1. Explain what it means to use the sociological imagination and use at least one example to make your point. • Wright Mills explains it as a vivid awareness of the relationship between your personal experience and the bigger society. so the way i would put it into my own words is knowing that the reason you do something isn’t the reason why another person does it. An example of this is going for a run. People can go on a run for many different reasons like to lose weight, to tone their body, for run, to be healthy and ect. 2. How would a conflict theorist explain the educational system in the United States? How would this differ from how a functionalist might see it? • A social conflict theorist might explain our educational system in the U.S. as competitive like we are all competing against each other to get the best paying job. This is different from the functionalist because they would see it as all of us working together to achieve a goal. 3. Discuss the main ideas of symbolic interactionism. • Society is the product of everyday interactions of the self. • Its micro-level • Its an ongoing process • People interact in many ways using this. 4. What is the difference between correlation and causation? Which is harder to prove and why? Use an example to explain your answer. • Correlation is usually when two things tend to happen together at the same time and causation is something happens because of something else. I think it is harder to prove causation because
There are several differences between correlation and causation. Correlation is if an event happens and is not related to another event and it is a coincidence. This would be if an event happened but it was not connected to another. An example of this would be catching a foul ball at a baseball game. It would be a correlation because you just happened to be in that place where the ball was hit and were able to catch it. Causation on the other hand is a cause and effect. One thing happens because another thing previously happened. An example of this would be if a person drank caffeine late at night, then they would be up all night. Another example of this would be if someone slipped on ice coming out of class.
Structural functionalism is a macro analysis view defined as “The way each part of society functions together to contribute to the whole.” In education, it focuses on how it serves the needs of society. Functionalists view education as a way to pass on knowledge and skills. While functionalists believe that schools sort students based upon their academic knowledge, Conflict theorists believe that students are sorted based on their social/financial class. Conflict theory is “The way inequalities contribute to social differences and perpetual differences in power.” Conflict theorists believe that students of lower status won’t have the same opportunities in school as students of a higher class. A student of a family with a
What is sociological imagination? According to C. Wright Mills sociological imagination is the ability to see how individual experiences are connected to the larger society. Sociological perspective enables one to grasp connection to history and biography. History is the background and biography is the individual’s specific experiences. C.Wright Mills came up with the idea that in order for one to understand their personal lives the need to look beyond personal experiences and look at larger political, social, and economic issues of others. “It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate
Conflict Theory sees social life as a competition, and focuses on the distribution of resources, power and inequality. Unlike functionalist theory, conflict theory is better at explaining social change and weaker at explaining social stability. Conflict theory has been critiqued for its inability to explain social stability and incremental change. For example, a conflict theorist might ask, "Who benefits from the current higher educational system in the U.S.?” The response is for a conflict theorist accustomed to imbalanced amounts of wealth, is the wealthy. After all, higher education in the U.S. is not cheap. The education system frequently siphons through poorer individuals, not because they cannot contend academically, but rather that they cannot afford to their education, monetarily. For this reason the poor are unable to achieve higher education, they are generally also unable to gain higher paying jobs, and, therefore, they remain poor. This tehn becomes a vicious cycle of poverty.
Sociological imagination as defined by C. Wright Mills is the ability to view how a society 's "unique historical circumstances" influence the people and
Comparing and Contrasting How the Three Sociological Theories View the World Steven Spears Southern New Hampshire University Abstract In the world of sociology, there are three views, the conflict, functionalist, and interactionist. Each theory can be used to view the world and its social structure. Though they can be considered independent, it behooves us to examine, additionally, the combining of these views to better elaborate on the social constructs we are witness to.
The sociological imagination is an idea or a way of thinking that interlocks an individual in a society with the society as a whole. Most people refer to sociology as the study of how people or individuals interact with each other. In order to fully understand sociology and the concept of the sociological imagination as proposed by C. Wright Mills, one has to be able to envision the individual and the society working together to better understand the role each plays in the social order. C. Wright Mills states that "Sociology must make a connection between the individual and the social. It must allow the individual to see the larger context in which his or her life is lived, and in
In this essay I’ll be talking about Sociological Imagination and the concepts following it and more especially the importance of it. Sociological Imagination is one of the core concepts of Sociology whereas Sociology is all about studying people within the society and what they do. Sociological imagination is all about using one’s mind to see how people are affected by tangible and intangible things around them. Sociological imagination is affected by social forces which are forces that influence people to act in a certain way that is different from before.
It is the ability to note or see the strange in familiar activities of everyday life and to connect personal troubles to public issues, which makes biography of many people. Example A family which smoking is a familiar thing to them but some individual in the family realise that smoking is not the healthy not only realising that smoking affects the family but it also affects the community or society (public issue).
The concept of the sociological imagination means that there are bigger factors that go into things that happen to you. Those factors can include be just one large event that has happened in society, or many events having an effect together. The events may not even be happening in the same time in history; they may be a month or multiple months apart, but can still influence you. The sociological imagination is very different from how people usually think about things because it is easier to just think that they personally did something to allow for something to happen to them, whether it be for good or for bad.
Correlation is an action or occurrence that can be linked to another. They are associated. Causation is an action or occurrence that can cause another. An example of correlation could be that the colder weather brought the warmer jacket sales up. This is correlation because the coat sales are not directly caused by the weather. An example of causation could be if you stand in the rain you will get wet. Therefore, one event caused another. I read that causation is harder to prove because there are many statistical factors you can use to find correlations between actions. But after finding examples of the two it almost seems that causation is the easier to see. The correlation example I used about the coats seems harder to prove than standing in the rain and getting wet. The jackets could be on sale and that’s why
The sociological imagination is the point at which an individual perspectives his general public as the potential reason for his day-by-day triumphs and disappointments. People regularly tend to see their own issues as social issues and attempt to interface their individual encounters with the workings of society. The sociological creative ability tries to think of foundations for certain social patterns and gives a structure to fathoming the social world.
Having attended public schools throughout my childhood and adolescence, I never was familiar with the term functionalism and its many elements. After observing and analyzing my field placement classroom I have come to understand the concept of functionalism to some extent. In general, functionalists “see schools as serving to socialize students to adapt to the economic, political, and social institutions of that society” (Feinberg, p.6, 2004). They also theorize that in order for societies to survive, they must carry out vital functions such as, attaining fundamental knowledge and acquiring essential skills and proficiency, acknowledging certain norms and values within their community, and recognizing authority figures. It is also
When C. Write Mills talks about the sociological imagination, he is saying that it is the capacity to understand that individual life is complexly intertwined with events and issues present in the world. Sociological imagination can range from subjects as simple and everyday as hygiene, to something more serious such as racism. In terms of hygiene, there has been a rise in amounts of desire for state of the art hand sanitizers in schools, resulting from the Swine Flu epidemic of 2009. Similarly, there has been a surge in racism against people of Islamic and Muslim faiths stemming from the tragedy of 9/11 and other terrorist attacks by Middle Eastern Terrorist groups. The sociological imagination lets us recognize that we act in these ways because of societal beliefs, events and concerns.
Correlation is the statistical measure to indicate the relationship between some events. Coincidence is that some events occur by accident, but there is some connection between events. Correlation is more than coincidence because it carries with it the weight of statistics. When a correlation between a cause and effect or between the likelihood of one event leading to another is established, it means that statistics have been gathered on the problem for years over the course of hundreds (if