TASC Sociology flashcards
TASC Sociology · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Sociological imagination
- Mills's term for linking personal troubles to public issues by seeing how biography intersects with historical and structural conditions beyond the individual's control.
- Social fact
- Durkheim's concept for external, constraining patterns of behavior and belief, such as suicide rates, that exist beyond any single individual's will.
- Verstehen
- Weber's method of interpretive understanding: the researcher reconstructs actors' subjective meanings in order to explain social action causally and adequately.
- Operational definition
- Specification of how a concept will be observed and measured, such as defining religiosity by attendance frequency, so that others can replicate the study.
- Culture lag
- Ogburn's term for the delay of nonmaterial culture, such as norms and values, behind rapid changes in material culture and technology.
- Cultural relativism
- The methodological stance of interpreting beliefs and practices within their own cultural context rather than judging them by another culture's standards.
- Generalized other
- Mead's concept for the internalized attitudes of the wider community that an individual uses to guide and evaluate their own conduct.
- Resocialization
- The process of unlearning established norms and identities and learning new ones, typically occurring in total institutions such as prisons or military boot camps.
- Master status
- A status that overrides other statuses in shaping how others perceive and treat a person, often race, gender, disability, or occupation.
- Role conflict
- Incompatible demands arising from two or more distinct statuses a person occupies, such as employee and parent obligations competing for the same time.
- Reference group
- A group a person uses as a standard of comparison for evaluating their own attitudes, achievements, and behavior, whether or not they belong to it.
- Groupthink
- Janis's term for faulty group decisions produced by strong conformity pressure, self-censorship, and an illusion of unanimity that suppresses dissent.
- Bureaucracy
- Weber's ideal type of organization marked by division of labor, hierarchy, written rules, impersonal administration, and careers based on technical qualification.
- Socioeconomic status
- A composite ranking based on income, educational attainment, and occupational prestige that predicts life chances and patterns of advantage.
- Intergenerational mobility
- Movement in social position comparing an individual's adult status with that of their parents, usually measured by occupation or income.
- Intersectionality
- Crenshaw's framework holding that race, gender, class, and other statuses interact to produce distinctive experiences of advantage and disadvantage.
- Relative poverty
- A deprivation standard set relative to the prevailing living standard of a society, such as income below a fixed share of the median.
- Endogamy
- A marriage rule requiring a partner from within one's own group, such as the same religion, caste, class, or ethnic category.
- Hidden curriculum
- The unofficial lessons schools teach through routines and expectations, such as punctuality, obedience, and competition, beyond formal academic content.
- Sick role
- Parsons's concept describing culturally defined rights and obligations of the ill: exemption from normal duties in exchange for seeking competent help.
- Rational-legal authority
- Weber's type of legitimate domination resting on belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of officeholders to command under those rules.
- Cultural capital
- Bourdieu's term for knowledge, tastes, and credentials that signal class position and can be converted into advantage within institutions such as schools.
- Relative deprivation
- A perceived gap between what people expect and what they actually attain, which can generate grievance and motivate participation in social movements.
- Resource mobilization
- A theory explaining movement emergence and success through available money, organization, leadership, and allies rather than through grievance intensity alone.
- Emergent norm theory
- An explanation of crowd behavior holding that new situational norms arise through interaction and guide collective action rather than mere contagion.
- Reform movement
- A social movement seeking limited change within existing institutional arrangements, such as campaigns for suffrage extension or environmental regulation.
- Political opportunity structure
- Features of the political environment, including elite divisions, institutional access, and repression levels, that make movement mobilization more or less feasible.
- Dramaturgical analysis
- Goffman's approach treating social interaction as theatrical performance, with front-stage and back-stage regions, scripts, props, and impression management.
- Civil inattention
- Goffman's term for the practice of briefly acknowledging strangers in public while avoiding sustained attention that would invade their privacy.
- Ethnomethodology
- Garfinkel's approach studying the everyday methods people use to produce and recognize a shared sense of social order in ordinary interaction.
- Impression management
- The effort to control the impressions others form, through appearance, demeanor, setting, and selective disclosure of information about oneself.
- Proxemics
- Hall's study of how people use and interpret interpersonal space, distinguishing intimate, personal, social, and public distance zones.