Free CLEP Introductory Sociology Exam Flashcards

C. Wright Mills's term for seeing how an individual biography intersects with history and social structure. Its test case: one person out of work is a personal trouble, but when millions are unemployed it is a public issue rooted in the structure of the economy, not in individual failings.

Comte named the discipline sociology and argued it should study society using the systematic observation and reasoning of the natural sciences. Positivism treats social patterns as knowable through empirical evidence rather than speculation or doctrine.

A way of acting, thinking, or feeling that exists outside any one individual and exerts coercive power over them, such as law, custom, or religion. Durkheim's study of suicide argued that even that act varies with social integration and regulation, not individual psychology alone.

The macro-level paradigm, rooted in Karl Marx, that sees society as an arena of competition over scarce resources and power. Marx focused on the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who must sell their labor.

Max Weber's principle that researchers should interpret social action from the actor's own point of view and the meanings they attach to it. It pushed sociology toward interpretive, qualitative understanding alongside statistical analysis.

The micro-level paradigm that treats society as built up out of everyday interaction and shared symbols, especially language. George Herbert Mead laid its foundation, and his student Herbert Blumer named the perspective in 1937.

Robert Merton's distinction: a manifest function is an intended, recognized consequence of a social pattern, while a latent function is unintended and often unrecognized. Consequences that undermine a system he called dysfunctions, separating what a pattern does from whether that outcome was intended.

Du Bois described double consciousness as the experience of always measuring oneself through the eyes of a dominant group. His 1899 study of Black life in Philadelphia was among the first systematic empirical community studies in American sociology.

A sample in which every member of the population has the same chance of selection, typically by drawing at random from a complete list called a sampling frame. Because chance rather than the researcher picks the cases, results can be generalized to the population within a calculable margin of error — something convenience and volunteer samples cannot claim.

Reliability is whether a measure produces consistent results when repeated; validity is whether it actually measures the concept it claims to measure. A measure can be perfectly consistent and still be invalid.

Material culture is the physical objects a group produces, such as tools, clothing, and buildings. Nonmaterial culture is the intangible content of a way of life: beliefs, values, norms, symbols, and language.

Ethnocentrism judges another culture by the standards of one's own, usually treating one's own as superior. Cultural relativism suspends that judgment and interprets a practice in the context of the culture that produces it.

William Graham Sumner distinguished folkways, everyday customs whose violation brings only mild disapproval, from mores, norms tied to core values whose violation brings strong condemnation. Taboos are the strongest mores: prohibitions so deeply held that breaking them provokes revulsion, such as the incest taboo.

Charles Horton Cooley's idea that self-image is assembled from imagining how we appear to others, imagining their judgment of us, and then feeling pride or shame in response. The self is therefore a social product rather than an inborn trait.

George Herbert Mead's term for the organized attitudes of the whole community, taken into the self so a person can judge their own conduct from society's standpoint. It emerges in the game stage, when a child must hold every player's role in mind at once — unlike the play stage, where a child takes on one role at a time.

Erving Goffman's total institution is a setting that cuts people off from the wider society and regulates every part of daily life, such as a prison, boot camp, or long-stay psychiatric hospital. Resocialization there strips away a prior identity and builds a new one.

Role conflict is tension between the demands of two different statuses a person holds at once, such as employee and parent. Role strain is tension among the competing demands built into a single status.

Erving Goffman's approach treats social life as theater: people perform on a front stage before an audience and drop the performance backstage. Impression management is the ongoing effort to control how others perceive that performance.

Max Weber described bureaucracy as a hierarchy of offices with a clear division of labor, written rules, impersonal handling of cases, and appointment by technical qualification. He saw it as the most efficient form of organization yet feared that rationalization would trap modern people in an "iron cage" of rules and calculation.

Robert Merton argued that deviance arises when a society urges everyone toward the same cultural goals while distributing legitimate means to reach them unequally. His five adaptations are conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion.

Labeling theory holds that deviance comes from society's reaction rather than from the act itself; Howard Becker argued that social groups create deviance by making the rules. Edwin Lemert's secondary deviance is the behavior that follows once a person adopts the deviant label as an identity.

John McCarthy and Mayer Zald's explanation (1977) that social movements rise and succeed less because grievances are severe and more because organizers can assemble resources: money, members, leadership, media attention, and existing networks. It answers why widespread discontent alone rarely produces a movement.

William F. Ogburn's term for the delay between a change in material culture, such as a new technology, and the adjustment of nonmaterial culture — norms, laws, and values — to it. Arguments over how to regulate a new technology are the classic example.

A caste system is closed: position is ascribed at birth, marriage is expected within the group, and mobility is essentially impossible. A class system is open: position rests partly on achievement, so movement between strata can occur.

Max Weber argued that inequality is more than economic, identifying class (economic position), status (prestige or social honor), and party (organized political power). The three need not line up — a lottery winner gains class without status, and a member of the clergy may hold high status on a modest income.

Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore's 1945 functionalist claim that stratification persists because unequal rewards motivate the most capable people to train for and fill the positions a society treats as most important. Melvin Tumin's 1953 critique replied that it rationalizes inequality, cannot say which positions are truly most important, and ignores how inherited privilege blocks access to training.

Intergenerational mobility compares a person's social position with that of their parents. Intragenerational mobility tracks movement up or down within a single person's own working life.

Sociologists point to a body of theoretical knowledge gained through long formal training, a service orientation, self-regulation through associations and licensure, and substantial autonomy over the work. Professionalization is the process by which an occupation claims those features.

Prejudice is an attitude — a prejudgment about people because of their group membership. Discrimination is behavior — unequal treatment based on that membership. Robert Merton's typology shows the two are separable: the "fair-weather liberal" discriminates without being prejudiced, while the "timid bigot" is prejudiced but does not discriminate.

Unequal treatment produced by the ordinary rules, policies, and routines of organizations rather than by one person's bias. It can persist with no prejudiced actor present, as when a hiring or lending rule has an unequal effect across groups.

Assimilation is the process by which a minority group takes on the dominant culture and its distinctiveness fades. Pluralism is coexistence in which groups keep distinct identities while sharing the society's institutions.

A category of people singled out for unequal treatment who hold less power and share a sense of group identity — not necessarily fewer in number. Sociologists therefore often analyze women in the United States as a minority group even though they slightly outnumber men.

Sex refers to the biological and physiological characteristics used to classify people as male or female. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, expectations, and behaviors a society attaches to those categories, which vary across cultures and over time.

Arlie Hochschild's term for the unpaid housework and caregiving that many women perform after completing a day of paid employment. It shows how gendered expectations at home can persist even where women's labor-force participation has risen.

Disengagement theory, associated with Cumming and Henry, holds that older adults and society gradually withdraw from each other, easing the transfer of roles between generations. Activity theory counters that well-being in later life depends on staying active and replacing lost roles.

A stable, organized pattern of statuses, roles, norms, and organizations that meets a basic need of society. Sociologists usually treat family, education, religion, the economy, government, and medicine as the major institutions.

The family of orientation is the family a person is born into or raised in. The family of procreation is the family a person forms as an adult with a partner and any children.

Endogamy is the norm that people marry within their own group — class, religion, ethnicity, or caste. Exogamy requires marrying outside a defined group, most universally outside one's own close kin.

The unofficial lessons schools teach alongside academic subjects: punctuality, obedience to authority, competition, and expected conduct. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis's "correspondence principle" argues that these lessons mirror the workplace, training working-class students for obedience and higher-class students for independence.

The growing use of diplomas and degrees as gatekeeping requirements for jobs, even when the credential exceeds what the work demands. Randall Collins argued that credentials often serve to control access to positions rather than to certify actual skill.

Talcott Parsons's functionalist account of illness as a temporary social role. The sick person is excused from normal obligations and not blamed for the condition, but is expected to want to recover and to seek competent help.

Traditional authority rests on long-standing custom and inherited position. Charismatic authority rests on the extraordinary personal qualities of a leader. Rational-legal authority rests on enacted rules and the office a person holds rather than the person.

C. Wright Mills argued that major national decisions in the United States are made by a small, interlocking group at the top of corporations, the military, and the federal government. The pluralist model disputes this, seeing power spread among competing interest groups.

Max Weber argued that ascetic Protestantism, especially Calvinism, encouraged disciplined work, thrift, and reinvestment of profit, helping modern capitalism take hold. Weber used it to show that ideas, and not only material conditions, can reshape an economy — a direct counterpoint to Marx.

The process by which religion loses influence over other institutions and over everyday life as a society modernizes. The thesis is contested: religious authority has weakened in much of Western Europe, yet the United States remains highly religious, and fundamentalist and new religious movements have grown in many modern societies.

A model tying population change to industrialization in stages: Stage 1 has high birth and death rates and little growth; Stage 2 brings falling death rates while births stay high, so population surges; Stage 3 sees birth rates fall and growth slow; Stage 4 has low birth and death rates and near-zero growth.

Thomas Malthus argued in 1798 that population grows geometrically while food supply grows only arithmetically. He distinguished positive checks that raise deaths (famine, disease, war) from preventive checks that lower births (delayed marriage, "moral restraint"); critics note he did not foresee modern agricultural yields or the voluntary fertility decline of industrial societies.

Ferdinand Tönnies contrasted Gemeinschaft, the close-knit community held together by kinship, tradition, and personal ties, with Gesellschaft, the modern association held together by self-interest, contract, and impersonal relations.

Ernest Burgess's Chicago School model of urban growth pictures the city as rings expanding outward from a central business district, with land use and residents sorted by zone. It is a founding example of human ecology, the study of how populations relate to their environment.

Push factors drive people out of an area, such as war, unemployment, persecution, or disaster. Pull factors draw them toward a destination, such as jobs, safety, schooling, or family already there. Together they explain migration streams and much urban growth.