Introduction As I sketched my sociological portrait, I found myself looking at the multiple statuses I hold in society and how each came about. I am not only a father to a young adult, but a son, a brother, a friend to many, a neighbor, a student once again and a blue-collar worker. Each of these statuses developed during various times in my life and required me to take on, at times, numerous roles. These statuses have defined who I have become and the impacts I have on society. My sociological portrait will be based on the social institution of family. My family has been the most influential in molding who I have become. Identity and Social Institution My parents came from working-class families that where the “traditional family.” Both of …show more content…
These reference groups helped shape us by providing us the means of how to behave in group settings in the proper way, communication among people from all social classes, and gave us the ability to identify other social norms. My friends and their families taught me soft skills that I had not been exposed to within my family. “Soft skills are the character traits and difficult to teach interpersonal skills that characterize a person’s relations with other people. Soft skills have more to do with who we are than what we know. As such, soft skills encompass the character traits that decide how well one interacts with others, and are usually a definite part of one 's personality (www.investopedia.com).” “Soft skills are things like knowing how to dress, act and present oneself or the ability to work well with other people”. (Manza Pg. 417) In part, I learned proper table etiquette and dressing appropriately for different situations from some of my friends and their families. The benefits of these soft skills became invaluable later and into adulthood by helping me in the real world. I learned what to say and when to say it in conversational circumstances, a skill that I might have been otherwise unprepared for had I not been given this guidance when I was young. This allowed me to carry on conversations and interact with people of greater importance than myself later in
Throughout time, family dynamics continually adapt to fit an always changing society. Using the sociological imagination, I can analyze my family’s history to understand the shift between Puritan farming life to the Industrial Era to the modern-day family I live in now.
Throughout SOCIO 211, Professor Sanderson has repeatedly stated that the things we do every day are not natural. Instead these things are constructed by society. He has repeatedly reminded us that we don’t “see” sociology or culture and that we need to “teach ourselves how to see again.” This has been the main take home point of this class for me. I’ve never realized how much I am shaped by my friends, family, teachers, and others around me. That being said, three sociological concepts have improved my understanding of my relationship with society: socialization, gender, and family. These three concepts have been the most important to me because they all are concepts I’ve related to my everyday life, that I am influenced by, and have been molded into. These concepts have made me realize that I cannot necessarily be whoever I want to be or do whatever I want to do. Because of these three main points, I understand my roles and expectations better in life. I have noticed that I act the way I do because I have been socially constructed to do so through socialization, expectations of gender and gender roles, and by how my family has influenced my view of society.
In today’s society, it is easy to spot someone blaming themselves for the occurrence of their personal life problems. For example, a single-mother may blame herself for not being able to support her children well due to a shortage of money and unavailability to find a decent job. Another could be a newly wed couple having daily arguments that may lead to their divorce, or women who are facing difficulties perceiving their housekeeping responsibilities and wanting to become something more than just a homemaker. These various private tensions may seem very personal. These dilemmas are all related to a bigger world called society and this is known as the sociological imagination. Sociological imagination suggests that people look at their own personal troubles as social issues and, in general try to connect their own individual encounters with the workings of society. The personal problems are closely related to societal issues such as unemployment, marriage, war and even the city life where the private troubles and the public issues become clearly apparent. With the understanding of the sociological imagination, I began to notice the daily choices I make, the classes I attend, the way I was raised by my parents, the group of people I choose to hang out with, the things I like to converse about with others are all somehow affected by public issues and what society tends to make us believe is right. There are many areas in my life where I feel that I am greatly affected by various sociological theories such as events dealing with gender and sexuality, family and culture, ethnicity and race, and social class and work.
"A family is a small social group of people related by ancestry or affection, who share common values and goals, who may live together in the same dwelling, and who may participate in the bearing and raising of children. They have a physical or emotional connection with each other that is ongoing" (Vissing, 2011) and is the foundation of all societies. They can be formed by a grouping of father-mother-children or even more complicated combination of relatives. In the primary stage of family life in the United States, everyone from every generation lived together in one house. Subsequently, the idea of traditional family evolved and a married couple with children is at present, often called the traditional family. There are many types of families; however, this paper will focus on the traditional family. It will describe how the functionalist perspective, conflict perspective, and the interactionism theory apply to the sociological institution known as a family. It will explain some of the similarities and differences between the sociological theories in regards to families and how they affect the family members.
...rfect and not always in a nuclear family structure. Danny was able to realize that every woman he decides to date will have a few flaws, but he must see past it so he can add a mother figure to his family. C. Wright Mills perceived the world with “the way of thinking” in a sociological perspective. He believes that the factors which we face throughout our life are what shape us. Our biography, social structure and history interconnect with our life and shape our life and views on the world. This theory proves that many households may be different, but everyone is still cared for and loved in the same way. Media has become a large part of today’s generations, with it showing different shows with different cultures, family structures, social classes, sexual orientation, and race, all of which are concepts of the sociological imagination and has helped formed everyone.
This is the foundation of the Sociological Imagination Concept. According to C. Wright Mills, sociological imagination is developed when we can place personal problems in a social situation or environment such that they are no longer viewed solely as individual or personal problems, but instead as social problems. That is problems that are shared by enough peop...
After reading different articles and learning more about African American culture, it made me want to find out more about my own family culture. There are different traditions that are pasted down in generations, which could have been a part of African culture that we don’t realize such as parenting styles. I don’t remember hearing too many stories about my past relatives growing up, so I had to find out more on my family experiences in the south. Also, I wanted to see how spirituality played a roll in my family choices. My goal in this paper is to show how I got a better understanding of the reason my family could be structured the way it is now.
Newman, David. 2010. “Seeing and Thinking Sociologically.” Sociology: Exploring the architecture of everyday life: 8th edition, edited by D.Newman. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, Sage Publications Company.
Everyone in the world belongs to a subculture. Each subculture has its own sets of traditions, relics, and artifacts. Relics and artifacts are symbolic, material possessions important to one's subculture. Relics are from the past; artifacts are from the present. These traditions, relics, and artifacts help shape the personalities of individuals and how they relate with others. Individuals know about these items through storytelling in the subculture. Families are good examples of subcultures. My family, a middle-class suburban Detroit family of Eastern European heritage, has helped shape who I am through story telling about traditions, artifacts, and relics.
Week two covered the two levels of analysis typically used in sociology; macrosociology which explores the social structures of society and microsociology which investigates social interactions and how people behave towards each other (Henslin, Possamai & Possamai-Inesedy 2011). It was through this week’s reading that my thoughts about how society affects individuals was challenged as I became aware of the impact social structures such as culture, roles and social institutions have on identity. The concept of roles and status from a sociological view took my interest and I began thinking how my own identity has been shaped by the many statuses I hold and the subsequent roles I pl...
In 1951, C. Wright Mills wrote a book called The Sociological Imagination. His objective was an attempt to try and link how individuals affect society as a whole. By doing so, he not only challenged, but also examined many basic concepts. In the beginning of the book, Mills aggressively attacks certain parts of sociology and follows on with how he as an individual views sociology, which he believes is a necessity in terms of politics and history (Giddens: 1991).
While growing up we rarely think about why we do things the way that we do, and make the decisions that we make. From infancy we are socialized, meaning that we are trained how to exist within our social environment. By developing a sociological perspective we are able to see that we are socialized, and view how our social environment has an effect on the decisions that we make. Social environments differ across many boundaries including, but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, and class. For example I was raised within a poor, Caucasian, single parent, low class family, which means that the deci...
The most accurate cultural statement that can be made about my family is that we have no culture. For as long as I can remember, we have never done anything the same way twice. Every time we try to make a tradition out of something, we do not have the enthusiasm to do it more than once, and oftentimes my parents are too busy to put the time into developing a family culture. My parents’ families were both like this in some respects as well. In both cases, their parents were too busy working to establish longstanding traditions. This has created in all of us the quality of being disjointed from any kind of nostalgic family heritage. We are ambitious, and we seek progress and change. These qualities often cause us to roll our eyes at those
My family if we go as far back as ancestry, we can date the Stewart’s back to Scotland and my grandmother her family originates from Sweden. I tend to think most of my family originated in the United states though, our ancestry dates far back to being in America is believe around the seventeen hundreds. Since my family has had most of their roots in America for so long the best way to describe my ethno culture in my opinion is to say it is in line with modern day Americans. I interviewed my grand parents, I chose them because they have lived a longer life than say my parents and have built more of a culture. They also have the knowledge bank and intelligence to address deep questions.
Sociologists look at society from either a macro or micro view and the theories that define their work are based on those perspectives. There are several family theories that we learned about this semester. Briefly, Structural-Functionalism and Conflict Theory are “macro” theories in sociology. Structural-Functionalism sees society as a living machine made up of different parts which work together for the good of society. Individuals, as well as Institutions work together, and the family is the key to the well-functioning machine. Emile Durkheim, considered the Father of Sociology argues social solidarity, where people do the right thing, create harmony and have shared values. According to Durkheim the nuclear family is the only type of institution that can achieve that. Conflict Theory sees society as a pyramid with those at the top having more power and influence than those at the bottom. Males in society have more power than females. There is a power imbalance, which could lead to oppression o...