Unit Two

Question 1

What is Replacement Fertility Rate?

Answer 1

The average number of children that the women of one generation would need to have to result in a generation of the same size

This has a significant impact on the money contributed for pensions and the social welfare programs for many Canadians. Canadians may need to work longer or start saving earlier to prepare for retirement.

Question 2

Bourgeoisie

Answer 2

Members of the property-owning class; people who own the means of production.

According to Marx, the Bourgeoisie played a heroic role in revolutionizing and modernizing society.

Question 3

Capitalism

Answer 3

An economic system where the means of production is privately owned and profit is earned in competitive conditions.

Helps democracy
Less government involvement
Drives the economy to grow

Question 3

Proletariat

Answer 3

The poorest class of people; the lower working-class wage-earners who sell their skills for money

Question 4

Petty Bourgeoisie

Answer 4

The lower middle class including tradespeople, shop owners and craftspeople

Question 5

Cultural Hegemony

Answer 5

A behaviour or cue within a society that is considered normal or common; used by social groups to determine what is normal or abnormal

Question 6

Organic Specialization

Answer 6

A set of specialized entities working together to create a larger functioning organism

Question 7

Anomie

Answer 7

Normlessness; a lack of feeling or a breakdown of social norms

Its important in structural functionalist theory because it shows societal values are eroding, and people are no longer able to differentiate between right and wrong. It basically shows a social unrest.

Question 8

Eros

Answer 8

The creative life force or sexual drive which increases the body’s tension

Question 9

Hedonistic

Answer 9

Behaviour that focuses on meeting a person’s immediate need for happiness without focusing on future consequences

Question 10

ID

Answer 10

The unconscious part of the human psyche, that meets the instinctual, impulsive, and primitive needs of the mind

Question 11

Superego

Answer 11

The part of the psyche that seeks perfection and controls our sense of guilt, and right and wrong; its demands are often opposite to the ID

Question 12

Thanatos

Answer 12

The destructive force; the death drive

Question 13

Positivism

Answer 13

The use of scientific approach to research and understand social behaviour

Question 14

Employment Standards Act

Answer 14

A government act that sets out the minimum standards employers and employees must follow in the work force

It seeks to create fairness in the workplace for all Ontarians

Question 15

Looking-glass self:

Answer 15

A person’s self-image, which forms by imagining what others thing of his or her behaviour and appearance

Question 16

Lens

Answer 16

A way of viewing something using a specific perspective and/or viewpoint

Question 17

Desensitize

Answer 17

The process of becoming familiar with a stimulus, which reduces a person’s reaction to it

Question 18

Normalization

Answer 18

The process by which a social phenomenon becomes accepted as being “normal” or common and part of the mainstream beliefs

Question 19

Demographics- Impact

Answer 19

Immigration:

• Large number of new Canadians introduces a diverse cultural mix into the existing culture.
• A large influx of immigrants to Canada changes physical landscape Canadians experience; street signs and sign boards.

Question 20

Karl Marx & Alienation

Answer 20

Under Marx’s theory, the bourgeoisie wanted to alienate the proletariat (the upper class wanted to exclude the lower class, cause a division).
This refers to separating the working class from its final product. 
The erosion of the proletarian happens even more with the introduction of technology. Bourgeoise power increases, as does their profit and the wealth gap increases. 
The value of the proletarian decreases with automation and affects how they view themselves.
In current social systems, to accept a persons value, we asses how important their skill is.
The greater the skill importance, the greater their income should be.

Question 21

Gramsci & Theory of Change

Answer 21

He was a Marxist theorist who challenged the ruling class.
He explained that the state was divided into two parts:
-the political society
-and the civil society.
Political society rules through fore while the civil society rules through consent.
He also supported the quiet revolution and believed that early education is the key to changing the future.
Technology and social media spread ideas around the social population.

Question 22

Internal Drives: Emilie Durkheim

Answer 22

Durkheim looked at the values and expectations created by society as a means of understanding how members of the society know the difference between right and wrong.
Every society had rules and expectations of how people should behave to each other.
When people don’t know what is expected because norms and behaviours are unclear, they experience a state of anomie.
** Refer to Organic Specialization
Social bonds between workers become more impersonal as people are no longer linked to one another by similar working conditions.
Social norms break down because social rules are not being transmitted through social interaction resulting in dissatisfaction, deviance and conflict.
Economic disruption can bring about an even higher state of anomie when a person is unemployed

Question 23

Freud: Instinct

Answer 23

Instinct plays a key role in the motivation of human behaviour, and according to Freud is dominated by two basic instincts:
Eros- represents creativity, growth and life.
Death drive (Thanatos)- seeks to lead organic life back into the inanimate state through death.
They are both driven by sexual impulses.

The psychosexual energy is transferred from erogenous zone to another as a child develops.

The 5 states of psychosexual development are: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.

He argued that fulfilling the needs of each of the stages would create a healthy personality in adulthood and failing to do so would lead to fixation at a stage.

Question 24

Defence Mechanisms

Answer 24

• Freud theorized that the human consciousness is divided into three different parts: the id, the ego, and the superego.
• The ID seeks immediate pleasure by reducing stress to the person. Consequences and long-term planning are never considered and allowing it to become strong results in hedonistic behaviour.
• The superego is concerned with what is socially responsible and acts as the minds conscience. A person with a superego too strong can be considered prudish or too sensitive in doing always right.
• The ego acts as the meditator between the two. If the ego allows either to become too strong, coping mechanisms must be employed to bring balance.
• Using these ego defence mechanisms has a big impact on an individuals personality and interpretation of social situations and can distort, transform or otherwise falsify reality.

Question 25

Unconscious Drives

Answer 25

• The ability to rationalize a situation and construct hypothetical outcomes for a given scenario is what separates us from other species.
• Fight or flight is the instinctual reaction of the body in response to a stressor; blood flow and adrenaline increase, preparing the mind and body for instant actions.
• Neuroscientist Paul Maclean’s Triune brain theory states that that the human brain developed three layers.
  
  • The reptilian system is a part of the brain responsible for instinctual behaviours like aggression, dominance, territoriality and ritual displays.
  • The paleomammalian brain consists of the septum, amygdala, hypothalamus, hippcampal complex, and cingulate cortex and controls the production of hormones and chemicals needed for survival.
  • The neomammalian consists of the cerebral neocortex which allows creative thinking, language, abstraction and perception.

Question 26

Max Weber & Social Construction of Ideas

Answer 26

Jobs:
Paid work evolved into a distinguishing mark of success.
Wealth accumulation was essential in the formation and continuation of capitalism.
Life was organized around the idea of producing, consuming, and increasing personal wealth
Ideal Types:
Human organization followed the idea that a formalized process must be obeyed for a society to function well.
His ideal types represent a means of comparing social structure to better understanding them and their context.
Bureaucracy:
-Impersonality
-Hierarchy
-Written rules of conduct
-Specialized division of labour
-Promotion based on achievement and efficiency
Weber believed that government was an idea type of bureaucracy
Rationalization:
Social structures like schools, the legal code, and the political process, are there to promote change without overturning the social system.
A moral compass will help guide the system. This is all up for debate and interpretation based on your moral compass.

Question 27

Howard Becker & Drug Use

Answer 27

• Becker conducted 50 interviews of people who used cannabis to determine how they learned to interpret the effects of cannabis.
• He found that most new users were unable to get “high” on marijuana until they had gone through a three-stage process of social learning.
• That is, through social interaction with more experienced users, new users (1) learned the proper technique for smoking marijuana, (2) learned to perceive the effects associated with the “high,” and (3) learned to enjoy these effects–to experience the “high” as pleasurable.
• He concluded that drug users need to understand and be able to make sense of their feelings and link them to the social construct of drug use.

Question 28

Cooley vs. Mead

Answer 28

• Mead argued that the personality of an individual is not biologically determined. He did not accept the biological basis of human behaviour. Mead said that human personality and growth was through a social means, and the different symbols and meanings that are given to each separate thing are given via socialization. The meanings and interpretations that one gives to a social situation are key to symbolic interactionism.
• Cooley theorized that there were three aspects of human behaviour and personality development; Imagining, Interpreting and Developing self-concept. He called this concept the ‘Looking Glass Self.’ The imaging stage occurs where one will judge the way they appear and the way they act through the eyes of others. Initially, an individual will use their interpretation of the views of family and friends. The second stage is interpreting, where the information has already been gathered and an individual is able to draw a conclusion from past experiences and the evaluation of others. The second stage of the ‘looking glass self’ is a learned ability. The final stage of Cooley’s looking glass self is based on ‘developing self-concept’ where an individual takes all the information that they have synthesized so far and develop a self-image.

Question 29

Teens and Work: Economy

Answer 29

• Overall 34% of boys and 40% of girls aged 15-18 reported having a job in 2006. The importance of securing a paid employment plays a significant role in defining who students are as individuals as well as the role the might have in the family unit.
• Studies show that working more than 15 to 20 hours per week has a negative impact on academic success and increases probability of dropping out as well as impacts teenagers sleeping patterns/
• The unemployment rate for those aged 15-24 was 14.7 percent in 2012 and has accounted for half of the job losses during the recession.

Question 30

Media Consumption

Answer 30

• The average Canadian watched 22 hours of television a week. Typical teenagers spend upwards of 13 hours per week. This stat does not include Internet or video games.
• American teenagers spend nearly 55 hours per week watching audio visual.
• Canadians spend roughly 19 hours per week on the Internet.
• These stats do not account for time spent in public with Wi-Fi.

Question 31

Conformity: Solomon Asch

Answer 31

• The Asch conformity experiments consisted of a group “vision test”, where study participants were found to be more likely to conform to obviously wrong answers if first given by other “participants”, who were actually working for the experimenter.
• The experiment found that over a third of subjects conformed to giving a wrong answer.
• In terms of gender, males show around half the effect of females (tested in same-sex groups). Conformity is also higher among members of an in-group.
• The power and influence of unwritten rules is extremely strong as demonstrated by this experiment. The results of this study can either help or hinder social change.

Question 32

Proportional Representation & Feminism

Answer 32

• Feminism is a social perspective devoted to equality and equal rights between the sexes.
• With the onset of the industrial revolution, the status of women and the social function they served were diminished in replacement of the wage earning men.
• The industrial revolution also saw a greater division in classes than ever before in history.
• Feminist theory can be used to help understand power in social institutions.
• Affirmative action attempts to correct issues in inequality based on race, gender, and religion.
• Considering more than half of the population is female, there is a disproportionate representation of the male sex in the group that makes the rules and sets policies for country.
• e.g. federal judges appointed to the bench in Canada

Question 33

Observational Learning: Alfred Bandura

Answer 33

He believed people learn through observing other peoples behaviour and then modelling it. This learned behaviour then serves as a template for how to behave in similar situations in the future.
(Reference to the Bobo doll experiment)

Question 34

Television & Gerbner

Answer 34

Gerbner saw television as more than a means of reinforcing behaviour. In his view, television was a means of transmitting culture across the country.

Question 35

Violence & Media: Change

Answer 35

• McLuhan suggested the message presented by a medium is only part of what is communicated; the medium itself influences how the message is perceived.
• In the case of watching violent t.v, this can be reflected in the change in public acceptance of viewing violent acts of the normalization of violent behaviour, which influences parents who decide what is appropriate for their children to watch.

Question 36

Youth Voting: Participation/Barriers/Trend

Answer 36

• Voter participation in Canada has been on the decline.
• In 2008, only 56% of 18-24 year olds voted. This has a significant impact on voting results because there are more than twice as many seniors over the age of 55 than young people aged 18-24 who are eligible to vote.

Question 37

Health & Beauty: Barriers, Identity, Image

Answer 37

• Erik Erikson theorized that adolescents go through a stage of identity versus identity-confusion in which they explore who they are and have an increased concern for how others view them.
• Explanation for the different ideals of feminine and masculine beauty might be found in cultural expectations embedded within North American society.