Students who have had difficulty with the examinations have the option of preparing a paper or essay on a topic selected from the following list. The essay may be 5 to 6 pages in length and must be type-written, double spaced. There will be no exceptions to this requirement. You may use any source you wish, but sources must be cited in standard format. There are a couple of good sources for this on-line. The Electronic Sources: APA Style of Citation is a guide to how one cites Electronic sources in a paper. This is a straightforward description of how one cites references from the Web and other electronic sources. Professor of English Charles Darling of Capital Community College has put together an excellent on-line how to write papers, A Guide for Writing Research Papers. Please read this latter source for how to set up a paper and to prepare citations. I will expect you to have read this and to have formatted your paper accordingly.
Any student may choose to write one of these essays. However, you must be aware that it must be significantly better than average if it is to change your grade substantially. I will substitute the essay score for the lowest grade you have on one of the first three examinations. This essay cannot substitute for the last examination. The essay is due Wednesday at class time, November 22, 2000. There can be no exceptions to this due time and date, that is, no paper will be accepted after this time and date for any reason.
You are to choose your essay topic from one of the following or come and talk with me about a possible topic:
1. Gender is a significant factor in our every day lives. For example, women with a college degree earn less than men who are high school drop outs. Examine how these conditions come about and suggest how changes might be made that will improve the status of women, i.e., will give them equal pay for equal work.
2. Select any ethnic or minority group and:
3. Computers have greatly changed how we work, process and access information. Discuss the social nature of these changes and the social and sociological consequences they will mean for our future. For example, you may wish to consider issues of privacy as well as those related to work and learning. (Since we are using the computer for this course you may want to look at the discussions of privacy shown in the many links from Cryptography, PGP, and Your Privacy by Francis Litterio.)
4. The urban place is quite varied and interesting. Explore this variation by selecting one central city neighborhood and one suburban neighborhood (the central city neighborhood will be in Denver, and the suburban neighborhood in any other community in the metropolitan area). Compare these two neighborhoods in terms of:
5. Examine the future of the family in the United States by drawing upon your knowledge of socialization, urban/industrialization and population growth. Relate your conclusions to current discussions in a popular magazine, a newspaper, or the internet (You may start your search on the internet with a look at the sources listed in Society and Culture: Families at Yahoo).
6. Select a single set of product ads (e.g., toothpaste or beer). Analyze to whom the ads are directed (i.e., the target audience) and how the ads attempt to influence consumer actions. As reference you will want to look to the work of Jules Henry, particularly his book, Culture Against Man (Random House, 1963). There is a brief discussion of Henry's view in Chapter 13 of Ray Cuzzort's book, Humanity and Modern Sociological Thought (the First Edition, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).
7. Medical technology has recently been placed in the spotlight by reports about organ transplants, animal cloning research at CSU (and in 1996 the announcement of a complete in vitro horse fetus!!), a recent court battle over frozen embryos, women past menopause who use in-vitro fertilization, and other discussions in the popular literature. Investigate some of the developments in this area and discuss their implications for future societies and human communities. (E.g., you might want to consider the sociological consequences of gene splicing, cloning, surrogate motherhood, real test tube babies. There are many places to look for such information on the World Wide Web, you may want to start with the Yahoo index page on biotechnology.)
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Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by Richard H. Anderson, the Department of Sociology and the University of Colorado at Denver.
This page last revised: November 06, 2000. Please contact Richard H. Anderson (randerso@carbon.cudenver.edu) if you experience any problems or have comments about these pages.