Sociology The Core Study Set 1

Societies control romantic love by arranging marriages, isolating the young from potential mates, and applying peer and parental pressures.

Heterogamous marriages are marriages between people firmly committed to heterosexuality.

Research shows that the American family has undergone complete disintegration.

About half the women in the United States are living without a husband.

Polyandry is a custom that represents the freedom of sexual choice for women in the societies that practice it.

Fears about the disintegration of the American family are a relatively new phenomenon.

Societies trace descent and pass on property from one generation to the next in three ways: patrilineal; matrilineal; and bilineal.

Amato and his co-authors found that happy couples were those who were committed to staying married.

Families seldom vary in their composition and in their descent, residence, and authority patterns.

All societies regulate the pool of eligible people from which individuals are expected to select a mate.

Economic dislocations and the increased availability of nonnuclear kin may have encouraged the formation of extended family households in the early industrialization of the United States.

The ancient Greeks defined romantic love as "diseased hysteria."

According to the matching hypothesis, individuals of equal attractiveness are the ones most likely to reciprocate our advances.

Sociologists agree that incest taboos are the only universal norm in the world.

In a cross-cultural study, monogamy was the preferred or ideal type of marriage in fewer than 20 percent of the 862 societies surveyed.

The psychological well-being of parents is, on average, a little worse than that of childless couples, and it remains lower until children grow up and move out of the household.

Children born outside of marriage are rare in the United States, with fewer than 10 percent of all babies born to unmarried mothers in 2008.

The model of the family that includes a married couple, breadwinner husband and homemaker wife, and children now describes only one in five families in the United States.

Sociologists agree that industrialization and extended family patterns are incompatible.

According to exchange theory, we like those who reward us and dislike those who punish us.