1. Stacey is a tenth grader who’s always been a bit shy, and has never had a boyfriend. In the middle of the school year, she gets drunk at a party, and sleeps with a boy she doesn’t know. Afterward, some other girls think it’s a great joke to spread the rumor that Stacey is sexually promiscuous. By the end of the year, she figures she’s got nothing to lose, and starts sleeping around. According to labeling theory, the night of the party Stacey engaged in ____; at the end of the year, she was engaging in ____.
A. secondary deviance; primary deviance
B. self-presentation; the construction of reality
C. primary deviance; secondary deviance
D. the construction of reality; self-presentation
2. According to the Thomas Theorem, although Stacey’s “slutty” reputation at mid-year was based on a lie, it was:
A. real in its consequences
B. the product of conflict between status groups
C. dysfunctional and tautological
D. rational, given the social context
***
3. The night before the midterm, a Soc 292 student is weighing the costs and benefits of studying all night for the midterm or attending a party with her friends and studying an hour before the exam. Which theoretical perspective would be most useful to analyze her decision-making process?
A. Symbolic Interactionism
B. Rational Choice
C. Structural Functionalism
D. Status Conflict
4. According to the functionalist perspective of education, the role of the education system is to:
A. reproduce the existing social class order
B. create social cohesion through shared norms and values
C. facilitate social change by providing a setting where diverse cultures can meet
D. serve as a site in which important social realities (the self, gender differences, etc.) are constructed
5. Which of the following is a criticism of the functionalist perspective of education?
A. It overemphasizes the role of power and prestige in determining students’ outcomes.
B. Actors lack perfect information and cannot reasonably calculate the costs and benefits to each education-related decision.
C. It focuses too heavily on the micro-level and ignores important macro-level dynamics.
D. It produces tautological (circular) arguments.
6. Two sociologists are making observations in a classroom. Dr. Smith is analyzing exchanges between teachers and students, looking for the ways in which each communicates through verbal and nonverbal means. Dr. Jones is looking at how teachers use rewards and punishments to elicit preferred behaviors from students. Smith is most likely operating from a ____ perspective, while Jones probably is being guided by ____ theory.
A. rational choice; symbolic interactionist
B. Marxist; Weberian
C. Weberian; Marxist
D. symbolic interactionist; rational choice
7. Marxist theorists of education would be MOST interested in conflict between ____ over ____.
A. high and low SES groups; how educational resources are distributed to the children of each
B. students and teachers; how girls receive less attention than boys in the classroom
C. teachers and principals; whether/how to include multicultural content in the curriculum
D. parents and children; kids’ academic performance
8. Randall Collins is a ____ theorist who uses the history of the professionalization of medicine to illustrate conflict between ____.
A. Marxist; social classes
B. symbolic interactionist; alternative systems of meaning
C. Weberian; status groups
D. rational choice; rational actors
9. Which of the following is an example of “credential inflation”?
A. Getting more education at the same time that degrees become less relevant in the job market.
B. Needing a master’s degree to get a job that would have required a bachelor’s degree twenty years ago.
C. High SES parents being able to send their kids to more expensive schools.
D. The tendency of whites’ educational attainment to increase faster than that of certain minority groups.
10. According to Randall Collins (“Some Comparative Principles of Educational
