Sociology 110
Survey of Sociology

Welcome to the Course

Welcome to Sociology 110: Survey of Sociology. This course will provide you with a comprehensive overview of the discipline of sociology. As you progress through the lessons you will begin to understand the structure and functions of societies, as well as the effect of social, economic, political, and other factors on individuals and groups.

About the Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with me, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

The Online Student Handbook, which you can access from your course syllabus page, answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your textbook, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course.

Communication with Your Instructor and Student Peers

• Online Discussion Forums, designed by the University of Washington award winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with me. You should utilize the general discussion forum to exchange ideas, resources, and comments about your course work with other students in this course. This forum is monitored by me.
• You can e-mail questions to me, but it is preferable that you post them on the general discussion forum for a prompt reply.

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability.

Course Overview

This introductory course in sociology is comparable to the ten-week on-campus course offered at the University of Washington. You will use the same textbook as students do in the on-campus course in the UW Department of Sociology, grapple with identical sociological concepts, theories, and research, and demonstrate your mastery of the course material by your responses to questions in each lesson and by your performance on exams.

What Is Sociology?

Sociology (the name comes from the Latin socius, meaning social) is a science concerned with explaining primarily group behavior, ranging from two-person dyads to nation-states. Sociologists seek to identify the basic properties and elements of all groups, and to examine how the various parts are interrelated. Sociologists assume that human interaction is orderly; acting on this assumption, they try to understand the patterns of relationships among individuals, groups, and institutions. Note that

• sociology is not anthropology, which typically concerns itself with preliterate or non-industrial societies;
• nor is it history, which traditionally focuses on describing past social events; and
• sociology should not be confused with psychology, which focuses on behaviors and factors motivating behavior and attitudes of individuals.

Rather, sociology is an analytical, theoretical, and research-oriented discipline that attempts to understand how small and large groups emerge, expand, diminish, and disappear over time and across places, as well as how they affect each other.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course you will be able to

• apply specific sociological research and the theories that explain social phenomena to your own life experiences;
• define and describe sociological terminology and concepts;
• identify different levels of sociological analysis, and the linkages among them

Required Print Materials

You are required to buy Rodney Stark, Sociology, 10th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2007) and the study guide that accompanies it.

I chose Rodney Stark's text because it emphasizes theory and research, and provides the best example of what sociology is all about. The author discusses in an interesting fashion the types of social events and facts that intrigue sociologists. The research and theories discussed in each chapter are current. The textbook is well written and designed to engage you in the sociological enterprise. Its many graphs and figures provide a visual supplement to textbook discussions. The textbook is also used by most students taking introductory sociology at the University of Washington.

Each chapter in the textbook represents one of the many subfields within sociology. The diversity of these various sociological domains may appear confusing and chaotic, but by the end of the course, you will understand how these subfields are integrated with each other. Only eighteen of the twenty-one chapters are required reading, although you may find the remaining three of interest.

The Study Guide

The Wortham Study Guide for Stark's Sociology is a required and necessary supplement to the textbook. It includes a chapter-by-chapter overview, summary, glossary, relevant theories and studies, and several types of self-graded quizzes. These questions include true and false fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice, and short essays to help you learn the material in the textbook and assist you to prepare for the exams. The Study Guide for Stark's Sociology follows the approach (see the preface in the Study Guide for Stark's Sociology) to facilitate your learning. I expect you to review carefully the material and questions in the Study Guide for Stark's Sociology as you complete each chapter.

You are required to submit both true/false and multiple choice questions for the assigned chapters from the textbook, with the assignment for each lesson. When you test yourself without looking at the answers, be sure to grade yourself (you'll find the answers at the end of each chapter in the Wortham Study Guide for Stark's Sociology). I will not grade these exercises, but I want to assure myself that you have done them.

The assignment for each lesson also includes essay questions from the Wortham Study Guide for Stark's Sociology for each chapter of the textbook you are required to read.

Online Materials

The online materials for this course consist of ten lessons; two of these are preparations for the two examinations (a midterm and a final) that you will take in this course.

• Lesson Five will help you prepare for the midterm examination; and
• Lesson Ten will help you prepare for the final examination.

Each of the remaining eight lessons first identifies your reading assignments and lesson objectives, and then includes two other sections:

• Online lesson commentary in which I present a topic relevant to the lesson and provide you with references to other books you may want to read on the topic.
• A written assignment in which I ask you to respond to three or four questions. I have also included a question in each written assignment that will help you learn how individual lives (including your own) are affected by larger social, economic, and political forces—a process known as the application of the sociological imagination. This provides immediate relevance of sociology to your own life and family history. You are not required to write a response to this question, but I encourage you to explore this application of sociology to your own personal and/or familial history.

Course Options

In order to give you greater control over your learning process, I am offering you two options in this course.

Option 1

Option 1-Grading
Written Assignments	50%
Midterm Examination	25%
Final Exam	25%

With this option, you complete and submit all written assignments and take the two exams. Fifty percent of your course grade is based on the mean grade of all written assignments. Each of the two exams is worth 25% of your grade. Your course grade is an average of your averaged assignment and averaged exam grades.

Under Option 1 you will send Assignments 1 through 4, and 6 through 9 directly to me via e-mail. See the "About the Instructor" page on your syllabus for contact information. However, you will inform the Distance Learning office directly to make arrangements to take the midterm (Assignment 5) and the final (Assignment 10).See the Online Student Handbook for more information on scheduling exams.

Option 2

Option 2-Grading
Written Assignments	--
Midterm Examination	50%
Final Exam	50%

With this option you are graded only on the midterm and the final exam. Each exam counts for 50% of the total course grade. You must send the first written assignment to me. I will give you feedback and a grade, but I will not factor this grade into your final course grade.

After completing the first lesson you may want to switch to Option 1; you may do so, but only at this point. If you choose Option 2 you are free to complete this course within the usual Distance Learning program time frame. As soon as you decide which option you prefer, please inform me.

Each of the course completion options is designed so you can complete this course within a ten to twelve week period. The two options reflect the fact that different people have different learning capabilities and preferences. Thus, since there is little reason for not completing the course, most students do so.

About the Assignments

Each of the eight written assignments includes

• an application of the new concepts you have learned in the lesson to your own life and that of your family, as an example of the application of the sociological imagination. You need not submit a written response to this question.
• three or four essay questions from the Study Guide for Stark's Sociology for each assigned chapter of the textbook for that lesson;

Submitting Assignments

For instructions on how to submit assignments, please see the "Assignment Submissions Guidelines" page on the syllabus.

Planning Your Time

You will need more self-discipline to complete an online course than you would to study the same material in a class that meets regularly with an instructor. In this course it is up to you to set the time and the place to study the material. It is easy to start out enthusiastic and determined, but you may find that you tend to relax your efforts over a period of time, and thus do not complete the course as you had planned.

It will help if you establish both a daily and a weekly schedule for reading the textbook, reviewing the study guide and responding to questions. Please use the planning calendar located on your course syllabus to schedule your assignments and plan your examinations. I have limited the amount of reading you'll need to do. You have only the Stark textbook Sociology and the Wortham Study Guide for Stark's Sociology to read and study.

It is easy to let yourself become careless and sloppy over time. I urge you to forgo this temptation, even for those questions in which you are asked to use yourself or your family as a data base. Take as much time as you need to write a good response to each assignment, even if you feel pressed to complete the assignment—or the entire course—within a specific time period.

Exams

This course includes two proctored, closed-book exams: a midterm (Lesson Five) and a final (Lesson Ten). The midterm covers only material you have been asked to study in Lessons One through Four. The final exam covers only material from Lessons Six through Nine. Each exam includes term definitions, true/false questions, multiple-choice questions, and a selection of short-essay questions. The questions on the two exams are taken directly from the Wortham Study Guide for Stark's Sociology. Each exam consists of 100 points. You will have 100 minutes to complete each exam.

If you study the textbook, the Wortham Study Guide for Stark's Sociology, and the online lesson commentary carefully and routinely, you should do very well on the exams.

Grading

I grade written assignments and exams on a four-point scale. If your written assignments are accurate, complete and clearly written, you will earn high grades. Course grades are assigned as shown in the following table:

A+	99%-100%	4.0
A	95%-98%	3.8-3.9
A-	91%-94%	3.6-3.7
B+	88%-90%	3.4-3.5
B	85%-87%	3.2-3.3
B-	81%-84%	3.0-3.1
C+	78%-80%	2.7-2.9
C	75%-77%	2.4-2.6
C-	71%-74%	2.0-2.3
D+	68%-70%	1.7-1.9
D	65%-67%	1.4-1.6
D-	61%-64%	1.1-1.3
E	Less than 60%	1.0-0.0

Guidelines for Effective Writing

You need to write well in order to communicate with me. Although I will correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling, I prefer that you do this as you are writing, since poor writing detracts from what you have to say. Here are a few guidelines to aid you:

• Don't assume that I know what you are writing about.
• Begin by identifying what the question is about. This includes defining terms.
• Write clearly and concisely, but with enough elaboration to make your points clear.
• Whenever possible, use concrete examples to illustrate points.
• Generally, do not quote from the textbook, but use your own words.
• Do express your opinion, especially when you are invited to do so.

Course Evaluation

You have an opportunity to evaluate this course, using the checklist provided after Lesson Three. The feedback you provide is important to me as I assess how well the course has achieved its general and lesson-specific goals. Comments of students who have completed the course were most helpful as I developed this revision of the course. I have appreciated each student's willingness to take the time to tell me what he or she thought of the course.

Contacting Your Instructor

If you have questions about contacting me, please refer to the "About Your Instructor" page on the course syllabus.

About Your Course Developer—Virginia Paulsen, Ph.D.

Virginia Paulsen, a graduate of the University of Washington's Department of Sociology, was born in New York City. When the youngest of her four children was in kindergarten she decided to return to college life, entering as a freshwoman at the University of Washington. For personal reasons she wanted to pursue a degree that emphasized research skills, so she chose the Department of Sociology at the UW since it has a long history of training its graduates in quantitative empirical research methods. She earned her B.A. and M.A., and at the age of 50 took her Ph.D.

In addition to teaching through the University of Washington's Distance Learning Program, she has taught at the University of Washington on campus, as well as at Pacific Lutheran University, Western Washington University, Central Washington University and Highline, Bellevue and Everett Community Colleges. She has also worked as a researcher for the Schools of Medicine and Nursing at the UW , for the Washington State Board of Pharmacy and the Department of Health, publishing reports and journal articles.