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Click on each question to check your answer.
1. What is the difference between culture and society?
Answer: Society is the sum of human interactions and common institutions across the same geographic territory. Culture, on the other hand, refers to the system of behaviours, beliefs, knowledge, practices, values, and materials.
2. Why are anti-consumerist groups considered countercultural?
Answer: They disagree with the dominant culture’s focus on acquiring and consuming products to display status and worth. Instead they choose to pursue their own cultural focus.
3. What research methods did Garfinkel use to run his breaching experiments?
Answer: Garfinkel asked his students to act like guests in their parents’ homes during the holidays. During another breaching experiment Garfield asked his students to take grocery items from the carts of shoppers without asking in order to gauge the shoppers’ reactions.
4. How did the core founders of sociology—Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim—theorize religion in human societies?
Answer: Marx believed religion dulled people’s tendency to resist social inequality. Durkheim believed religion was an important ingredient in keeping human societies united. Weber believed religion’s authority would weaken as the authority of science and bureaucracy grew stronger.
5. How did Durkheim’s study of suicide prove the act is not always an individual psychological decision?
Answer: Durkheim proved this by showing how social facts, in other words elements of a society beyond an individual’s control, shaped their actions. To support this, Durkheim demonstrated how suicide rates differed according to country, gender, and religion. These social facts impacted suicide rates in the Western European countries Durkheim studied.
6. What is the difference between independent variables and dependent variables?