Teaching Resources
Sociology labs, free to use
67 self-contained teaching labs for introductory sociology, criminology, white-collar crime, and research methods. Each one opens in a browser, holds real published data or real cases, and asks students for a judgment before it shows them the evidence.
What these are
I write these for my own classes, and I run them during class rather than assigning them as homework. A lab takes somewhere between fifteen and forty minutes. The pattern is nearly always the same: a student is asked to commit to an estimate, a classification, or a judgment, and only then does the page show what the published data or the case record says. The gap between the two is the lesson.
They are plain web pages. There is no account to create, no server behind them, and nothing a student enters is transmitted anywhere, which means they work on a phone, on a laptop, from a projector, or from a link posted in a learning management system. Students copy their finished work out of the page and submit it however the course normally collects work.
You are welcome to use any of these in your own teaching, to change them, and to strip my course references out. If you build on one, I would be glad to hear about it.
Browse the repository
Showing all 67 labs.
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Introduction to Sociology
You Draw It
Students sketch their prediction of a social trend on a blank axis before the real series is revealed, which turns a passive chart into a record of what they believed and how wrong it was.
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Introduction to Sociology
How to Lie with a Chart
Real published data with controls that change only how it is drawn. The axis baseline, direction, and scale move; the numbers never do. Students see how far a presentation can be pushed without a single false value.
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Introduction to Sociology
Census Categories
Every race and ethnicity option that has appeared on a United States census questionnaire since 1790, shown by year, so students can watch an official classification system change shape around the population it claims to count.
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Introduction to Sociology
Culture Compare
Published cross-national survey measurements of cultural traits, including norm tightness and individualism, arranged so students can compare countries and interrogate what a national average can and cannot support.
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Introduction to Sociology
Sites of Socialization
Data on family, school, peers, media, and religion as agents of socialization, with the relative weight of each put in front of students rather than asserted.
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Introduction to Sociology
Front Stage
Goffman wrote about dinner parties and shop counters in 1959. This lab tests dramaturgical analysis against contemporary evidence about self-presentation and audience.
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Introduction to Sociology
Best Practices
A simulation of the rationalized workplace, in which students apply efficiency logic to a work process and confront what the resulting standardization does to the people inside it.
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Introduction to Sociology
Launch Control
Why good organizations do bad things. Students work through an organizational decision in which no individual does anything obviously wrong and the outcome is a disaster anyway.
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Introduction to Sociology
The Schelling Segregation Model
A runnable agent model in which nobody prefers segregation and every agent only wants not to be badly outnumbered on its own block. Students set the tolerance threshold and watch the neighborhood sort itself anyway.
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Introduction to Sociology
The Whole Pie, Guessed First
Students guess the composition of American incarceration before seeing it, then compare their estimate against the published breakdown and consider what labeling theory predicts about who ends up counted.
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Introduction to Sociology
Where Would You Put It? Drug Laws
Drug laws sort substances into categories, and each category brings a different reaction, from a pharmacy shelf to a prison sentence. Students work through a simplified version of the federal scheduling system and decide where substances belong before seeing where the law puts them.
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Introduction to Sociology
Life Chances
Weber's concept made measurable. Students set the circumstances of a birth, including parents' income, race and ethnicity, and gender, and see what published data on millions of Americans say about that child's odds in education, health, and income.
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Introduction to Sociology
Born Lucky
Nobody chooses where they start. Students live two childhoods side by side, one that starts in the bottom fifth and one in the top fifth, make the same kinds of choices at five stages of each, and see what the starting point did to every outcome.
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Introduction to Sociology
The Pay Gap, Taken Apart
The raw gender pay gap, then what survives when occupation, hours, and experience are held constant, then what is left over. Students take the number apart rather than accepting or dismissing it whole.
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Introduction to Sociology
The Family, Measured
Marriage, divorce, how couples meet, the division of household labor, and the evidence on what family structure does and does not do to child outcomes.
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Introduction to Sociology
The Three Drivers
Births, deaths, and migration, with the published series for each and the forecasts they add up to. Students build a population story from its three components.
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Introduction to Sociology
The Movement
How social change actually happens. Students work through the resources, framing, and political opportunity behind a movement rather than treating change as the result of sentiment.
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Criminology
The Perception Gap
The distance between what Americans believe about crime and what crime data show. Students estimate first, then meet the measurements, then account for the gap.
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Criminology
What Are You Counting?
Every crime number was produced by an institution with a procedure. Students specify exactly what their chosen offense type consists of and find out how much of it any given system counts.
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Criminology
The Dark Figure
Where official crime data come from, how victimization surveys differ, and what neither one can see. The lab builds the funnel from incident to statistic step by step.
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Criminology
Sorting Crime
A typology is a filing system, and filing systems have consequences. Students sort real events into violent, property, and public order categories and discover the cases that break the scheme.
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Criminology
The Harm Gap
Offenses that do not fit the machinery built for street crime: crime in suites, crime as enterprise, and crime that scales. Students compare harm against enforcement attention.
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Criminology
The Pattern Test
Crime is patterned rather than random, and those regularities are the reason criminological theory exists. Students identify the patterns their theories will later have to explain.
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Criminology
Beccaria's Arithmetic
Beccaria argued in 1764 that punishment should work like arithmetic. Students run the calculation under varying certainty, severity, and celerity, and find where the arithmetic stops predicting behavior.
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Criminology
Who Taught You That?
Differential association against the chapter that came before it. If crime requires no teaching, only a failure of restraint, what work is left for a learning theory to do?
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Criminology
Told to Win
Merton's nine-page 1938 argument, tested. American culture prescribes the same goal to everyone and distributes the means unequally. Students trace each adaptation through cases.
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Criminology
Why Didn't You?
Control theory refuses the standard question. Instead of asking why some people offend, it asks why most people do not, and students apply that inversion to their own restraint.
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Criminology
The Mark
Labeling theory and the field's third domain, which is the reaction to crime rather than its causes. Students follow what a criminal label does after it attaches.
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Criminology
Three Things Have to Line Up
Routine activity theory takes the offender as given and asks what else had to be true. Students manipulate offender, target, and guardianship and watch which combinations produce an event.
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Criminology
The Other Half
Victimization, taught with care. The lab presents the patterns and the measurement problems without asking any student to disclose anything about themselves.
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Criminology
What It Costs, What It Buys
Five competing purposes of punishment that do not agree with each other. Students assign sentences, then discover which rationale their own choices actually served.
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Criminology
Fix the Place
Situational crime prevention changes the unit of analysis from the person to the event. Students redesign a setting and confront displacement.
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Criminology
The Pattern Is Not the Reason
A writing lab for the moment a paper stalls, when a student has found a real pattern, reported it accurately, and stopped short of explaining it.
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Criminology
The Askable Question
Narrowing a topic into a question that can actually be answered, and finding peer-reviewed sources that speak to it rather than sources that merely share its vocabulary.
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Criminology
Apply the Theory
Naming a theory is not applying one. The lab walks students from restating what a theory says to putting its mechanism to work on their own case.
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Criminology
The Home Stretch
An end-of-semester synthesis lab that turns four short scaffolded papers into one coherent account of what criminology knows about a single offense type.
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White-Collar Crime
Who Counts
Every count of white-collar crime starts with a definition, and the definitions disagree. Students sort real events under offender-based and offense-based definitions and see the totals move.
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White-Collar Crime
Follow the Harm
There is no national count of white-collar crime. There are a handful of general counting systems plus separate enforcement records at every regulatory agency with a statute. Students try to assemble a total and find out why nobody has.
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White-Collar Crime
Sutherland's Count
Sutherland counted 980 decisions against 70 corporations in 1949. Students repeat the count for eleven of today's largest companies in Violation Tracker, guess the numbers first, and then work out what a record count does and does not measure.
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White-Collar Crime
The Fraud Triangle
Cressey interviewed 133 people imprisoned for violating financial trust and asked what had to be true for each of them. Students test the resulting triangle against cases it was not built from.
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White-Collar Crime
The Sanction Threat
A replication of the Paternoster and Simpson scenario study, in which managers weigh formal sanctions, informal sanctions, and moral inhibition. Students answer first and compare against the published results.
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White-Collar Crime
Strain on the Record
Eight real cases, from WorldCom to a Houston embezzler with gambling debts, sorted by the strain the court record shows and by whether the offender was falling, holding steady, or rising, as a test of Wheeler's fear-of-falling idea.
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White-Collar Crime
Denying the Guilty Mind
Benson found that convicted white-collar offenders rarely denied the acts. They denied the criminality. Students classify real accounts and locate the line between explanation and excuse.
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White-Collar Crime
Diffusion of Fraud
A real oil and gas investment fraud that began as a legitimate business, reconstructed from the record, so students can watch the point at which the enterprise crossed over.
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White-Collar Crime
The Ponzi Machine
A runnable model of a scheme financed by the people who have not yet found out. Students set the promised return and inflow rate and watch the arithmetic of collapse.
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White-Collar Crime
Fraud, Abuse, or Neither
Seven real health care cases, from a $10.6 billion catheter scheme to a hospital system's physician pay, sorted on Tennyson's planned or opportunistic and hard or soft cuts, with the law the government actually used.
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White-Collar Crime
The Price of a Death
Workplace fatality investigations and the penalties that follow them. Students work with the enforcement record and compare the sanction against the harm.
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White-Collar Crime
ECHO
A guided exercise in the Environmental Protection Agency's public compliance database, in which students look up real facilities, read what inspectors found, and see what was done about it.
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White-Collar Crime
The Paycheck: National
Wage theft as a property crime, worked through a pay stub. Students calculate what was taken, identify the mechanism, and compare it against the enforcement route available to the worker.
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White-Collar Crime
The Paycheck: Texas
The Texas version of The Paycheck. Students audit eight pay records against the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Texas Payday Law, compute what each worker is owed, and look at enforcement in a state with no minimum wage or overtime law of its own.
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White-Collar Crime
Swap or Bet
A contract that pays if a team wins is a swap under the Commodity Exchange Act and a bet under the Texas Penal Code. Students classify real products and defend the line they drew.
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White-Collar Crime
The Deal
Most corporate crime in the United States is resolved by agreement rather than by trial. Students read real deferred and non-prosecution agreements and weigh what each side obtained.
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Research Methods
Your First Chart in R
Students make a chart from real survey data in RStudio, change it, and then make a chart of their own. The lab is written for students who have never written code, and every step says what to click and what they should see.
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Research Methods
Look at the Data
Students open the General Social Survey, find out what it contains and what is missing from it, and fill in and run the code themselves for the first time.
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Research Methods
Ethics Casework
Students register for CITI research ethics training, then apply a five-item ethics checklist to three famous studies: the Tuskegee syphilis study, Tearoom Trade, and Milgram's obedience experiments.
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Research Methods
Grouping Categories
Combining the categories of a variable is a measurement decision, and it can change the answer. Students group the same party identification answers two ways, group religion their own way, and read four GSS questions closely.
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Research Methods
Sampling Variation
Students treat the 21,483 GSS respondents as a population, draw random samples from it, and watch the answer move from sample to sample. Then they see what happens when the sampling list leaves people out.
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Research Methods
Testing a Rival Explanation
Older people in the GSS report watching more TV. Students find the pattern and then test whether work or marriage explains it better than age does.
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Research Methods
Survey Questions Written by an AI Tool
A free AI tool drafts ten survey questions on the concept in each student's research question. Students find the problems in each question and repair the three worst.
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Research Methods
Build and Launch Your Survey
Students build a ten-question survey in Google Forms and send it to their first respondents. Three questions are shared across the class so that one R script can read everyone's data.
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Research Methods
Chart Your Own Survey
Students load their own survey responses into R, chart a shared question and one of their own, and count how many respondents fall into each group.
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Research Methods
From Talk to Text
Students transcribe ten minutes of their own interview and see how each choice about what to keep shapes what the analysis can find later.
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Research Methods
Coding Your Interview
Students code their transcript in Taguette with a class codebook, check their coding against a partner's on a practice transcript, and write a memo and a model of how their codes connect.
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Research Methods
Structured Observation
Nobody can see community directly. Students plan a 30-minute observation in a public place, decide in advance which actions will count as evidence, and then write up what they found.
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Research Methods
Your Personal Network
Students answer two name generators, describe the people they name, and say who knows whom. The lab shows how much a single survey question shapes the network a study finds.
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Research Methods
Chart Your Personal Network
Students load their Lab 13 network into R, measure how connected it is, and draw it twice, once plain and once colored by the question that named each person.
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Research Methods
Count the Words
After coding ten court texts by hand, students have the computer count every word in a twenty-text corpus, chart the most frequent words, and use a short word list as a second coder.
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