Sociology 100

Topics: Sociology, Poverty, Sociocultural evolution Pages: 11 (3219 words) Published: December 3, 2012
15 short-answer based questions ½ page. Define, get examples and write answer. If there are 2 sides to a question, mention them.  
1. Define feminism and describe how this perspective is useful for sociologists.

Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women. In addition, feminism seeks to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment. A feminist is "an advocate or supporter of the rights and equality of women" Feminist perspective is to see things from the point-of -view of women. This is relevant to almost everything in a society driven by patriarchy, male chauvinism & male sexist bias. It is to be conscious of and critical towards domination of women by their male counterparts at home, at workplace, in the streets, as regards property rights, right to education, right to justice and others. It implies social activism for the correction of gender imbalances/exploitation such as female foeticide, dowry-related abuse of women, sexual harassment etc.  

2.    Explain three ways that Max Weber disagreed with Karl Marx. Is this disagreement important? * Look at Weber’s book “Class, status and power.”
* Quote Marx (proletariat, and bourgeoisie) workers and owners. * Believes that status come from your work- economically determined. * Earnings are given to owners and not the working class. * Power is owned by bourgeoisie; basic reality of capitalist environment. They own the people who run the state because of their wealth. * Economy- economic analysis: fundamental difference is that class, status and power according to Weber is far more complex than how Marx sees the world. Status means that people could be respected even before wealth. * Marx underplays status, and class is too narrowly minded. Marx: class comes from haves and have not’s, comes from power. Power comes from wealth. Heavily economically inclined. Weber: class comes from political parties. Power comes from people collectively working. Relationships between members such as respect, respect comes from spiritual values. Important because their differentiating views on socials stratification cover an array of ideas that all raise important points. There are multiple ways to look how class, power and status are measured, and these are only 2.

3.    Compare the strengths and limitations of both qualitative research and survey (quantitative) research. Methods-> sense data. Quantitative method- creating data that is numerical (stats). What the problem with this? Lets you come up with figures that appear to satisfy the question. Information, but you pre-package it. You decide in advance to go after particular information so you cut out the rest of reality. Strengths 1. Surveys are particularly useful in describing the characteristics of a large population. 2. Surveys- especially self-administered ones – make large samples feasible. 3. In one sense, surveys are flexible.

4. Standardized questionnaires have an important strength in regard to measurement generally.  
1. Surveys often appear superficial in their coverage of complex topics. 2. Similarly, survey research can seldom deal with the context of social life. 3. In many ways, surveys are inflexible.

4. Finally, surveys are subject to artificiality. The problem of artificiality has two aspects: a. The topic of the study may not be amenable to measurement through questionnaires. b. Second, the act of studying that topic- an attitude, for example, may affect it.  

* Survey research is generally weak on validity but strong on reliability. Qualitative method- different way of inquiring than surveys. Participation observation. Find out the meanings people have for things, may come up with different study than survey LIMITATIONS · The problem of...
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