Research Methods
An ordered series of questions intended to elicit information from respondents, including cross sectional and longitudinal variations
What are Surveys?
Status assigned by society without regard for the person’s unique talents, efforts, or characteristics (as opposed to achieved)
What is Ascribed Status?
An example would be someone who grew up in a poor family that is classified as middle class later in life.
What is Upward Mobility?
Examples include language, kinship systems, incest prohibition, art, dancing, bodily adornment, gift giving, rules of hygiene.
What are Cultural Universals?
Essential for social science research, since we conduct research on people
Directly observes and participates in the social world they’re studying
What is Participant Observation (or Ethnography)?
Our capability to act given the structural rules and resources that impact our behaviors.
What is Agency?
A group of individuals who share a similar socioeconomic position based on income, wealth, education, and occupation.
What is Social Class?
The values, beliefs, behaviors, ideas, ideals, and social norms of a particular society or sub-group.
Means that the measures are consistent; in theory, another researcher could redo your study and get similar responses.
Method in which the environment is controlled to isolate the effects of one factor or characteristic
What is an Experiment?
The patterned social arrangements in society, shapes rules and access to resources
Looks at the context of the need, how one social group compares to others
What is Relative Poverty?
Commonly attuned to elite and upper-middle class tastes and sensibilities, and has an “aura” that denotes its exceptional quality as opposed to popular culture
What is High Culture?
What is Primary Socialization?
When two (or more) variables can be shown to vary simultaneously, as opposed to cause change in another
What is Correlation?
The experiences that give us an identity and teach us the values, morals, beliefs, and ways of acting and thinking that are expected in our society
What is Socialization?
Refers to people who spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force but whose incomes still fell below the official poverty level
What are the Working Poor?
What are Social Norms?
The conceptual ways people separate each other into groups, like traditions, styles, tastes, classifications
What are Symbolic Boundaries?
Defining abstract concepts and ideas in ways that then allow them to be observed and measured
What is Operationalization?
Examples include mass media, government, the economy, the family, the healthcare system, and the education system.
What are Social Institutions?
Shows us that the average White family has accumulated much more wealth than Black and Hispanic families.
What is the Racial Wealth Gap?
Any aspect of culture (material or not) that people are able to rely on as a symbolic resource to produce status
What is Cultural Capital?
A statistical measure of inequality which shows that the United States is one of the most unequal developed nations in the world