Interview With My Dad: An Analysis Of His Life With My Father

Renowned sociologist Emile Durkheim was once quoted as saying, “A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.” Society and its aspects play a role in developing the individual. I decided to perform an interview with my dad to analyze his life through the lens of sociology. After performing an interview (one of the sociological methods of inquiry) with my father, I was able to see contributions of structure, culture, and agency in his life. My dad is forty-nine years old years old and works at Stantec (an engineering firm based out of Canada with a branch in Lexington) as a human resources manager. In my interview, I decided to really focus on the topics of work, family, social class, and education to look for explanations of the factors that influenced his social mobility.

To provide some further background info, my family is in the upper-middle socioeconomic class, my dad graduated with an MBA from the University of Kentucky, and he is married to my mother; who is a pharmacist at Baptist Health Hospital in Lexington. The three main topic areas I hit on in my interview with my dad were social class/family, education, and work. Branching off of these three topic areas, I really keyed in on the relationship between my grandfather and father. Some of the ice-breaking questions I asked that enable me to discover the grand effect of my grandfather’s social mobility on my father were: 1. “What kind of careers did your parents and other family members have during your life?” 2. In your own experience, do you believe that your race/ethnicity or your social class has impacted certain aspects of your employment? 3. “Have you ever believed that your social class has impacted your educational