in that face-to-face moment.
  4. The habit: "each shopper chose the market" is an individual explanation; "the market's payment rule changed who could shop there" is a structural one.

Why it matters: every lens answers a different question at its own level, and none of them wins.

Worked example 2 — reading a Gini pair and an income group (Units 1 and 5)

The World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform, as published by Our World in Data, gives the United States a 2022 Gini index of 41.7 and Germany 33.7.

  1. What is measured: how unequally income is spread across households, on a 0-to-100 scale. The source publishes 0 to 1, so a value read as 0.337 becomes 0.337 × 100 = 33.7.
  2. The gap: 41.7 − 33.7 = 8.0 points on the 0-to-100 scale, so income was spread less evenly in the United States. Before comparing any two countries, check that both figures use the same kind of measure, income or consumption.
  3. What it does not show: which country is richer, or why one is more unequal. A Gini value describes spread, not level.
  4. Correlation or cause: neither; these are survey estimates for one year.
  5. An income group, illustrative. A country reports GNI per capita of 900 dollars. Since 900 is below the 1,175-dollar ceiling, it falls in the low-income group for fiscal year 2027. That is a classification of the country, not a description of any one resident.

Why it matters: a figure without its four questions is unfinished, and an income group is never one person's paycheck.

Worked example 3 — three theories, one call center (Unit 5)

An illustrative call center in one country answers phones for a company based in another. Read it three ways, with no verdict.

  1. Modernization theory: the jobs are a stage on the way to industrial and service growth.
  2. Dependency theory: the value the work creates flows mostly to the wealthier country where the company is based.
  3. World-systems theory: the center is one link in a chain that runs from the periphery to the core.

Why it matters: the three theories read the same workplace differently, and each has critics.

Worked example 4 — two overlapping census shares (Unit 6)

In the 2020 Census, White alone was 61.6% of the population and White alone or in combination was 71% (Census Bureau).

  1. What is measured: self-identified race, counted for everyone in the United States.
  2. The overlap: 71 − 61.6 = 9.4 percentage points of the population reported White together with at least one other race.
  3. Why never add them: everyone in the 61.6% is also inside the 71%, so adding the two counts the same people twice.
  4. Count to base: White alone was 204.3 million people, so 204.3 ÷ 61.6 × 100 ≈ 332, about 332 million people counted.
  5. Correlation or cause: neither. A share describes composition; it says nothing about causes or about any one person.

Why it matters: the categories follow the source, and overlapping categories are read side by side, never stacked.

Worked example 5 — the earnings ratio and a job-mix firm (Unit 7)

Women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings that were 83% of men's in 2024, against 62% in 1979 (Bureau of Labor Statistics).

  1. The change: 83 − 62 = 21 percentage points over 2024 − 1979 = 45 years.
  2. The gap, then and now: 100 − 62 = 38 in 1979 and 100 − 83 = 17 in 2024. Then 17 ÷ 38 × 100 ≈ 44.7, so the 2024 gap was a little under half its 1979 size.
  3. A job-mix firm, illustrative. Job A pays 600 dollars a week and Job B pays 900, and each job pays women and men the same. Four of five women work in Job A and four of five men in Job B. Women's median is 600 and men's is 900.
  4. Raw against same-job: the raw ratio is 600 ÷ 900 × 100 ≈ 66.7%, while the same-job ratio is 100% in each job. The controlled comparison removes the part of the gap tied to job mix, but it cannot say why women and men landed in different jobs.

Why it matters: a raw ratio describes a gap; the competing explanations are weighed on further evidence.

Worked example 6 — households and marriage patterns (Unit 8)

The Census Bureau reported that married-couple households were 47% of U.S. households in 2025, against 66% in 1975, and that the median age at first marriage was 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women in 2025, against 23.5 and 21.1 in 1975.

  1. The married-couple share: 66 − 47 = 19 percentage points lower, and 19 ÷ 66 × 100 ≈ 28.8, so the share was about 28.8 percent smaller.
  2. Read it: it is a share of households, not of people, and it does not mean fewer families, because a single parent with children is also a family.
  3. The gap between men and women: 30.8 − 28.4 = 2.4 years in 2025 and 23.5 − 21.1 = 2.4 years in 1975, so both medians moved later by the same amount.
  4. Marriage patterns, illustrative. A community's custom requires marrying within one's own clan: endogamy. A neighboring village's rule requires a spouse from another village: exogamy.

Why it matters: the data describe a change in composition; the decline view and the change view interpret it differently.

Worked example 7 — the "nones" and two functions of school (Unit 9)

Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study found that the religiously unaffiliated were 16% of U.S. adults in 2007, 23% in 2014, and 29% in 2023–24.

  1. Step by step: 23 − 16 = 7 percentage points higher, then 29 − 23 = 6 percentage points higher.
  2. The whole change: 29 − 16 = 13 percentage points, and 13 ÷ 16 × 100 = 81.25, so the share was about 81 percent larger than in 2007.
  3. The ratio: in 2023–24 there were 62 ÷ 29 ≈ 2.1 Christian-identifying adults for every unaffiliated adult.
  4. Read it: self-reported identity, not belief or attendance, and a description, not a cause.
  5. Two functions, illustrative. A district runs a summer program to help students recover course credit: a manifest function. It also gives working parents supervision for their children all morning: a latent function.

Why it matters: a percentage-point change and a percent change answer different questions, and both carry their base.

Worked example 8 — union rates, sectors, and authority (Unit 10)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a union membership rate of 10.0% of wage and salary workers in 2025 (14.7 million members), against 20.1% in 1983 (17.7 million).

  1. The rate: 20.1 − 10.0 = 10.1 percentage points lower, and 10.1 ÷ 20.1 × 100 ≈ 50.2, so the 2025 rate was about half the 1983 rate.
  2. The count: 17.7 − 14.7 = 3.0 million fewer members, and 3.0 ÷ 17.7 × 100 ≈ 16.9 percent fewer.
  3. The bases: 14.7 ÷ 10.0 × 100 = 147 million wage and salary workers in 2025, and 17.7 ÷ 20.1 × 100 ≈ 88.1 million in 1983. The rate fell by about half while the count fell by about a sixth, because the workforce grew.
  4. Sectors, illustrative. A fishing boat is primary, the cannery that packs the catch is secondary, and the seafood restaurant is tertiary.
  5. Authority, illustrative. In a fishing village, the eldest captain opens the season because it has always been done that way: traditional authority.

Why it matters: a count and a rate can tell different stories, so read both with the base named.

Worked example 9 — a fertility rate, a movement, and a move (Unit 11)

Our World in Data's presentation of the United Nations World Population Prospects gives a global total fertility rate of 2.3 children per woman in 2023, against 4.9 in the 1950s.

  1. The change: 4.9 − 2.3 = 2.6 fewer children per woman, and 2.6 ÷ 4.9 × 100 ≈ 53.1, a fall of more than half.
  2. Read it: a synthetic rate built from current age-specific birth rates, not a count of any family's children, and not proof that the world's population is shrinking.
  3. Natural increase, illustrative. A city records 18 births and 7 deaths per 1,000 people in a year, so 18 − 7 = 11 per 1,000 people.
  4. A movement, illustrative. A campaign urges individual drivers to stop texting at the wheel. It seeks a partial change in individuals, so it is alterative.
  5. A move, illustrative. A farmworker family leaves a region after years of drought (a push factor) for a town where a food-processing plant is hiring (a pull factor).

Why it matters: a rate is not a count, and a movement is classified by its aim, not its size.

Worked example 10 — crime data and a group study, read with the habit (Units 1 and 3)

  1. The victimization survey: 11.2 ÷ 23.3 × 100 ≈ 48, so about 48% of the violent victimizations the survey counted in 2024 reached police, and about half did not.
  2. Deviance, illustrative: talking loudly on a phone in a train's quiet car breaks a norm but no law, so it is deviant but not a crime.
  3. Asch's one ally: pro-majority errors fell from 32% to 10.4% of answers, a drop of 32 − 10.4 = 21.6 percentage points, and 10.4 ÷ 32 ≈ 0.33, about a third as often.
  4. The ecological fallacy: the 74% who yielded at least once (37 ÷ 50 × 100 = 74) describes 50 participants in one 1951 study, not you.

Why it matters: the early tools return inside every later question.

Self-check questions

  1. A district's median test score is high, so a classmate says every student there did well. What went wrong? Self-check: the ecological fallacy. Why: a group figure says nothing certain about any one member.
  2. A rule against chewing gum in class and a rule against cheating on a test: which is a mos? Self-check: the rule against cheating. Why: breaking it carries moral weight; gum is a folkway.
  3. Which theorist gave the course the generalized other? Self-check: Mead (1934). Why: the looking-glass self is Cooley's; the stages and the generalized other are Mead's.
  4. A worker gives up on both the company's goals and its rules and stops trying altogether. Which of Merton's responses? Self-check: retreatism. Why: the person drops both the goal and the means.
  5. What is the difference between absolute and relative poverty? Self-check: lacking the basics needed to live, against having far less than most people around you. Why: one is measured against needs, the other against neighbors.
  6. An illustrative country reports GNI per capita of 10,000 dollars. Which income group for fiscal year 2027? Self-check: upper-middle income. Why: 10,000 sits between 4,636 and 14,375 dollars.
  7. Does the contact hypothesis promise that any contact between groups reduces prejudice? Self-check: no; it says contact between members of different groups can reduce prejudice under some conditions (Allport, 1954). Why: it is a hypothesis to test, and which conditions matter is what researchers study.
  8. Is gender identity the same thing as sex? Self-check: no. Why: sex refers to physical characteristics; gender identity is a person's own inner sense of their gender.
  9. A household of two parents and their children, and one that adds a grandparent: which is which? Self-check: nuclear, then extended. Why: an extended family adds other relatives.
  10. A classmate says Weber proved that Protestantism caused capitalism. Fix the claim. Self-check: Weber argued an elective affinity, a fit that strengthens both. Why: he did not claim a one-way cause.
  11. Which model says power is shared among many competing groups, none dominating for long? Self-check: the pluralist model. Why: the power-elite model (Mills, 1956) says a small, interlocking elite holds decisive power.
  12. A flyer says "Our bus line was cut." Which frame is that, in Snow and Benford's terms? Self-check: a diagnostic frame. Why: it names the problem; a prognostic frame offers a fix, and a motivational frame gives a reason to act.

Check yourself — choose one. (a) Which unit in this guide felt least familiar, and which worked example would you redo first? (b) Pick one early tool, such as the four data questions or the three lenses, and explain in two sentences how it changes the way you read one Weeks 9–15 topic. Either choice is a good use of ten minutes.

Watch before the exam

These videos come from the course's own weekly readings. Use them to retrieve what you already learned and to connect weeks, not for new material.

Study plan

A short countdown sized to a course that meets twice a week. Count backward from the day the final opens in Week 16.

  • Two weeks out: review Units 1–4 in one sitting and redo Worked examples 1 and 10 from scratch. These tools return inside later questions.
  • Ten days out: review Units 5 and 6. Redo Worked examples 2, 3, and 4 until each step comes with its reason. Week 10 carries 8 of the 40 questions, more than any other week.
  • One week out: review Units 7 and 8. Redo Worked examples 5 and 6 without looking.
  • Five days out: take the paired practice exam once, closed-book and under exam-like conditions, then sort every miss by week. Remember that it leans on Weeks 1–7 far more than the final does.
  • Four days out: review Units 9–11 and redo Worked examples 7, 8, and 9.
  • Three days out: run the paired exam-prep tutorial (the copy/paste chatbot tutor, or its no-AI route) on the two units that felt weakest, with at least one from Units 5–11.
  • Two days out: answer the twelve self-check questions cold, then retake the practice exam.
  • The day before: skim the "Predictable mistakes → cures" lines in every unit and watch one video from the list above. Sleep.

Use the exam-prep tutorial and the practice exam for active recall; this guide is for review, and those two are where you rehearse. Rereading alone does less for you than retrieval practice does.

Exam format and scoring

The final is scored automatically, and all 40 questions count the same. The questions appear one at a time, and you cannot go back to an earlier question once you move on. You have one attempt and no time limit. AI tools are not permitted on the final.

Test-taking strategies for this material:

  • For any figure, walk the four questions before you choose: what is measured, over whom and when, what it shows and does not, and correlation or cause.
  • For a change between two percentages, decide first whether the question wants percentage points or percent.
  • For any perspective, say its level of analysis: structural functionalism and conflict theory are macro, symbolic interactionism is micro.
  • For a pair of look-alike terms, name the one word that separates them: attitude or action, bodies or expectations, household or family, power or legitimate power.
  • For a theorist and an idea, check the match before anything else: the opium line is Marx's, the elective affinity is Weber's, and the power elite is Mills's.
  • For a model, such as the demographic transition or Aberle's types, remember that it is a classroom model and classify by its stated test.
  • Since you cannot go back, settle each question before you move on.

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