Exploring Society By The NumbersModules
This module introduces students to recent trends in households and family forms, and provides data to examine how family types differ by class and race/ethnicity.
The Data Counts website is intended to engage students in data analysis and quantitative reasoning early on in their respective academic careers.
As such, it is a valuable resource for students and instructors alike.
As such, it is a valuable resource for students and instructors alike.
Objectives of this first data exercise are: to discover how the present-day US population is distributed across these various census categories; to discover how the distribution has changed over time; and, to see how some of the social characteristics of people who live in cities, suburbs and non-metro areas.
This module introduces students to the relationships between age, race/ethnicity, gender, poverty, and disability. It also provides students with an opportunity to use census data to gather information about a target population.
Students will analyze quantitative data and interpret the results, learning about the relevance of education and family type to earnings, how it has changed over time and the relevance of race in understanding these relationships.
For this assignment we will explore the impact of gender and race on the earnings of full-time workers in 2000.
The end of World War II created a dramatic increase in births. Known as the "Baby Boom", this trend continued into the early 1960's. During this period, five out of six women in peak childbearing years gave birth to at least two children. Americans were also marrying and staying married. As baby boomers have matured, they have not followed their parent's marriage and childbearing patterns. Consequently, more people have delayed marriage until their late twenties or early thirties. Couples have both delayed having children and are having fewer children. Divorces have increased as well. Clearly, there no longer seems to be a "singular" marital lifestyle that can be easily identified in American culture.
In this assignment, we will perform a simple analysis of poor households in the United States, considering whether certain kinds of households are more likely to be poor and what sorts of households make up the largest proportion of the poor. Students will be looking at three characteristics that may be associated with poverty: race, age, and family type.
In addition to a quantitative analysis that involves univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analysis, this module reinforces research terms introduced in Intro to Sociology (independent, dependent and control variables and includes the opportunity to discuss sample vs. population (in the comparison of national poverty data vs. the poverty rate in the sample) and value vs. variable (poverty as a value and a variable and the recoding of the values in the household data).
In addition to a quantitative analysis that involves univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analysis, this module reinforces research terms introduced in Intro to Sociology (independent, dependent and control variables and includes the opportunity to discuss sample vs. population (in the comparison of national poverty data vs. the poverty rate in the sample) and value vs. variable (poverty as a value and a variable and the recoding of the values in the household data).
This activity provides an introduction to U.S. Census data using American Factfinder.
The sociologist, Melvin Kohn, argued that people's locations in social structures, particularly the occupational structure, influenced the values they would stress for their children because variations in structural locations exposed them to different experiences.
You most likely learned in your introductory sociology classes that traditional mom-pop-children households in the United States are not as dominant as they once were. You may also have learned that the change was due in part to the increasing status of women and changes in customs and laws that made divorce less troublesome to obtain. And we all have known for quite some time that children in female-headed households have a much greater chance of living in poverty. While you do the exercises in this lesson, you will find data that look at some of these claims.
This exercises examines housing patterns using data from the 2000 U.S. Census considering how stage of life course and race/ethnicity influence these patterns. Students are expected to discuss the implications of their findings.
As discussed, the murder rates for Blacks in the United States are substantially higher than those for Whites, with Latino murder rates falling in the middle. These differences have existed throughout the 20th and into the 21st century and, with few exceptions, are found in different sections of the United States.
Explores contemporary trends in urban sociology
Short module (2 hrs.) focused on using excel to work through and understand segregation data
This online group project is to introduce students to demographic and socio-economic data from the American Community Survey to understand major concepts of marriage and the family in a sociology course.
Utilizing the SSDAN WebCHIP software, students will explore different disability types for older adults in the United States from the 2008 and 2012 American Community Surveys. Understanding the different types of disability and trends by age and race can help policy-makers decide how to allocate resources to improve population health.
Do secondary data analysis with the 2014 Puerto Rico Community Survey, which was developed by the United States Census Bureau and is available at the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics Web site.