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1. Sociological the ability to connect the most basic, intimate aspects of
Imagination an individual's life to seemingly impersonal and remote
historical forces
2. Social Institution a complex group of interdependent positions that, togeth-
er, perform a social role and reproduce themselves over
time; also defined in a narrow sense as any institution in
a society that works to shape the behavior of the groups
or people within it
3. Functionalism the theory that various social institutions and processes
in society exist to serve some important (or necessary)
function to keep society running
4. Conflict Theory the idea that conflict between competing interests is the
basic, animating force of social change and society in
general
5. Symbolic inter- a micro-level theory in which shared meanings, orienta-
actionism tions, and assumptions form the basic motivations behind
people's actions
6. Social construc- an entity that exists because people behave as if it exists
tion and whose existence is perpetuated as people and social
institutions act in accordance with the widely agreed-upon
formal rules or informal norms of behavior associated with
that entity
7. Reseach meth- approaches that social scientists use for investigation the
ods answers to questions
8. Quantitative methods that seek to obtain information about the social
methods worlds that is already in or can be converted to numeric
form
9. Qualitative meth- methods that attempt to collect information about the
ods social world that cannot be readily concerted to numeric
form
10.
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Deductive ap- a research approach that starts with a theory, forms a
proach hypothesis, makes empirical observations, and then an-
alyzes he date to confirm, reject, or modify the original
theory
11. Inductive ap- a research approach that starts with empirical observa-
proach tions and then works to form a theory
12. Dependent vari- the outcome that the researcher is trying to explain
able
13. Independent a measured factor that the researcher believes has a
variable causal impact on the dependent variable
14. Hypothesis a proposed relationship between two variables
15. Validity the extent to which an instrument measures what it is
intended to measure
16. Reliability likelihood of obtaining consistent results using the same
measure
17. Population an entire group of individual persons, objects, or items
from which samples may be drawn
18. Sample the subset of the population from which you are actually
collecting data
19. Case study an intensive investigation of one particular unit of analysis
in order to describe it or uncover its mechanisms
20. Participant ob- a qualitative research method that seeks to uncover the
servation meanings by observing social actions in practice
21. Survey an ordered series of questions intended to elicit informa-
tion from respondents
22. Historical meth- research that collects data from written reports, news-
ods paper articles, journals, transcripts, television programs,
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diaries, artwork, and other artifacts that date to a prior
time period under study
23. Comparative re- a methodology by which two or more entities (such as
search countries), which are similar in many dimensions but differ
on one in question, are compared to learn about the
dimension that differs between them
24. Experimental methods that seek to alter the social landscape in a
methods very specific way for a given sample of individuals and
then track what results that change yields; often involve
comparisons to a control group that did not experience
such an intervention
25. Ethnocentrism the belief that one's own culture or group is superior to
others and the tendency to view all other cultures from
the perspective of one's own
26. Nonmaterial cul- values, beliefs, behaviors, and social norms
ture
27. Material culture everything that is a part of our constructed, physical en-
vironment, including technology
28. Ideology a system of concepts and relationships, an understanding
of cause and effect
29. Cultural rela- taking into account the differences across cultures with-
tivism out passing judgement or assigning value
30. Values moral beliefs
31. Norms how values tell us to behave
32. Socialization the process by which individuals internalize the values,
beliefs, and norms of a given society and learn to function
as members of that society
33. Reflection theory the idea that culture is a projection of social structures and
relationships into the public sphere, a screen onto which