Notes

Chapter 8:
1. Understand social class.
A category of people who share similar opportunities, similar economic and vocational positions, similar lifestyles, and similar attitudes and behaviors.

2. Understand the upper class.
Great wealth
Recognize one another by reputation and lifestyle.
have high prestige and a lifestyle
Often influence society’s basic economic and political structures.
Usually isolates itself from the rest of society.

3. Understand the upper-middle class. (2 questions about this)
Made up of successful business and professional people and their families.
Usually just below the top in an organizational hierarchy but still command a reasonably high income.
Often have a college education, own property, and have a savings reserve.
They usually live in comfortable homes in the more exclusive areas of a community, are active in civic groups, and carefully plan for the future.
They very likely belong to a church.

4. Know all about the lower-middle class. (2 questions)
Shares many characteristics with the upper-middle class, but its members have not been able to achieve the same kind of lifestyle because of economic or educational shortcomings.
Usually high school graduates with modest incomes, they are semi professionals, clerical and sales workers, and upper-level manual laborers.
Emphasize respectability and security, have some savings, and are politically and economically conservative.
Often are dissatisfied with their standard of living, jobs, and family incomes.

5. Understand the lower class.
Bottom of the economic ladder.
Have little in the way of education or occupational skills and consequently are unemployed or underemployed.
Families often have many problems, including broken homes, illegitimacy, criminal involvement, and alcoholism

6. Understand the 5 myths about the poor.
1. People Are Poor Because They Are Too Lazy to work
2. Most Poor People Are Minorities, and Most Minorities Are Poor
3. Most of the Poor Are Single Mothers with Children
4. Most People in Poverty Live in the Inner Cities
5. Welfare Programs for the Poor Are Straining the Federal Budget

Chapter 9:
7. Understand the Caste system.
A rigid form of stratification, based on ascribed characteristics such as skin color or family identity, that determines a person’s prestige, occupation, residence, and social relationships.

8. Understand the Estate system. (Feudalism)
A closed system of stratification in which a person’s social position is defined by law, and membership is determined primarily by inheritance.
A segment of a society that has legally established rights and duties.
Is similar to a caste system, but not as extreme.

9. Understand the Class system.
Social class consists of a category of people who share similar opportunities, similar economic and vocational positions, similar lifestyles, and similar attitudes and behaviors.

10. Know all about modernization theory. (2 questions)
Assumes that the economic differences among countries are due to technological and cultural differences.
Depends on a country having a cultural environment that welcomes innovation and makes it possible for technological advancements to be incorporated into that society.
Assumes that developed countries play an important role in helping the less-developed countries to modernize

11. Know all about dependency theory. (2 questions)
Proposes that the economic positions of rich and poor nations are linked and cannot be understood in isolation from each other.
Global inequality is due to the exploitation of poor societies by the rich ones.
Dependency theorists believe that the prosperity of the more-developed countries came about because of the impoverishment of other countries.

12. Understand the maternal issues.
Maternal Health-
The survival of infants and children depends critically on the nurturing the mother provided during pregnancy and childhood.


Maternal Age-
An infant is at higher health risk if the mother is in her teens or older than 40, if she has given birth more than seven times, or if the interval between births is less than 2 years.

Maternal Education-
Children’s chances of surviving improve as their mother’s education increases.

13. Understand about child marriage and early marriage.
Child marriage began as a way to protect unwelcome sexual advances and to gain economic security.
That purpose is no longer being served and child marriage often means the girl will have a life of sexual and economic servitude.
The second class status of women is both the cause and the result of child marriage.

14. Understand contraception.
Partly a function of a couple’s wish to avoid or delay having children and partly related to costs.
People have regulated family size for centuries through abortion, abstinence, and even infanticide.
In many countries, the costs of preventing a birth, whether economic, social, or psychological, may be greater than the risk of having another child.

15. Know all about urban or rural residence.
Rural lifestyles that involve farming and herding tend to produce high birth rates because children are seen as contributing workers.
Urban fertility tends to be lower in developing countries than rural fertility.
Urban dwellers usually have access to better education and health services, a wider range of jobs, and more avenues for self-improvement and social mobility than do their rural counterparts

16. Understand global aging.
Global aging will affect economic growth, savings, investment and consumption, labor markets, pensions, taxation, and the transfers of wealth, property, and care from one generation to another.


Chapter 10:
1. Understand the concept of race (4 questions)
Race-
A category of people who are defined as similar because of a number of physical characteristics.

Genetic Definitions-
Define race by noting differences in gene frequencies among selected groups.

Legal Definitions-
Used as devices to prevent blacks from attending white schools, serving on juries, holding certain jobs, or patronizing certain public places.

Social Definitions-
The social definition of race, which is the decisive one in most interactions, pays little attention to an individual’s hereditary physical features or to whether his or her percentage of "Negro blood" is onefourth, one-eighth, or one-sixteenth.

2. Know the difference between multiracial ancestry and interracial marriage.
Multiracial Ancestry-
Children who are born to parents of multiple races-representing more than one race.
Ancestors comes from more than one race
Example : American Indian/Alaska Native

Interracial Marriage-
Marriage between two people of differing racial groups.
Example: Black and White

3. Understand the concept of ethnic groups. (2 questions)
As a distinct cultural tradition that its own members identify with and that may or may not be recognized by others.
An ethnic group may or may not have its own separate political unit
May have had one in the past ; may aspire to have one in the future,
Its members may be scattered throughout existing countries.

4. Understand the concept of minority. (2 questions)
A group of people who, because of physical or cultural characteristics, are singled out from others in society for differential and unequal treatment, and who therefore regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination.

5. Understand prejudice and discrimination. (3 questions)
Prejudice is a subjective feeling, whereas discrimination is an overt action.
Discrimination refers to differential treatment, usually unequal and injurious, accorded to individuals who are assumed to belong to a particular category or group.

6. Understand assimilation.
Is the process whereby groups with different cultures come to have a common culture.
Refers to the fusion of cultural heritages.
Integration of new elements with old ones.

7. Understand pluralism.
The development and coexistence of separate racial and ethnic group identities within a society
Is a philosophical viewpoint that attempts to produce what is considered to be a desirable social situation.

8. Know all about subjugation and segregation.
Subjugation-
The subordination of one group and the assumption of a position of authority, power, and domination by the other.

Segregation-
Segregation, a form of subjugation, refers to the act, process, or state of being set apart.
Places limits and restrictions on the contact, communication, and social relations among groups.

9. Understand the difference between expulsion and annihilation (2 questions).
Expulsion-
The process of forcing a group to leave the territory in which it lives.
Can be accomplished through forced migration.
The relocation of a group through direct action

Annihilation-
The deliberate extermination of a racial or ethnic group.


Chapter 11:
10. Understand the sociological definition of sex. (2 questions)
The physical and biological differences between men and women.
Sex differences are made evident by physical distinctions in anatomical, chromosomal, hormonal, and physiological characteristics.

11. Understand the sociological definition of gender. (2 questions)
The social, psychological, and cultural attributes of masculinity and femininity that are based on the previous biological distinctions.

12. Know about the religious views of gender stratification. (2 questions)
Patriarchal Ideology - The belief that men are superior to women and should control all important aspects of society.

According to traditional Islamic law and tradition, three groups of people are not eligible for legal and religious equality: unbeliever, slaves, women

13. Understand the functionalist viewpoint. (2 questions)
Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales (1955) applied functionalist theory to the modern family.
Argued that the division of labor and role differentiation by sex are universal principles of family organization and are functional to the modern family.
Believe that the family functions best when the father assumes the instrumental role.

14. Understand the instrumental and expressive roles in the functionalist viewpoint.
The Instrumental role-
Focuses on relationships between the family and the outside world.
Involves supporting and protecting the family.

The mother concentrates her energies on the expressive role which focuses on relationships within the family and requires her to provide the love and emotional support needed to sustain the family.

15. Understand gender-role socialization.
Lifelong process whereby people learn the values, attitudes, motivations, and behavior considered appropriate to each sex according to their culture.

16. Understand childhood socialization.
Parents carry in their minds images of what girls and boys are like.
How they should behave, and what they should be in later life.
Parents respond differently to girls and boys right from the beginning.
Girls are caressed more than boys, whereas boys are jostled and roughhoused more.
Mothers talk more to their daughters, and fathers interact more with their sons.

17. Know all about the 3 ways women experience discrimination the business world. (2
questions)
1) During the hiring process-
When women are given jobs with lower occupational prestige than men who have equivalent qualifications receive
2) Through unequal wage policies-
Women receive less pay than men for equivalent work
3) In the awarding of promotions-
Women find it more difficult than men to move up the career ladder