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Chapter 1 Review Questions
1. What is the difference between culture and society?
Society is the largest-scale human group that shares a common geographic territory and common institutions. 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?
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 method did Garfinkel use to examine unrecognized ways by which we follow social rules ?
He used a breaching experiment. In this type of experiment, a researcher breaks a social rule to reveal the unrecognized way by which all individuals cooperate to maintain the smooth functioning of social interactions and social order. By creating disorder, he hoped to demonstrate how social order is usually maintained. For example, 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?
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?
Durkheim proved this by showing how social facts, or 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 that Durkheim studied.
6. What is the difference between independent variables and dependent variables?
Independent variables are the variables that affect other variables. Dependent variables are affected by independent variables . If the research question is "Does your ethnicity affect your income?" then the independent variable is ethnicity and the dependent variable is income.