SOCI 130: Family and Society

Course Overview

Welcome to a new innovation in independent learning offered by the University of North Carolina. Self-paced Courses now offers Family and Society online as well as through correspondence. The advantages of taking the course online are many: You, the student, are not constrained by the traditional twelve-week semester as on-campus students are; you are able to submit your assignments via e-mail and thus receive more immediate feedback from me, the instructor; and you receive the same material as students who take my class on campus. Of course, with all the advantages come some responsibilities. You are responsible for your progress through the course. It is truly self-paced. Since you are most aware of your competing responsibilities, such as family, work, and other classes, you have the responsibility for planning your schedule for completion of the course around those activities. I have not found this responsibility to be a burden for the majority of students taking this course. The course fulfills a perspective for general college requirements at UNC, and the majority of students who haven taken the course through Self-paced Courses have been very motivated to finish it.

I have closely modeled this self-paced version of the course after my regular teaching of the course, both through regular Self-paced Courses and on campus. The major change has been in streamlining the chapters. I have divided the course material into ten lessons. The Web page for each lesson contains:

• objectives for that lesson
• required readings from a novel or supplemental academic material, sometimes online
• lesson notes
• enlighteners (optional self-growth activities included in most of the lessons, designed to make you more conscious of some of the topics we've covered)
• suggested readings for those of you interested in finding out more about specific topics
• study aids (included in the lessons that have novels assigned, to help you understand the reading)
• a written assignment for you to complete and e-mail to me (and a copy to Student Services at the Friday Center).
• a reminder to make an entry in your journal
• a bibliography link, so you can see the full references for works I have cited.

Most of the books assigned are available in paperback, and most of them are widely available in public and college libraries.

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Required Texts

Rather than requiring you to order one large, expensive textbook, I have assigned several novels, academic books, and online readings to supplement the lesson notes for the course. The books you will need are:

• Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Really Are (1998)
• Marian Wright Edelman, The Measure of Our Success (1993)
• Clyde Edgerton, Raney, (1985)
• Robert Munsch, The Paper Bag Princess (1988)
• Robert Munsch, Love You Forever (1986)
• Lillian Rubin, Families on the Fault Line (1995)
• Lillian Rubin, Worlds of Pain (1992)
• Dori Sanders, Clover (1990)
• Judith Stacey, In the Name of the Family (1997)
• Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand (1990)
• Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
• Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage (2000)

You can order the texts from the Higher Grounds bookstore at the Friday Center either online or by using the book order form. As a reminder, these books also should be available in college or public community libraries. Look for the Munsch books in the children's section.

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Course Requirements

Accessing the online readings (IMPORTANT!)

Some of your online readings are available only through UNC Library's online resources. Students enrolled in Self-paced Courses can access online library resources from the UNC-Chapel Hill Library System by linking to Library Services for Distance Education Students. If you will be accessing the library resources from a computer that is not on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, you will be asked to authenticate yourself as a Self-paced Courses student and enter your UNC Onyen and password. If you do not have an Onyen, you will enter your UNC PID. If you do not know your PID, you can look it up here.

UNC library staff is available to assist any students who have difficulties accessing online library resources. If you encounter difficulties, please visit this Web page for reporting a problem. Be sure to tell them your name and that you are taking the Self-paced Courses version of SOCI 130.

Academic books and articles

In this course, you will be required to read a number of academic articles and books that report research findings. The following suggestions will help you analyze these more rigorous write-ups of family studies.

1. Always read the title and abstract at the front of an academic article. The title will almost always give you an idea of the theoretical argument or research variables that are being investigated. The abstract is a short summary of the article and its major findings. The introduction of most books serves the same purpose as the abstract in an article. In Worlds of Pain by Rubin, for example, her introduction lays out her research plan and what she found.
2. Recognize the "order" of academic articles. Usually the write-up of the articles is organized in the following manner:
   • Introduction
   • Literature review
   • Data and methods
   • Results or findings
   • Discussion.
3. Don't worry about technical language, especially of the statistical sort, right now. You won't understand much of the more sophisticated statistical analysis unless you have a lot of background in that area. But it is not necessary to understand all the statistics to get an idea of what the author or authors were doing. Go to the Results and Discussion sections to get an overview of what was found and how the findings are being explained.
4. Finally, as you read the article, keep in mind or jot down the answers to questions such as the following:
   • What is the title of the article? Who is its author(s)? Where was it published (citation)?
   • What is the issue being researched?
   • What is the independent variable or "cause"?
   • What is the dependent variable or "effect"?
   • What theoretical perspective, if any, would you say the author is using?
   • What sample was used? How many? How were they chosen?
   • What were the major findings? Were major hypotheses supported or rejected?
   • What do you think of the quality of the article?
   • What might you have done differently if you were writing the article?

Journal write-up

You will be required to keep a journal as part of the course. Your entries do not have to be formal and well written; you can just jot them down as you’re doing an assignment. These entries should consist of experiences you’ve had that are similar to course discussions, or of thoughts you have as you read the course material. For example, on the lesson dealing with divorce, if you have experienced divorce personally, or your parents have, you could note similarities and differences between your experience and those mentioned in the lesson discussion.

I recommend that you keep up your journal entries as you go along and keep the journal entries in one place, such as in a special legal pad or notebook. I do not want you to turn in your journal entries at any time. I only want you to write a final summary of what you learned from the entries. This write-up will be due at the end of the last lesson.

The following is what I will look for in grading your journal write-up:

1. Is there evidence to show that journal entries were made regularly and as the course progressed, rather than all at the end of the course?
2. How much does the write-up relate to course material? I do not want you to simply quote from the text. Instead, you should incorporate personal insight and experience with relevant readings.
3. Is your journal write-up logical and appropriate, from a sociological perspective? For instance, if you tell me that there has never been a divorce in your family and therefore you don't think there's a problem with divorce in our society, I will not think you have learned much in the course.
4. Is the write-up grammatically correct? Are words spelled correctly? Proofread your own paper or get a friend to do so. It is very difficult to read papers for quality when there are numerous run-on sentences, misspelled words, and paragraphs that seem entirely out of context.
5. Is there creativity and/or originality?
6. The journal write-up should be approximately four to five pages using 12-point font.

Written assignments

At the end of each lesson, you will find an assignment to submit for grading. You will submit your assignments by clicking a "Submit" button at the end of the Written Assignment section that opens a pre-addressed e-mail to me and the Self-paced Courses office. In the subject line of each message, enter "SPC SOCI 130 Lesson #" and your name (example: SPC SOCI 130 Lesson 3 Smith). This information is necessary for us to keep track of your work. You may want to add your own e-mail address to the "Send to" line so that you can save the e-mail and have a record of your submission.

NOTE: If there are several items to submit for one lesson, please submit them all in one e-mail message.

You may submit your assignments as either (1) a Word document attached to your e-mail message or (2) within the body of the e-mail message itself. Make sure your e-mail message includes the e-mail address where you want me to send your grade and my comments.

The assignments are based on the readings, and most questions are objective or short-answer questions. The graded, returned assignments will be good review material for your final exam. Please answer the questions in your written assignments in complete sentences, using correct grammar and spelling. You do not need to rewrite the question itself (I know them). You can be brief but complete. If I have asked you to list something, such as "Please list three misperceptions of US family," you could simply write:

Three misperceptions of family life include:
1)
2)
3)

Final exam

You will be required to take one supervised exam at the end of the course. The following are some guidelines:

• You will need to schedule your final exam through the Self-paced Courses office at least two weeks before the exam.
• Your exam will be primarily short answer and short essay.
• You can prepare for one of the essay questions ahead of time. You need to find an article about family and society on the Internet and write about the article as part of your essay questions. You must give me the URL (Web address) of the article, so that I can read it myself to know what it's about. You may print out the Internet article and bring it into the final exam with you. In discussing the article, you will be asked to comment on any three concepts from the course that you choose to focus on.
• In studying for the exam, concentrate on your graded and returned assignments. Make sure you know the basic trends of family life, such as dating patterns, marriage rates, divorce rates, and so on. Recognize the definitions of obvious concepts we have covered.

Each of the ten written assignments is worth 100 points. All ten assignments, averaged together, make up 50 percent of your final course grade. Your journal write-up (which you will submit with Lesson 10) will count as 10 percent of your final course grade. Your final exam counts as 40 percent of your final course grade. Thus your final grade will be calculated as follows:

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Study Suggestions

Having taught for many years and having taken more than one Self-paced Courses course myself, here are a few suggestions that may help you finish on a set schedule.

1. Set aside a specific time, if at all possible, to work on your course. Treat it as if you were taking the course on a campus and had to be in class at a certain time for a certain length of time.
2. Look over the homework assignment for a lesson first, before you read the lesson notes and readings. The assignment will give you an idea of the questions and issues on which you need to focus, and it will alert you to certain terms and labels you need to know.
3. Read the academic articles assigned for the course with an eye to analysis and evaluation rather than with an eye to entertainment or pleasure.
4. Read the assigned novels with a sociological perspective. I have provided a study aid for each novel in the lesson that has questions about the novel.

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Honor Code

All work in SOCI 130 falls under UNC's Honor Code . If you have any questions about usage of sources, please contact me. Reading and using returned, graded assignments of students who have taken the course earlier is the same thing as cheating in class.

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Communicating with the Instructor

The primary method of communication in Self-paced Courses is electronic. You will be communicating with me and submitting your assignments via e-mail. It is essential to inform me and Student Services of any change in your e-mail address.

Contact me with questions regarding the content of the course and your progress. There is a link to my e-mail address at the top of every lesson page.

Contact the instructional designer at the Friday Center about problems with this Web site, including bad links.

If you have any questions about course credits, transfers, withdrawal, extensions, and so on, contact Student Services at the Friday Center for Continuing Education, phone 919-962-1134 or 800-862-5669.

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Schedule

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Lesson 1