Resocialization in Jonestown

For Research Assignment 2, you will have two options to choose from to complete. Choice 1 involves watching an excellent documentary film on the People’s Temple, a religious cult that existed from 1954 – 1978. The focus of this assignment will be on resocialization and social control, which are discussed in Chapters 4 and 6. Choice 2 involves watching a series of videos documenting research associated with social group behavior, which is a focus of Chapter 5. Once you’ve viewed the video(s) associated with your choice, you’ll then be asked to write a 3-page paper relating the videos to class content, as outlined below.

CHOICE 1: RESOCIALIZATION

For Choice 1, you are asked to watch the film, “Jonestown: Life and Death of People’s Temple.” This video is available on the Kanopy streaming service, free through the LCC Library. Here is the link to the video.

https://lcc.kanopy.com/video/jonestown

Once in the Kanopy video system, you may have to log in with your LCC TUID and password.

This is a documentary film about a U.S. religious cult that existed from the 1950’s until the late-1970’s. The content in this film reflects much of the material covered in Chapters 1 – 6, as well as some later chapters.

Warning: Please be warned that discussion and scenes of violence, discussion of suicide and homicide, as well as discussion of sexual assault and manipulation are contained in this documentary. If any of these topics are an issue for you, please consider completing Choice 2, outlined below.

Once you’ve watched the entire film, write a paper which has both introductory and concluding paragraphs as well as 4 additional paragraphs discussing the points below:

Explain how the experience of the people involved in the People’s Temple demonstrated resocialization. Be sure to include concepts associated with resocialization and examples from the film demonstrating these concepts.
Discuss why the members of this group joined the People’s Temple in the first place and them examine why people remained members of this group over the years. In this discussion, be sure to include a discussion of the methods of social control used by Jim Jones both before moving the group to Guyana and after the group was in Guyana (this helps to explain why people stayed with this group for so long).
Discuss what happened to the members of this group in the end. Thinking like a sociologists, explain why you think this happened (hint: consider the discussion of social group behavior in Chapter 5 when thinking about this question).
Pick 3 concepts from your textbook (other than socialization, resocialization and social control) that relate to the content of the video and write a paragraph discussing how each of these concepts connects to the video. Please bold and underline the concepts from the text you are discussing in this paragraph.
Once you’ve completed your paper, submit it in this assignment folder.

Your completed paper should be roughly 3-pages in length, typed and double-spaced, using a 12-point font.