Sociology: Stratification, Media, Gender, and Ethnicity

Comprehensive vocabulary review flashcards covering key sociological concepts in race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexualities, mass media, and social inequality.

Economic-Class Immigrants

Immigrants selected on the basis of some combination of educational attainment, occupational skills, entrepreneurship, business investment, and ability to contribute to the Canadian economy.

Family-Class Immigrants

An immigrant category in which individuals are sponsored by close relatives who are already permanent residents or citizens living in Canada.

Refugees

Persons who are forced to flee from their home country due to persecution, conflict, or violence.

National Pattern

An acculturation adaptation pattern among bicultural youth referring to identifying primarily with one's new, national culture rather than one's heritage culture.

Ethnic Pattern

An acculturation adaptation pattern among bicultural youth referring to identifying primarily with one's heritage culture rather than the new national culture.

Integration Pattern

An acculturation adaptation pattern among bicultural youth referring to identifying with both one's heritage culture and one's new, national culture.

Diffuse Pattern

An acculturation adaptation pattern among bicultural youth referring to uncertainty and lack of clarity about which culture(s) one should or should not identify with.

Bicultural Adaptation Patterns

A theoretical model developed by J. W. Berry and colleagues (2006) categorizing how immigrant youth adapt based on whether they identify with their heritage culture (Yes/No) and their national culture (Yes/No), yielding four patterns: Integration, National, Ethnic, and Diffuse.

Hate Crime

Criminal offences motivated by bias, prejudice, or hate toward an identifiable group.

Prejudice

An attitude that is unrelated to reality and is generalized to all members of a certain group, containing cognitive, affective, and behavioural components.

Discrimination

Treating someone unfairly or unfavourably because of his or her group membership.

Merton's Typology of Prejudice and Discrimination

A sociological classification matrix by Robert K. Merton (1949) crossing prejudicial thoughts (Yes/No) with discriminatory actions (Yes/No), classifying individuals into: Prejudiced Discriminators ("active bigots"), Non-prejudiced Discriminators ("fair-weather liberals"), Prejudiced Non-discriminators ("timid bigots"), and Non-prejudiced Non-discriminators ("all-weather liberals").

Assimilation

A process occurring when a minority group is absorbed into the culture of the dominant group, which can be voluntary (e.g., immigration) or involuntary (e.g., colonization).

Population Transfer

The forcible expulsion of members of certain minority groups from a country or limiting them to a particular geographic location (e.g., the Indigenous reserve system or Ukrainian and Japanese Canadian internment camps).

Residential Schools

Boarding schools funded by the Canadian government and run by churches used to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children by stripping them of their language, culture, and traditions.

Ethnocide

Policies and practices enacted with the explicit goal of full assimilation and the eradication of every aspect of a group's culture.

Colonization

The expansion of territory through the acquisition of Indigenous populations' lands as well as the exploitation and subjugation of those peoples.

Anti-Miscegenation Laws

Laws that prohibit interracial marriage and sexual relations between individuals of different racial classifications.

Authoritarian Personality

A personality type that values authority, strict adherence to rules, and obedience, while exhibiting low tolerance for ambiguity and high stereotyping.

Objective Ethnicity

The ethnic background, characteristics, or origins of one's ancestors; also referred to as ethnic origin.

Subjective Ethnicity

How people personally identify with and experience their ethnicity; also referred to as ethnic identity.

Race

A socially constructed category used to classify humankind according to physical characteristics such as skin colour, hair texture, and facial features.

Racialization

The process by which racial categories are socially constructed as different and unequal in ways that have social, economic, and political consequences.

Visible Minorities

Under Canadian legislation, persons—other than Aboriginal persons—who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.

Pluralism

A framework in which diverse cultural differences within a society are maintained, respected, and celebrated.

Realistic Conflict Theory

A social psychological theory arguing that prejudice, negative stereotypes, and discrimination emerge from interactions and competition between specific groups over scarce resources.

Critical Race Theory

A theoretical framework maintaining that racism is not merely the product of individual prejudice, but that white privilege is embedded in the entirety of the societal fabric, including economic, cultural, ideological, and political spheres.

Sex

Biological characteristics that include sex chromosomes, primary sexual characteristics (genitalia), and secondary sexual characteristics (bodily traits).

Gender

The behavioural, cultural, or psychological traits associated with a particular sex within a certain culture at a given point in history.

Intersexed

A person whose chromosomal, gonadal, or physical sex characteristics fall outside the conventional male versus female binary; also referred to as differences or disorders of sexual development (DSD).

Two-Spirit

An Indigenous term describing individuals who encompass both male and female identities, spirits, or social roles.

Cisgender

Individuals whose gender identity and expression align with their sex assigned at birth.

Transgender

Individuals whose gender identity or expression differs from or corresponds to that of a sex other than their assigned birth sex.

Gender Non-Conforming

Individuals whose gender identity or expression falls outside elite, binary discourses; also described as gender variant, gender creative, gender non-binary, or gender fluid.

Heteronormativity

The cultural and institutional presumption that heterosexuality is the standard, natural, expected, or preferred sexual orientation.

Hypermasculinity

Traditional masculinity performed in an extreme, exaggerated, and aggressive manner.

Glass Ceiling

The invisible, intangible systemic barriers that prevent qualified women and minority groups from attaining top positions of leadership, authority, or executive advancement.

Glass Escalator

The intangible, subtle structural advantages and accelerators that enable men to rapidly achieve positions of authority and leadership in female-dominated occupations.

Intersectionality

An analytical framework describing how an individual's multiple social identities—such as sex, gender, race, and social class—interlock and combine to produce unique configurations of oppression and privilege.

Matrix of Domination

The interconnected and overarching system of social oppression and privilege organized across structural, cultural, and interpersonal domains based on categories like sex, gender, race, and class.

Cult of Domesticity

A historical value system that arose during industrialization designating the home and family as women's exclusive, natural, and moral domain.

Mass Media

Organized communications that target large, widespread audiences in print or electronic formats using text, audio, or visual imagery.

Legacy Media

Traditional forms of mass communication that originated prior to the digital internet era, including books, newspapers, magazines, film, radio, and broadcast television.

New Media

Digitally native, network-based communications platforms that have emerged recently, including social media apps, video streaming, interactive gaming, and internet publications.

Net Neutrality

The regulatory principle dictating that internet service providers must treat all online content and communications equally without blocking, throttling, or charging differential rates based on user, content, or application.

Media Framing

The process through which media select, emphasize, and structure specific aspects of perceived reality, established through dimensions such as sizing, agency, identification, categorization, and generalization.

Sizing

A property in media framing referring to the overall volume, prominence, and amount of attention given to a story within the broader news flow.

Agency (Media Framing)

A property of media framing concerning the specific choice of words and syntactic constructions that indicate who caused an event and where moral or practical responsibility lies.

Identification (Media Framing)

A property in media framing that involves the linguistic cues and naming conventions used to encourage or discourage public empathy and connection with central figures.

Categorization (Media Framing)

The overarching label, thematic framework, or mental category chosen by media creators to define the nature of an event.

Generalization (Media Framing)

A property in media framing that connects an isolated news incident to larger political, ideological, or social systems.

Manufacturing Consent

A model formulated by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky positing that corporate media ownership and elite interests naturally filter information to mobilize public support for institutional agendas.

Cultivation Theory

A media theory proposing that prolonged exposure to television and media violence shapes individuals' worldviews, inducing an inflated perception of danger known as "mean world syndrome."

Desensitization Theory

A theory suggesting that repeated exposure to graphic depictions of media violence reduces an audience's emotional, empathetic, and physiological sensitivity to real-world aggression.

Agenda-Setting

The capacity of mass media to prioritize which issues receive public focus, thereby dictating what people think about rather than instructing them directly on what to think.

Media Literacy

The capability to access, analyze, evaluate, and critically deconstruct messages across various media forms and recognize underlying commercial or ideological biases.

Prosumer Capitalism

An economic and media dynamic where consumers simultaneously act as unpaid producers of content, value, and data (e.g., creating social media posts or reviewing products).

Social Stratification

Socially sanctioned, persistent patterns of institutional inequality in society that hierarchically rank groups based on attributes such as wealth, income, occupation, race, or gender.

Closed System

A stratification system characterized by rigid boundaries, ascribed social statuses determined at birth, and minimal or non-existent possibilities for social mobility (e.g., slavery, caste systems).

Open System

A stratification system based on achieved and ascribed economic criteria where boundaries between strata are permeable, permitting upward and downward mobility (e.g., Canada's class system).

Vertical Mobility

Movement upward or downward from one social class or stratum to another.

Horizontal Mobility

Movement within the same social class or occupational tier without a substantial change in overall socioeconomic status.

Intragenerational Mobility

Social mobility and status change occurring within the span of an individual's own lifetime.

Intergenerational Mobility

Social mobility measured by comparing the socioeconomic position of children relative to that of their parents.

Socioeconomic Status (SES)

A composite social standing ranking based on combined quantifiable measures of income, educational attainment, and occupational prestige.

Net Worth

The total economic worth of an individual or household calculated by deducting all outstanding liabilities and debts from total accumulated assets.

Meritocracy

A social system where individuals advance, obtain power, and earn rewards strictly on the basis of their demonstrated abilities, effort, and individual merit.

Low-Income Cut-Off (LICO)

A relative poverty measure established by Statistics Canada designating an income threshold below which a family devotes a disproportionately larger share of its income to necessities (food, shelter, clothing) than an average family.

Market Basket Measure (MBM)

Canada's Official Poverty Line, calculated based on the disposable income required for a household to afford a specified basket of basic goods and services in their community.

Alienation

In Marxist theory, the estrangement and detachment of workers from the products of their labour, the process of production, their fellow workers, and their human essence under capitalism.

Social Safety Net

The collection of public welfare services, social assistance policies, and insurance programs created to alleviate poverty and support low-income or vulnerable individuals.