Sociology 441: Stratification

Exercise #4: hypotheses

Geoghegan's book is excellent as a description of what is happening to the working class and unions. But Geoghegan is not a social scientist (perhaps you are grateful for this!). As social scientists, we need need to be more explicit about our causal theories.

Your job is to look carefully at one chapter and pull out one causal hypothesis from Geoghegan's descriptive text. Be sure you specify cause and effect. Cite where Geoghegan argues for this causal hypothesis.

Then describe what data might be useful for testing this hypothesis. (You don't actually have to find the data, but you should be realistic enough that getting the data would be possible.) The data might be macro data as in our past exercises (changes over time, differences across states and nations) or micro data (differences across individuals). Be clear about what you are comparing: years, states, individuals, etc.

Describe what kind of relationship would support your hypothesis and what kind of relationship would disconfirm your hypothesis.

To spread out the work, we will look at several different chapters. The chapter you must search for an hypothesis will be determined by the last digit of your social security number:

last SS #	chapter for hypothesis:
0	1, Solidarity
1	3, Before the Lean Years
2	5, Always Bring a Crowd
3	8, Officers and Lawyers
4	10, Free Trade
5	10, Free Trade
6	11, Bread and Wine
7	12, Citizens
8	12, Citizens
9	13, To the Medinah Temple

Due: Wednesday, April 19