Sociology-102

• objective component involves empirical evidence if the negative consequences of a social condition or behavior.
• Subjective component involves the perception that the condition or behavior is indeed a problem that needs to be addressed.
• Natural history of a social problem consist of four stages: emergence and claims making, legitimacy, renewed claims making, and alternative strategies.
• Functionalism emphasizes the importance of social institutions for social stability and implies that far reaching social will be socially harmful.
• Social institutions are the established patterns of beliefs, behaviors, and relationships that organized social life.
• Conflict theory emphasizes social inequality and suggest that far-reaching social change is needed to achieve a just society.
• Symbolic interactionism emphasizes the social meaning and understanding that individuals derive from their social interaction.
• A objective component is this: For any condition or behavior to be social problem, it must have a negative consequences for large numbers of people.
• According to some sociologist who adopt this view, negative conditions and behaviors are not a social problem unless they are recognized as such by policymakers, a large number of lay citizens, or other segments of our society. They would say rape and sexual assault before the 1970s were not a social problem.
• Other sociologist say that negative conditions and behaviors should be considered a social problem even if they receive little or no attention; these sociologists would say that rape and sexual assault before the 1970s were a social problem.
• Social constructionist view: perception matters at least as much as reality, and sometimes more so.
• Social entity such as social change group, the news media, or influential politician.
• stage one is emergence and claims making.
• Stage two is legitimacy
• Stage three is renewed claims making.
• Stage four development of alternative strategies.
• Stage one- A social problem emerges when a social entity begins to call attention to a condition or behavior that it perceives to be undesirable and a need of remedy. As part of the process, it tries to influence public perceptions of the problem, the reasons for it, and possible solutions to it.
• A social problem emerges when a social change group successfully calls attention to a condition or larger social movement.
• Stage two- once a social group succeeds in turning a condition or behavior into a social problem, it usually tries to persuade the government (locate , state, and/or federal). stage one helps to make their claim more legitimate.
• Stage three- Even government action does occur, social change groups often conclude that the action is too limited in goals or scope to be able to successfully address the social problem. If they reach this conclusion, they often decide to press their demands anew. By reasserting their claims and by criticizing the official response they have received from the government.
• Stage four- social change groups often conclude that the government and established interest are not responding adequately to their claim.
• Personal troubles refer to a problem affecting individuals and the affected individual, as well other members of society, typically blames on the individuals own personal and more findings.
• Sociological imagination refer to the ability to appreciate the structural basis for individual problems.
• Sociological imagination example- homeless may be blamed on the individuals who are living on the streets.
• If instead we blame the system, we would focus our attention on the various social conditions.
• Theoretical perspective- three theoretical perspective guide sociological thinking on social problems: functionalism theory, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism theory.
• Functionalism- emphasizes the importance of social institutions such as the family, religion, and education for producing a stable society.
• Functionalism even suggest that social problems must be functional in some ways for society, because otherwise these problems would not continue.
• Functionalism example- crime is a major social problem, but it is also good for the economy because it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs in law enforcement, courts and corrections, home security, and others.
• Socialization helps us learn society rules and the need to cooperate, as people end up generally agreeing in important norms and values.
• Social integration, or our ties to other people and to social institutions such as religions and the family, helps socialize us and integrate us into society and reinforce our respect for its rules.
• Conflict theory- emphasizes that different groups in society have different interesting stemming from their different social positions.
• Conflict theory assumes that fundamental social change is needed to be addressed society's many social problems.
• Symbolic interactionism- focuses on the interaction of individuals and on how they interpret their interaction.
• In doing so, they rely heavily on symbols such as words and gestures to reach a shared understanding of their interaction. (Symbolic interactionism)
• As term symbolic interactionism implies, their understanding of this encounter arises from what they do when they interact and from their use and interpretation of the various symbolic included in their interaction.
• Social problems are, first of all, persistent. It is easy for students to come away from social problems courses with a rather pessimistic, "doom/gloom".
• United states ranks below most of its democratic peers on many social indicators, such as poverty, health, and so on. A major reason for this different is that other democratic governments are far more proactive, in terms of attention and spending, than the US federal and state governments in helping their citizens.
• The survey is the most common method by which sociologists gather their data.
• The beauty of a random sample is that it allows us to generalize the results of the sample to the population from which the sample comes.