Culture 38 Flashcards
RACISM
- Theories, attitudes and practices that display dislike or antagonism towards people seen as belonging to a particular ethnic groups.
- Social or political significance is attached to culturally constructed ideas of difference.
RANDOM SAMPLE
A sample in which all members of the population have an equal statistical chance of being included.
RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL
- An experimental method whereby subjects are randomly allocated to either a group receiving a `treatment’ or another which acts as a control’, so that the effects of the treatment can be established.
- The method is effective in ruling out spurious causation.
RANKED SOCIETY
- A society in which there is an unequal division of status and power between its members, where such divisions are based primarily on such factors as family and inherited social position.
- This is in contrast with egalitarian society, which aims to minimise such unequal divisions.
RAP
A type of rhythmic, rhyming expression spontaneously composed.
REACTIVITY
The reactions of people being studied to the presence of an observer, seen by some to be a source of bias, in that behaviour may become artificial as a result.
REAL
What is known to actually be so.
REALISM
- Is the view that a reality exists independently of our thoughts or beliefs.
- The language of research is seen to refer to this reality, rather than purely constructing it, though more subtle realists recognize constructive properties in language as well.
RECIPROCITY
- One of the three principles of exchange. It governs exchange between social equals and is a major exchange mode in band and tribal societies.
- Since virtually all humans live in some kind of society and have at least a few possessions, reciprocity is common to every culture.
- Is the basis of most non-market economies.
REDISTRIBUTION
A mechanism whereby a politically or economically powerful individual (or group) collects goods and services from the members of society and reallocates them among the society’s members.
REDUCTIONISM
- The identification of a basic explanation for a complex phenomenon.
- Thus sexual identity may be explained by reference to genetic determinants alone, or social life explained in terms of economic relations alone.
REFLEXIVITY
- In its broad meaning this is used to refer to the capacity of researchers to reflect upon their actions and values during research, whether in producing data or writing accounts.
- More narrowly, ethnomethodologists use the term to describe a property of language, which reflects upon actions to make them appear orderly.
REGIONAL INVERSION
- Is a process of radical change when the established order of territorial influence changes.
- Through regional inversion, previously backward regions become predominant in a national context.
- Lagging areas that emerge through this process eventually overshadow the influence of predominant regions.
REGRESSION
- A statistical technique for using the values of one variable to predict the values of another, based on information about their relationship, often given in a scattergram.
- Multiple regression involves the prediction of an interval-level variable from the values of two or more other variables.
- Logistic regression does this too, but predicts the values of nominal or ordinal variables.
RELATIONS
The relationships between individuals in a social network.
