All flashcards
Flashcard 1: Identify the concept: A student-employee misses class due to work scheduling demands.
Answer: Role conflict. Student and employee roles have incompatible demands.
Flashcard 2: What is role embracement?
Answer: Strong identification with and commitment to a role. Person fully accepts and internalizes role expectations.
Flashcard 3: What is social status in sociology?
Answer: A socially defined position in a group with associated prestige. Combines position in social structure with relative ranking.
Flashcard 4: What is a social role?
Answer: A set of expected behaviors tied to a particular status. Roles define how someone in a status should act.
Flashcard 5: What is an ascribed status?
Answer: A status assigned at birth or involuntarily later in life. Examples include race, sex, or family background.
Flashcard 6: What is an achieved status?
Answer: A status attained through effort, choice, or accomplishment. Examples include education level or career position.
Flashcard 7: What is a master status?
Answer: A status that dominates identity and shapes social interactions. Often visible characteristics like disability or celebrity.
Flashcard 8: What is role set?
Answer: The set of roles linked to one status across different relationships. Teacher has roles with students, parents, administrators.
Flashcard 9: Identify the concept: a parent feels pulled between being nurturing and enforcing discipline in the same role.
Answer: Role strain. Competing demands exist within the single parent role.
Flashcard 10: Which term best fits: among many statuses, being “incarcerated” dominates how others treat the person?
Answer: Master status. Criminal status overrides other identities in social interactions.
Flashcard 11: Which status type is illustrated when a person becomes a licensed attorney after education and exams?
Answer: Achieved status. Earned through personal effort, not assigned at birth.
Flashcard 12: What is social status in sociology?
Answer: A socially defined position in a group linked to prestige and power. Reflects hierarchical social organization and resource distribution.
Flashcard 13: What is a social role?
Answer: A set of expected behaviors for a given social status. Guides interaction and maintains social order through predictable patterns.
Flashcard 14: What is the relationship between status and role?
Answer: Status is the position; role is the behavioral expectation for it. Status is structural position; role is its performance requirements.
Flashcard 15: What is an ascribed status?
Answer: A status assigned at birth or involuntarily later in life. Examples include race, sex, or family background—not chosen.
Flashcard 16: What is an achieved status?
Answer: A status obtained through effort, choice, or accomplishment. Reflects meritocracy and individual agency in social mobility.
Flashcard 17: What is a master status?
Answer: A status that strongly shapes identity and others’ perceptions. Often overshadows other statuses, especially if stigmatized.
Flashcard 18: What is status set?
Answer: All statuses held by an individual at a given time. Shows complexity of modern social positions and identities.
Flashcard 19: What is role set?
Answer: All roles associated with a single status. One status connects to multiple relationships and expectations.
Flashcard 20: What is role strain?
Answer: Stress from competing demands within one role or status. Occurs when single role has contradictory expectations.
Flashcard 21: What is role conflict?
Answer: Incompatibility between expectations of two or more roles. Arises when multiple roles have contradictory demands.
Flashcard 22: What is role ambiguity?
Answer: Unclear expectations about a role’s duties or boundaries. Creates stress from not knowing proper role performance.
Flashcard 23: What is role exit?
Answer: The process of leaving a role central to one’s identity. Involves stages: doubt, search, turning point, new identity.
Flashcard 24: What is role-taking in symbolic interactionism?
Answer: Adopting another person’s perspective to guide one’s behavior. Mead's concept of understanding others' expectations.
Flashcard 25: What is role-making?
Answer: Modifying a role through negotiation and individual agency. Shows active construction rather than passive acceptance.
Flashcard 26: What is the looking-glass self?
Answer: Self-concept shaped by perceived judgments of others. Cooley's theory: we see ourselves through others' eyes.
Flashcard 27: What is impression management in Goffman’s dramaturgical theory?
Answer: Strategic control of how one is perceived by others. Life as theater: front stage vs. backstage behavior.
Flashcard 28: Identify the concept: a physician feels tension between hospital rules and patient advocacy.
Answer: Role conflict. Two roles (employee vs. advocate) create incompatible demands.
Flashcard 29: What is a role set?
Answer: The collection of roles associated with a single status. A role set encompasses the array of expectations linked to one status, interacting with different social actors in varied contexts.
Flashcard 30: Choose the best label: being a first-generation student is assigned at birth or earned later?
Answer: Ascribed status. Ascribed statuses are involuntary and based on inherent traits or family circumstances present from birth.