sociology unit two exam terms or descriptions that it may...
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SOCIOLOGY UNIT TWO EXAM
Terms or descriptions that it may be helpful to use within your answers:
1. 7 Steps in Sociological Research
Methodology
2. Variables
3. Independent variable
4. Dependent variable
5. Hypothesis
6. Indicator
7. Operational Definition
8. Quantitative Research
9. Mode
10. Mean
11. Median
12. Standard Deviation
13. Correlation Coefficient
14. Casual Connection
15. Statistical Independence
16. Spurious Correlation
17. Qualitative Research
18. Survey
19. Population
20. Sample
21. Random Sample
22. Closed Response Question
23. Open Response Question
24. Immediate Contact
25. Interview
26. Semi Structured Interview
27. Structured Interview
28. Unstructured Interview
29. Hawthorne Effect
30. Halo Effect
31. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
32. Shared Reality
33. Interactionisim
34. Triangulation
35. Interpretivism
36. Positivism
37. Empirical
38. Over Generalization
39. Presupposition
40. Falsifiability
41. Experimental Group
42. Control Group
43. Ethnography
44. Overt Participant Observation
45. Covert Participant Observation
46. Non Participant Observation
47. Intrusion
48. Content Analysis
49. Cross Cultural Research 50. Secondary Analysis
Read the following article and use the information therein to answer the following questions
on a separate sheet of paper:
1. What is the problem Contreras is researching?
2. What did Contreras learn from the literature he reviewed?
3. What was Contreras’ hypothesis?
4. How did Contreras design his research (be specific, and use terminology that accurately tells a
researcher how he went about conducting his research)?
5. What were the dependent and independent variables?
6. What was the indicator used in this study?
7. What was the operational definition Contreras used based on these indicators?
8. What quantitative research did Contreras use?
Some of the data Contreras could have found on his 27 participants is included in table one.
Answer the following questions based on information from this table
PARTICIPANT
AVERAGE MONEY
EARNED PER MONTH
LEGITIMATELY
AVERAGE MONEY EARNED
PER MONTH FROM DRUG
DEALING
AVERAGE MONEY EARNED
PER MONTH FROM DRUG
ROBBERIES
NUMBER OF TIMES ARRESTED ON DRUG CHARGES IN PAST
YEAR
AVERAGE # OF DAYS PER
MONTH SPENT
SELLING DRUGS
1 $542.00 $2,043.00 $0.00 0 23
2 $312.88 $657.01 $254.00 0 19
3 $0.00 $3419.00 $678.00 0 14
4 $16.57 $287.56 $323.00 0 8
5 $1242.00 $670.00 $0.00 3 15
6 $239.54 $567.90 $26.00 1 14
7 $79.66 $321.00 $239.00 0 22
8 $645.99 $700.00 $116.00 0 29
9 $43.12 $698.00 $53.50 0 30
10 $906.00 $750.00 $450.00 1 6
11 $145.87 $3200.00 $0.00 0 18
12 $2,053.45 $234.00 $897.00 0 6
13 $0.00 $712.76 $230.00 2 30
14 -$23.72 $1,209.73 $0.00 0 22
15 $61.89 $416.90 $10.00 0 14
16 $187.39 $900.00 $0.00 0 9
17 $343.90 $432.56 $0.00 0 4
18 $501.71 $562.90 $115.00 4 17
19 $44.41 $875.00 $432.00 1 21
20 $19.26 $650.00 $1250.00 1 15
21 $234.34 $329.00 $61.00 4 10
22 $120.96 $907.28 $3.00 6 8
23 $6.72 $415.22 $113.00 1 1
24 $208.64 $888.91 $567.00 0 6
25 $450.23 $546.32 $0.00 0 11
26 $239.89 $700.00 $87.00 2 5
27 $38.72 $438.00 $19.00 1 5
9. What is the mode of ther average number of days spent each month selling drugs?
10. What is the median average money earned per month from drug dealing?
11. What is the mean number of times arrested on drug charges in the last year?
12. How far off is participant # 22’s number of times arrested on drug charges in the past year from
the standard deviation?
13. What is the correlation coefficient of the average money earned per month legitimately when
over $500.00 to the average money earned per month from drug dealing under $500.00?
14. How would you describe the correlation between a participant making over $1,000.00 a month
in drug dealing, and the number of times a month arrested on drug charges in the past year?
15. How would you describe the correlation between a participant making over $1,000.00 a month
in drug dealing, and spending at least 10 days a month selling drugs?
16. What statistical errors may be found in Dr. Contreras’s research that are common problems
within much quantitative research?
17. How did Contreras’ collect his data (be specific, and use terminology that accurately tells a
researcher how he went about collecting his data)?
18. What did Contreras’ find when he analyzed his data?
19. What results could he have examined quantitatively?
20. What results could he have examined qualitatively?
21. What conclusions did Contreras reach regarding his research?
22. Within this article, identify some positivist arguments against Dr. Contreras research.
23. What are some interpretivist / interactionist arguments that can be made against the empirical
aspects of Dr. Contreras’ study?
24. What are some interpretivist / interactionist arguments that can be made against the empirical
aspects of Dr. Contreras’ study?
25. In your opinion, does Dr. Contreras’ study meet the standards of “science”? Be specific and use
accurate terminology to state your opinion.
From selling crack to sociology
3 October 2013 | By Jack Grove
A failed dealer used his insider status to research drugs, violence and the American Dream
When I read the transcripts of my interviews, the stories would jump off the page. Sometimes, I
couldn’t believe these people were my friends
“Yo, we gonna get paid! We gonna make crazy dollars, bro! Ha-ha!” Sitting in front of a mound
of crack cocaine destined for the streets of New York’s South Bronx, Randol Contreras had
never felt so confident of success. He was going to be rich.
His confidence, however, was misplaced: Contreras, now assistant professor of sociology at
California State University, Fullerton, turned out to be a lousy drug dealer.
His product was “garbage”, according to the local crack users who tried free samples, and no one
was willing to sell it for him. One eventually agreed to deal it if he could take $2 for every $5
sale – twice the normal cut – but he often turned up late, leaving the 20-year-old Contreras and
his friends to undertake risky hand-to-hand sales. After weeks of slow business, unable to pay
“rent” to the dealers who controlled the sidewalk, he was forced out of the drug game, frustrated
and broke.
Luckily, a friend in the neighbourhood had filled out a community college application for him.
Contreras may have been “a repeat drug market failure”, but with strong encouragement from a
community college professor he excelled in sociology, later becoming a graduate student at the
City University of New York.
Far from losing touch with his South Bronx roots, however, he would return to the area as a PhD
student to explore the lives of his childhood friends who had continued in the drug world.
Hanging out on the “stoops” and corners with other young men, he listened to how early success
in dealing crack – living the high life, spending money on cars, clothes, jewellery and women –
had abruptly ended for many as the ready cash available during the 1980s “crack epidemic” dried
up.
To remain part of the drug world, some of Contreras’ acquaintances had turned to an even more
brutal way of life: conducting drug robberies – holding up drug dealers and torturing them to
obtain information on where their drugs and money were stashed.
“I came into the market at the tail end of the [peak] crack era, which is partly why it was so hard
to make any money,” he says. “I wanted to understand why my friends had now turned to drug
robberies. I was never arrested or got a criminal record, but I could have easily gone down the
same road as them.”
Contreras knew his “insider” status within the Dominican-American community – many of the
so-called “stickup kids” were close friends – could secure him access to a violent underworld out
of reach to even the best investigative journalists or academic ethnographers.
The son of poor Dominican immigrants, Contreras grew up in a single-parent home in the
decaying New York suburb – a background, he believed, that would inform a different approach
to sociological analysis.
“When I read the literature about robberies, it stressed the emotional thrill of violence or looked
more broadly at social factors,” he says, leaving him frustrated that many studies failed to marry
the two.
His aim was to combine “macroeconomic reasons for this phenomenon” with “the most micro of
micro-reasons: emotions”. This would allow him to produce “a much more complete model of
analysis that looked at deprivation and larger economic forces that explained why markets –
including markets in drugs – rise and fall, but tying that to the emotions involved in these
criminal enterprises”.
Ultimately, his research would lead to a book, published by the University of California Press,
The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream (2013).
One of the best-known recent explorations of drug dealing in the US is The Wire, the Baltimore-
set police television drama that connects the actions of City Hall, police chiefs and legislators to
the fortunes of the most downtrodden crack addicts seeking their next hit in the boarded-up row
houses of once-prosperous suburbs.
Creator David Simon’s acclaimed drama was first screened in 2002, several years after Contreras
began to tape the testimony of various drug robbers, a dangerous pursuit that he undertook most
nights over a period of more than five years.
While Contreras admires the series, commending its ambition, scope and realism, he disagrees
with aspects of Simon’s vision – in particular, the noble, shotgun-toting drug robber Omar Little.
A lone wolf living by his own honour code (“I ain’t never put my gun on no citizen”) and his
own rules (he is masculine, feared and openly gay), Omar is entirely a “fantasy character”,
Contreras says, held in awe in a way that would never happen in reality.
One of his interviewees’ motivations for taking part in the study was the hope that the book
would possibly lead to the sale of film rights
“In The Wire, Omar knocks on the door and the dealers drop the drugs out of the window,” he
says. “That never happened to anyone I interviewed.”
The reality of a drug robbery is far more violent than anything depicted in the television show, he
argues.
Potential targets are acquired through tip-offs, sometimes from rival dealers but most often by
drug distributors’ disgruntled friends, colleagues, even family members. Most stickup gangs then
set a “honey trap”, with a young woman gaining access to the dealer’s apartment and then
unlocking the door for the waiting armed gang. Once inside, things move fast, with the gang
spurred on by an “emotional momentum” to achieve their aim in the same way a football team
unites in the common purpose of a touchdown, Contreras explains. The dealer is tied up, gagged
with duct tape in most instances and then threatened – and the threats are often carried out.
“If you don’t tell me, I’m gonna cut your ear off. You understand that shit?” recounted one drug
robber, who then proceeded to do as he had warned. On most occasions, household implements
are used to torture victims: most people have an electric iron in their homes, and one method
used is electrocution in the bath. Threatening to stab a heated coat hanger into a person’s ear
generally yields information, various robbers have confided to Contreras.
Often dealers will endure some degree of duress to prove to their superiors that they had been
taken hostage and robbed of the drugs (often belonging to others), rather than face suspicion that
they had stolen from their suppliers, Contreras adds.
So how did Contreras conduct his study and cope with hearing such extreme stories of the
maiming and murder of dealers by people he considered his friends? Did his personal ties to his
subjects compromise his appraisal of their actions?
Contreras promised his 27 participants that the research would not endanger them, so his study is
“purposefully vague” about timings, uses pseudonyms and is covered by a Federal Certificate of
Confidentiality from the National Institutes of Health, protecting him from any attempt to
subpoena his field data.
Although he began by writing “field notes” on his conversations with his subjects, after three
months he started to use a tape recorder for the interviews.
“Sometimes, the tape recorder was therapeutic, letting the study participants voice their hopes,
dreams, sadness and anger in ways they never had. They even cried,” he writes in The Stickup
Kids.
To be allowed continued access to those involved in the drugs world, Contreras also realised he
would, to an extent, have to follow his participants’ rules – in words and dress, for example –
avoiding any “slip ups” that might challenge his insider status.
He recalls chuckling, smiling and “high-fiving” as Gus, Pablo, Neno and others told him about
their violent robberies as they drank alcohol on the public stairwell each night. Once back in the
neighbourhood, he was expected to behave as the “same old Ran”. In such situations, he says, he
was desensitised to vivid descriptions of how victims had been beaten, burned or mutilated,
temporarily returning to his old status as a “wannabe” drug dealer, accepting their value system
and even romanticising their actions.
Afterwards, however, he would look at the same tales in a very different way: “When I read the
transcripts of my interviews, the stories would jump off the page.”
Sometimes, he says, he “couldn’t believe these people were my friends”.
But Contreras also worried about how his study would be perceived by academics. He did not
want to be seen as a “cowboy ethnographer”– a term he uses to describe those “who are
perceived to exploit research for their own professional or narcissistic ends…[or] glorify
themselves”. He received warnings from colleagues that his project could “ruin” his career, and
at conferences, questions would always turn to how his insider status had affected the work.
Eventually, after what he terms this “standpoint crisis”, he decided to devote part of the book to
explaining how his own experiences and feelings significantly shaped his interpretations.
Lone wolf: Omar Little, the drug robber with a code: one aspect of The Wire that struck
Contreras as false
In writing up his study, he was also aware of the risk of being seen to “glamorise” the
participants and their actions. Disturbingly, one of his interviewees’ motivations for taking part
in the study was the hope that the book would bring them fame and possibly even lead to the sale
of film rights.
“I wanted to give them [the study participants] a potential movie. But I wanted to realize my
sociological goals too,” he confesses in the book. He was also determined to publish with a
university press. Ultimately, Contreras says, he had to sacrifice many of the violent stories and
extend the sociological analysis in order to get the book through peer review and accepted by an
academic publisher. In the introduction, he says that the study participants “will not like” The
Stickup Kids as a result.
Many vivid accounts remain, however, including the story of Pablo, once a promising running
back with hopes of a football scholarship. He became one of the drug market’s so-called
“intractable criminals” after his incarceration at Rikers Island juvenile detention facility for a
minor drug bust.
Gus, meanwhile, revelled in the brutality of the institution dubbed “gladiator school”, where
overcrowding forced inmates into daily confrontations, solidifying his obsession with toughness
and intimidating others. Back on the street, this mindset allowed Gus to become a “robber elite”,
someone who, denied any chance of normal success, is able to target “American-style
overachievement” and fulfil their ambition in the underground economy’s violence.
Gus did not see himself as an outsider in wider society, Contreras observes: he was living the
American Dream.
Gus’ reputation allowed Contreras to feel somewhat secure when dealing with highly violent,
untrustworthy criminals: he introduced the academic to everyone as his cousin, “the journalist”.
However, there were times when Contreras feared for his safety as he hung out with “hoodlums”
who would happily “double-cross” their own family members for money or revenge.
“I knew these people could betray you so easily. In fact, many of the drug robberies were often
retaliatory, with information coming from someone with a grudge,” he says.
And when Gus fell on hard times, Contreras began to fear his one-time protector, who had
supported the book from the beginning.
“I got a job in Baltimore, then Gus started dealing there. He started calling me, asking me for a
$100 loan and telling me he had become a drug user,” he explains.
But street stories like Gus’ need to be heard, Contreras believes, not least because they often
challenge assumptions about law enforcement, the prison system, career criminals and drug
markets.
For instance, the study led the sociologist to the view that falling crime levels in New York had
less to do with the “zero-tolerance” strategy introduced by Rudy Giuliani, mayor of the city from
1994 to 2001, than the natural cyclical downturn in the destructive crack trade. The crimes of the
stickup kids, meanwhile, would usually go unreported.
He also urges policymakers to look more broadly at the decisions that facilitate the crack market
in the first place. Everything from General Pinochet’s CIA-backed attack on Chile’s cocaine
industry (which forced the country’s drug makers north into politically volatile Colombia) and
the Pan-American Highway that enables easy drug transportation, to the rent controls that led to
slumlords neglecting apartments for New York’s deindustrialised working class are analysed in
Contreras’ treatise on how Gus, Pablo and Neno fell into their violent line of work.
The sociologist calls for efforts to reduce the gap between the highest paid and the least educated
workers, wants more drug treatment programmes and hopes that a way can be found to reduce
“the allure of our nation’s capitalist greed and its single-minded focus on material consumption
as the greatest good” – desires that often drive (and are used to justify) the actions of those
involved in the trade. However, he recognises that this goal is “perhaps most impossible to
reach”.
In the end, he writes, “I must tell this story” because “we must understand how despair can drive
the marginal into greed, betrayal, cruelty and self-destruction”.