Comprehensive Study Guide for Sociology: Media, Socialization, Groups, and Deviance

Media

Any formats, platforms, or vehicles that carry, present, or communicate information.

Mass Media

Any form of media that reaches a vast, widely dispersed audience simultaneously from a centralized source.

Symbolic Indulgence

A practice where low-income parents purchase specific, high-status consumer goods for their children to grant them pathways to peer belonging and shield them from social stigma.

Hegemony

A condition conceptualized by Antonio Gramsci where a dominant group uses power to elicit voluntary consent from the masses rather than relying on physical force.

Looking-Glass Self

Charles Horton Cooley's concept that self-identity develops through imagining how we appear to others, how they judge us, and forming a self-concept based on those perceived evaluations.

Concerted Cultivation

Annette Lareau's childrearing strategy practiced by middle- and upper-class parents involving structured extracurricular activities, analytical reasoning, and institutional entitlement.

Accomplishment of Natural Growth

Annette Lareau's childrearing strategy in working-class families where parents provide necessities and unstructured free time, leading to child independence alongside institutional constraint.

Total Institution

Erving Goffman's term for an institution that controls all aspects of an individual's daily life under a single central authority, isolated from wider society.

Dyad

A social group of two people, characterized as fragile because it requires ongoing commitment from both members to exist.

Social Capital

The information, knowledge, trust, and reciprocal connections within social networks that enable individuals to leverage resources and achieve goals.

Labeling Theory

The perspective that deviance is not inherent in an act, but results from society applying rules and labels to an offender, influencing subsequent behavior.

Mechanical Solidarity

Émile Durkheim's concept of social cohesion based on shared values and uniform lifestyles in traditional societies, enforced through punitive sanctions.

Organic Solidarity

Émile Durkheim's concept of social cohesion based on division of labor and mutual interdependence in modern societies, maintained through restitutive sanctions.