Sociology Final All Terms

Nuclear family

a parent or parents and children

Extended family

includes parents, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins

Blended Families

Reconstituted families

Simple households

unrelated adults with or without children

Complex households

two or more adults who are un/related but not married to each other and hence could reasonably be expected to live separately

Multigenerational households

Multiple generations living together

Conjugal (or marital) roles

The distinctive roles of the husband and wife that result from the division of labour within the family

Bott hypothesis

Elizabeth Bott (1957) characterized conjugal roles as Segregated (tasks, interests, and activities are clearly different) or Joint (many tasks, interests, and activities are shared)

Complementary roles

(Bott’s segregated roles) cast men primarily as earners or breadwinners and women involved primarily in the unpaid work of childcare and housework

Companionate roles

(Bott’s joint roles) breadwinning and caretaking roles overlap

Double burden (or "second shift")

imbalance in conjugal roles, where women take on more unpaid work at home than married men

Double ghetto

describes the marginalization of working women experience inside and outside the home

Gender strategy

Plan of action through which a person tried to solve problems at hand, given cultural notions of gender at play

Occupational segregation

Women choose occupations that have greatest flexibility in terms of childcare-related work interruptions

Endogamy

refers to marrying someone of the same ethnic, religious, or cultural group as oneself

Exogamy

marrying outside one’s group

Residential schools

created to keep Indigenous children away from the (assumed harmful) influence of their parents and communities

Sixties Scoop

removal of large numbers of Indigenous children from their families by government-affiliated agencies in the 1960s

Health (WHO definition)

a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing, not just a complete absence of disease or infirmity

Policy sociology

concerned with attempts to improve the delivery of health services through sociologically informed research

Critical sociology

examines the practices of multinational pharmaceutical companies, medical schools, and privately run, for-profit clinics and hospitals

The sick role (or patient role)

term introduced by Talcott Parsons where being sick comes with four expectations (exemptions and obligations)

The social course of disease

The social interactions that a person goes through in the process of being treated

Biomedicine (orthodox medicine)

involves the use of Western scientific principles in the diagnosis and treatment of illness and disease

Alternative (or complementary) medicine

falls outside orthodox or conventional biomedical practice, based on the notion that a person’s psychological, social, and emotional state affects their ability to fight diseases

Medicalization

process by which certain behaviours or conditions are defined as medical problems and medical intervention becomes the focus of remedy and social control

Commodification of healthcare

occurs when normal conditions are identified as diseases that can be treated with “commodity cures”

Radical monopolies

Situation in which professional control work is deemed socially important

Iatrogenesis

doctor-generated epidemics that avert people from preventing and treating their illnesses

Clinical iatrogenesis

ways in which diagnosis and cure can cause problems that are as bad or worse than the health problems they are meant to resolve

Social iatrogenesis

occurs when political conditions that “render society unhealthy” are hidden or obscured

Cultural iatrogenesis

entails how the knowledge and abilities of the medical community are extolled, and patients are given no credit for their recovery

Health Belief Model (HBM)

a psychological model that seeks to explain and predict health-related behaviors by focusing on individual beliefs and attitudes

Perceived Susceptibility

an individual's belief about the likelihood of experiencing a health issue

Perceived Severity

beliefs about the seriousness of the consequences of a health issue

Perceived Benefits

an individual’s assessment of the advantages of taking a specific health action

Perceived Barriers

potential obstacles that individuals perceive in taking a health-related action

Cues to Action

triggers that prompt individuals to act toward their health

Self-Efficacy

an individual’s confidence in their ability to successfully act toward a health behaviour

Big Pharma

large pharmaceutical companies, which profit from developing, manufacturing, and marketing drugs

Brain drain

the exodus of educated professionals erodes healthcare systems of their countries of origin

Racialization of disease

when a disease is strongly associated with people of a particular racial or ethnic background, so that people of this background are treated negatively

Inverse care law

The availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need for it in the population served

Temporarily able-bodied (TABS)

Potentially, people without disabilities can be considered this given that aging and other unanticipated life events can lead to disability

Education

a social institution that serves as a powerful instrument for promoting ideas among impressionable youth, provide skills, modify behaviours, social interaction and conflict are negotiated

Human capital thesis

Industrial societies invest in schools to enhance the knowledge and skills of their workers

Assimilation Model

Education in Canada based on a monocultural model that emphasizes assimilation into the dominant culture

Multicultural Education

Study and celebration of lifestyles, traditions, and histories of diverse cultures

Hidden curriculum

the lessons about expectations for behaviour that tend to be more informal or unwritten

Latent dysfunction

unintended negative consequence (e.g., hidden curriculum reproduces the class system by hindering social mobility)

Correspondence principle

The argument that the norms and values instilled in school correspond to the norms and values expected of individuals in a capitalist society

Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Education

approach about decolonizing education and promoting inclusivity, seeking to expose and eliminate institutional and individual barriers to equity

Discipline

controlled behaviour, ensuring the external and internal “routinization” of the individual

Docile body

An individual that has been conditioned, through a specific set of procedures and practices, to behave precisely the way administrators want it to

Hierarchical observation

People are controlled through observation and surveillance

Normalizing judgment

Individuals are judged on how their actions rank when compared with the performance of others

The examination

A normalizing gaze that establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them

Stereotype threat

The idea that negative stereotypes about a group to which an individual belongs will have negative impacts on their academic performance

Cultural reproduction theory

involves the legitimization of inequality and the reproduction of social structure

Tracking

the process whereby students are divided into categories so that they can be assigned in groups to various kinds of classes

Socioeconomic status (SES)

based on jobs, incomes, and educational attainments

Educational attainment

the benchmarks of academic performance, including such things as reading level, grade point average, and test score

Disqualified knowledges

Knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task

Credentialism

practice of valuing credentials (degrees, diplomas, certificates) over actual knowledge and ability in the hiring and promotion of staff

Alienation

Separation between people and the work they are paid to do due to administrative monitoring and control

McJobs

Low-wage, low-skill employment for people with valuable skills, experience, or academic credentials

Underemployment

Involuntary part-time work for people seeking full-time employment

Plagiarism

the act of copying another person’s work or of piecing together work from several sources into an academic pastiche

Religion (Durkheim)

a unified system of beliefs, rituals, and practices that define and express the nature of sacred things in relationship to the profane things of the world

Religion (Weberian)

any set of coherent answers to human existential dilemmas which make the world meaningful

Religion (Steve Bruce)

belief, action and the institution which assume the existence of supernatural entities with powers of action or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose

Theism

Belief in G/god (a sacred higher power which has the power of control over human behaviour)

Monotheism

Belief in one divine power or god

Polytheistic religion

Belief in many gods

Animism

Belief in ghosts or spirits which may be forces for good or evil

Totemism

associated with small scale ‘tribal’ societies where totems (animals or plants) are believed to possess supernatural powers

Atheism

opposite of theism that disputes against believe in any form of supernatural influence in the affairs of humans

Agnosticism

advocates the doctrine that humans cannot know of the existence of anything beyond the phenomena of their experience (equated with skepticism)

Beliefs

strongly held conviction by the people who are adherents to a religion that their object of worship can solve their problems

Ritual

religious acts, ceremonial practices and customs that are geared towards the worship of the sacred

Emotions

spirit of reverence, humility, ecstasy, frenzy and even terror that is evoked in the believers as they present themselves in the presence of the sacred

Organization (Religious)

trained officials occupying hierarchy with authority, and ordinances/rules governing conduct

The Church

Usually monopolistic, hierarchically bureaucratic with flexible membership and complex division of labour

Denominations

come into existence when churches lose their religious monopoly in a society (membership usually by birth)

Sects

smaller, less organized religious bodies of committed members, typically arising in protest to larger denomination

Cults

service-based and organized around some sort of supernatural or mystical ideas rather than exclusive set of religious beliefs or doctrine

Liberation theology

progressive school of thought that advocates social justice for the poor

False consciousness

belief that class-based hierarchy was God’s plan and thus justified

Spiritual shopping

belief that religion is losing its traditional power to impose religious beliefs on people, leading to individual consumerism

Disengagement

church withdrawal from the center of social, economic, and political life

Change (social context)

the adjustments or adaptations made by a group of people in response to a dramatic change experienced in at least one part of their lives

Modernism

Holds that change equals progress, that what is modern or new will automatically be better than the older thing it replaces

Positivism

an aspect of modernism (Auguste Comte)

Social Darwinism

posits that societies naturally proceed from simple to complex and only the strongest triumph

Conservatism

view that social change is potentially more destructive than constructive, especially in emotionally charged areas of life

Cycle of civilization

The belief that civilizations rise and fall in a predictable cycle

Slippery slope argument

Citing one instance of social change as evidence for imminent collapse of entire social order

Luddites

group who waged a battle against the modernization of the textile industry in England in the early 1800s

Particularist protectionist

opponents of globalization who focus on the socioeconomic, political, and cultural problems caused in their home territory

Universalist protectionists

opponents of globalization who promote the interests of the poor and marginalized groups worldwide