End of the Week Quick Quiz 1

Quick Quiz 1 OK, here’s a very brief, and I’m afraid today, a rather messy quiz. In future I’ll aim to make this available as loadable documents, but today, well, needs must. Today the quiz has questions mainly focussing on a couple of AS topics. It’s hard to know exactly what readers are teaching/studying at the moment, but I hope this will be a useful ten or fifteen minute filler for all. If you’d like to comment on the format, types of questions, please do so.

So, here we go. 1. What’s the term for using a variety of research methods? 2. Name two functionalist sociologists. 3. Who wrote the book, ‘The Rise of the Meritocracy’? 4. How many ‘aptitudes’ were identified in the 1944 Education Act and what were they? 5. What sort of theoretical perspective does the sociologist Howard Becker adhere to? 6. What is the means of production? 7. Which Spanish sociologist wrote ‘The Information Age’? 8. How many universities are there in the UK? 9. Who recently said that institutional racism was no longer a problem in the Metropolitan Police Force? 10. Which American sociologist developed the concept of an underclass? Answers below - don’t cheat!

Answers

1. Methodological pluralism - or triangulation.
2. Durkheim, Talcott Parsons.
3. The social entrepreneur Michael Young - worth looking up on Wikipedia.
4. 3 - the academic, the technical, and the practical.
5. ‘Howie’ as he likes to call himself, is an interactionist.
6. It’s a Marxist term which just refers to the form of technology a society uses to produce wealth, e.g. a feudal means of production in contrast to an industrial means of production.
7. Manuel Castells - another one worth looking up. He teaches at UC Berkeley, USA.
8. Approximately 325. Oh yes there are! I looked it up on UCAS. True, that figure includes Colleges of HE and FE which award HE qualifications, so you could haggle with it. Tells you something about the importance of education in modern society though - what would Talcott Parsons - or Bowles and Gintis - say about that?
9. It was Jack Straw. Impress your teacher by explaining what institutional racism is. Impress your teacher even more by evaluating the concept - how could it be operationalised?
10. Charles Murray - and that just proves that there is such a thing as a right-wing sociologist. Those who say sociologists are all left-wing are - way off the mark and telling you quite a bit about their own prejudices.