SOCL 200 Exam 3 Study Guide

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering core sociological concepts, institutional theories, demographic trends, and Contexts readings from the SOCL 200 Exam 3 Study Guide.

Sex

Biological characteristics such as chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive anatomy.

Gender

Socially shaped roles, behaviors, expectations, and meanings connected to sex categories.

Sacred

Things set apart from ordinary life and treated as special, holy, or worthy of reverence.

Profane

Ordinary parts of everyday life that are not treated as sacred.

Sociological Approach to Religion

An approach that examines how religion affects people, groups, institutions, inequality, politics, identity, and behavior, rather than evaluating whether religious beliefs are true.

Social Placement

The functionalist concept that schools sort students based on their skills and abilities so society can place individuals into needed roles.

Tracking

The conflict-theory perspective that rigid ability groupings in schools can reproduce race and class inequality.

Durkheim's Theory of Religion

The view that religion creates social solidarity, cohesion, and togetherness through shared rituals, beliefs, and a collective identity.

Marx's Theory of Religion

The view that religion preserves class inequality and the status quo by comforting people and making unequal conditions seem legitimate or tolerable.

Weber's Theory of Religion

The view that religious beliefs and meanings shape motivation, behavior, and broader economic or social change.

Manifest Functions of Education

Intended and recognized purposes of education, such as teaching mathematics and job skills.

Latent Functions of Education

Unintended or less obvious effects of schooling, such as providing childcare, facilitating matchmaking, and keeping youth out of the full-time labor market.

Credentialism

The increasing reliance on educational degrees, diplomas, or certificates as gatekeepers for jobs and opportunities.

Hidden Curriculum

Unofficial lessons learned in school that are not written on the syllabus, such as obedience, punctuality, competition, and deference to authority.

Minority Group

A social group that experiences disadvantage or unequal power relative to a dominant group, referring to power dynamics rather than numerical size.

Path Dependency

The institutional process whereby an established system becomes difficult to reverse because organizations and powerful groups develop a stake in maintaining it.

"Nones"

People who report no religious affiliation on surveys, though they are not necessarily atheists and may still pray or believe in God.

Cultural Lag

A condition occurring when cultural beliefs and values evolve more rapidly than institutional rules and structures.

Crisis Tendency

A state of tension and pressure for institutional change that arises when outdated institutional rules no longer align with current cultural values.

Fundamental Social Cause

A broad social condition that impacts multiple health outcomes by granting individuals flexible resources like money, knowledge, prestige, power, and social ties.

Occupational Segregation

The concentration of men and women into different occupations, with female-dominated fields typically offering lower pay, representing a primary driver of the gender wage gap.

Socioeconomic Gradient in Health

The graded relationship where lower socioeconomic status is consistently tied to worse health outcomes, while higher socioeconomic status correlates with better health.

Gendered Health Paradox

The epidemiological pattern where women experience higher morbidity (more illness) despite having longer life expectancy, whereas men have higher mortality rates due to fatal conditions and risky behaviors.

U.S. Public School Funding Model

A financing framework heavily reliant on local property taxes, meaning that areas with higher property values generate larger tax bases and greater educational resources.

Behavioral Epidemic

A sociological framework for epidemics, such as the opioid crisis, where health-affecting behaviors spread through social networks and groups.

U.S. Health-Care Cost Drivers

Systemic cost factors such as high administrative overhead, expensive prescription drugs, costly equipment and testing, fee-for-service models, and expensive hospital care, rather than higher patient volume.

Ispa-Landa & Risman Reading

A study on Greek life demonstrating cultural lag and crisis tendency: college women increasingly reject sexist norms, yet sorority and fraternity governance remains rigidly gendered.

Lundquist & Curington Reading

A study on dating apps like Tinder showing that while mobile technology provides an alternative to campus hookup culture, it still reproduces traditional gender norms and inequalities.

Silva Reading

A study of rural and small-town men who have sex with men, highlighting how heteronormativity leads men to preserve a straight identity despite non-heterosexual behavior.

Randles Reading

A study evaluating responsible-fatherhood programs, arguing that low-income fathers typically value paternal involvement but are constrained by structural barriers like unemployment, poverty, criminal records, and child-support debt.

Sandwich Generation (Patterson Reading)

A life-course phenomenon where adults face the stress of simultaneously providing care for young children and aging parents due to delayed childbearing and extended life expectancies.

Hout Reading

A study illustrating that religious decline in America primarily reflects declining institutional affiliation rather than an absolute loss of personal belief or prayer.

King & Schindler Reading

A study documenting the latent dysfunction of school policing, where officers intended for safety inadvertently criminalize minor student misconduct, disproportionately funneling Black and Latino youth into the justice system.

Reich Reading

A study analyzing the tension between individual parental autonomy ("my child, my choice") and collective public health obligations in the context of vaccine refusal.

Cobesity (Wilson Reading)

The phenomenon where obesity clusters within married couples due to marital homogamy and assortative mating, concentrating dual health and financial vulnerabilities in single households.

Frankham Reading

A study showing that fatal police encounters involving individuals with mental illness often stem from calls for help by family or friends, turning a mental health crisis into a policing crisis.

Casanova Reading

A study examining how institutional racism and gender inequality intersect to produce medical neglect and reproductive abuses against women of color in immigration detention.