Final Exam Review Handout
Soc110 (Broh)
NOTE: This is not intended to be a comprehensive listing of everything we have covered in the course. It
is only intended to provide you some focus to your studying.
1. Chapter 1: Taking a New Look at a Familiar World (Introduction)
a. What is sociology? (define and describe the perspective)
i. How does sociology differ from other disciplines/perspectives?
ii. What are the “three steps” of sociological knowledge development?
b. What is the “sociological eye” and the “sociological imagination”? Why are they important
and how do they relate to the three steps of sociological knowledge development?
c. What are “human agency” and “social structure” and how do they relate to each other?
How do they help us “see and think” sociologically?
d. What does it mean to say that something is “social constructed”? What is a simple test to
determine if something is socially constructed?
e. What does it mean that sociology attempts to see “both/and” as opposed to “either/or”?
f. Be able to describe Durkheim’s study of suicide. What do we learn from it? Why does
Newman present this in Chapter 1?
2. Chapter 2: Seeing and Thinking Sociologically (Social Structure)
a. What is society? (Be able to define and describe)
b. What is “social structure”? What is “culture”? How do they relate to each other?
i. What are the four “building blocks” of social structure?
1. Individuals:
a. Status (ascribed, achieved, master)
b. Role (expectations, performance, conflict, exit)
2. Groups
a. Primary and Secondary
b. In and Out groups
3. Organizations
a. Bureaucracy (see Chapter 9)
4. Institutions
c. Be able to define the key characteristics of and recognize and example of each of the three
primary theoretical perspectives/paradigms of thought:
i. Structural Functionalism
ii. Conflict Theory
iii. Symbolic Interactionism
d. Be familiar with several scientific studies that illuminated how social structure and culture
affect individual behavior such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram’s “Shock Study”,
and Asch’s experiment on group conformity (the “line” experiment).
