Instructions: For each question, click on the radio button beside your answer. When you have completed the entire quiz, click the Submit my answers button at the bottom of the page to receive your results.

Question 1:

Which social thinker called for sociologists to locate sociology at the intersection of individual biography and larger social structures?
a) C. Wright Mills
b) George Herbert Mead
c) Max Weber
d) Talcott Parsons

Question 2:

When sociologists do not favour agency in their explanations of social life, they tend to focus, instead, on what concept?
a) Social structure
b) Social norms
c) Social stratification
d) Social inequality

Question 3:

What have sociologists never been able to do?
a) Concentrate on social structure
b) Entirely separate the individual from society
c) Address criticisms from other disciplines
d) Move past epistemological problems

Question 4:

According to functionalism, what puts strain on existing social structures?
a) Religious intolerance
b) Dysfunctional forms of adaptation
c) Economic strife
d) Radical individualism

Question 5:

For Talcott Parsons, cherished American values were under strain. What was his solution?
a) Revolution
b) Promoting moral values
c) Religion
d) Centralization

Question 6:

In their supermarket shoppers’ study, what contradiction were Lave, Murtaugh, and de la Rocha trying to describe?
a) The contradiction between the prices of products and the ability of the shoppers to afford the products
b) The contradiction of women being primarily responsible for making supermarket purchases and men being responsible for consuming
c) The contradiction between the abundance of choice and the need to make a choice amongst the abundance
d) The contradiction between the lack of choice and the need to make a choice with so few options presented

Question 7:

What is a pre-existing condition for human agency?
a) Social capital
b) Social networks
c) Social freedom
d) Social structure

Question 8:

What is the intentional, but nonetheless socially constrained, disposition of an individual social actor to act a certain way and to make a certain kind of sense out of the social world?
a) Structuration
b) Habitus
c) Habit
d) Inclination

Question 9:

What is one of the two factors that contribute to the aging of the Canadian population?
a) Emigration
b) Increase in life expectancy
c) Collapse of pension system
d) Low population growth

Question 10:

Which type of social capital reflects relations within a social network?
a) Bonding social capital
b) Bridging social capital
c) Belonging social capital
d) Cultural social capital

True or False Questions

Question 11:

Functionalism is a neutral, value-free, objective method of sociological inquiry.
a) True
b) False

Question 12:

In Western societies there is clearly a strong ideological commitment to treat individual freedom and social structure as competing or even opposing ideals.
a) True
b) False

Question 13:

Most sociologists argue that social structure and social agency should be used as conceptual opposites.
a) True
b) False

Question 14:

In Wertsch’s research, the common narrative found in student essays on the topic of “The Origins of the United States” was the quest-for-freedom narrative.
a) True
b) False

Question 15:

For Giddens, human agency and social structure are oppositional.
a) True
b) False

Question 16:

Kabyle women, Bourdieu observed, maintain a bowed comportment, a bodily manifestation of a habitus appropriate to their subordinate status in Kabyle society.
a) True
b) False

Question 17:

According to Elder-Vass, social structures are not literally internalized by individuals, but only metaphorically so, through the influence they have on our subjectivity.
a) True
b) False

Question 18:

Network analysis is a cohesive and unified theory of social structure.
a) True
b) False

Question 19:

Families are an example of a social network tied together through bonding capital.
a) True
b) False

Question 20:

In caring for frail, elderly adults, tensions rarely emerge between family caregivers over equity in caregiving.
a) True
b) False

Higher Education

Thinking About Sociology, Second Edition - Chapter 11