Week 1: Thinking about social problems

1. What is a social problem?

a. Objective elements
i. An actual social condition: financial crises /insecurities, homelessness,
joblessness, (can affect large amount of people in wave/patterns)
ii. We become aware of the social problem through personal experience
(Illness, disease, death), media, and education
b. Subjective elements
i. Beliefs: social condition:crime, drug addiction, poverty, racism,
violence, pollution etc. /often not considered a social problem believe
that these conditions diminish quality of life
2. Concepts
a. Variability in definitions; different values, different beliefs, different life
experiences
i. This is what causes people to have different beliefs about what social
problems are important or actually considered social problems
ii. Vary across societies and historical periods
iii. Ex. Prior to the 19th century a husband can discipline his wife - now,
hitting a woman is against the law
3. Social structure
a. Serve a specific function, “rather than buying indviduals acts of desperation
(likewise, employement rates, morbidity (presence of more than on disease),
mortality, population growth/ population decline rates)
4. Elements of social structure
a. Institutions (largest elements of social structure, established and enduring
organization of social relationships made up of social groups, statuses and
roles )
b. Social groups (defined as two or more people who have a common identity/
interact, and form a social relationship ex. Family/ each social group
consisted of statuses)
c. Statues are positions people occupy within the social group/ largely defining
the social identity of group members/ every status is associated with many
roles
i. Social group consists of many different statuses (people occupy
numerous statuses simultaneously/ the ones we occupy drive our
behaviour and make up our identity)
1. Master status: the one considered as being the most important
in a person's identity (gender, race, occupation etc.)
2. Ascribed status: assigned by society, we have no control over
this. Ex. A child or teenager, adult, race, sex (pre-determined)
3. Achieved status: assigned on the basis of characteristics and
behaviour (these status we can exercise some control) ex.
Being a university graduate, best selling author, there is a level
of control)
5. Elements of culture;
a. Culture: the means and ways of life that characterize a society, in contrast to
social structure which organizes society
 b. Beliefs: of an individual or a group influences whether a particular social
condition is viewed as a social problem/ it also influences how a social
condition is interpreted, and the existence of a social condition/ generally
speaking, criminologists and sociologists do not believe anything as true but
to be sources of information (how social relations operate/ influence on
directions taken on social actors)
c. Values: social agreement, could be good or bad, could be right or wrong,
desirable or undesirable/ they also can be central to the development of
social problems / things can lead to a social problem / consider social
conditions to be social values when conditions contradict or are in-compatible
with closely held values/ absent or weak values may also contribute to social
problems
d. Norms and sanctions: socially defined rules of behaviour (guidelines for
personal behaviour, as expectations of others behaviours, essentially three
types of norms:
i. folkways (customs and manners, cultural traditions),
ii. laws( formalized norms, backed by an authority, need pre-scribed
notions)
iii. Mores (they have a moral basis, a fundamental moral views of a
group) ex. Child sexual abuse violates are mores/ goes against
natural law
e. Roles: rights, obligations, and expectations associated with a status (they
guide behaviour/ enable predictions of other peoples behaviours)
6. Types and examples of sanctions
a. Social consequences for conforming to or violating norms
i. Conforming: often people are rewarded for conforming to society’s
norms (smile, money, public ceremony, etc.) Postive sanctions: could
be informal (smile) formal (public ceremony)
ii. Negative sanctions: informal, being shunned by the group formal: a
loss of autonomy, jail or prison
iii. Symbols: without them we would not be able to communicate with
others or live as social beings; verbal, non-verbal, written and not
written (anything that conveys meaning; includes language, gestures,
objects, meaning that is commonly understood by members of a
society/ same symbol can carry multiple meanings depending on
context/ little changes can vary
7. Five traditional institutions :established or enduring relationship: family, politics,
economics, education, and religion
8. Important newer institutions: science and technology, medicine, mass media, military
and sport
a. These social institutions play an important role in today society
b. Many arise from inadequacies in institutions and conflicts in institutions
c. Unemployment is influenced by educational institutions/ inability to keep up tin
demands and instability in economic institutions
9. The sociological imagination
10. Theoretical perspectives
a. A set of interrelated propositions or principles designed to explain an
observable phenomenon (provides a perspective/ a theory attempts to explain
 a phenomenon within society)- theories attempt to make sense of a social
problem within society
b. Theoretical perspectives:
i. structural functualism (considered to be a primary
historicalperspective, need to know where you came from to know
where you are going, assess social structures and how they
function/disfunction) ,
ii. conflict theory( examines power indifference while being an access to
resources ), symbolic interaction is (ask and explore about how people
agree upon meanings and the significant of events, how meanings fit
into sensibilities and strategies of a society),
iii. feminist theory (attemptto demonstrate the marginalization fo
womenmore generally by social structures and by syboliq
representations, and the distribution of resources/ attempts to point
out failures of sociological and criminological thinking to address
problems faced by women” the focus is on the subordinate focus of
women as a social problem” / assess social structures and how they
function/disfunction
1. Who benefits????- think Sutherland
2. Karl Marx (1818-1883)
a. Marx believes that industrialization led to two types of
people; those who were getting exploited and those
who were exploiting (power balance, those who have
get, those who dont get are exploited)
b. Bourgeoisie (the people in power who reek the
benefits, control institions, control the workers, the
suffering and exploitation, and or are fired)
c. Proletariat (workers who earn wages/ may earn
subsidized wages), often cannot access resour