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Abagail Geving

Sociology

E-portfolio

Semester of fall 2016

Sociology Portfolio

Sociology is one of the social sciences which applies scientific methods to study human society.

The study of sociology expands knowledge of how culture, religion, and societal norms play into our everyday lives. 

Dear Society

Dear Society,

          You are incredibly judgmental towards the humans that have to live with you. From the very start of a human’s life you are controlling. Babies must be perfectly healthy to be considered a good baby, illness from birth is only an inconvenience to you. Growing up girls must like Barbie, flowers,

nail polish, dress up and pink everything, while boys must like trucks, football, getting dirty and working on cars. If any girl or boy likes the other side of things they are considered “confused” or “likely to be gay” and it is absolutely ridiculous and appalling. Going forward into the teenage years, girls are bombarded with rules and safety precautions. In school they must be completely covered with minimal skin exposed in an attempt to not distract the boys. You sexualize almost every part of the female body. Crop tops showing stomachs are disgraceful, while comfortable leggings make boys stare so obviously they are banned as well. Inequality  is at its finest with the term“Boys will be boys” right? It is okay for a guy to cat call girls because its “funny” but if a woman does it, it is trashy. If a guy sleeps with countless girls he is referred to as a player, or one of the popular guys. If a girl sleeps with countless guys she is dirty, slutty, and a whore. A teenage girl is expected to drink responsibly and always carry pepper spray at a party to keep from being sexually assaulted. If she does drink too much and becomes unconscious, that is her fault, she is basically asking to be raped, right? No, society, you are disgraceful, and demeaning, it will never be the victims fault. Judge rules in favor of rapist too often. When a guy is sexually assaulted he must keep quiet because why wouldn’t he want to have sex at any given time? He is obviously a pussy if he says no. Wrong, guys and girls can say no whenever they want. Moving on to adulthood, females must cover up if you are breast feeding because apparently according to you, that is incredibly sexual and completely wrong. Although Victoria Secret ads showing girls in only a bra and underwear are okay. Breasts were meant for feeding, not sexual items for a male’s enjoyment. The sexism doesn’t stop there, women are paid a lot less than men and defiantly not given any more opportunities than men. Rich white men run our country and try to give rules for what a woman can and cannot do with her body. It is sickening that people actually think it is okay to create laws depicting what someone does with their own body. At old age, men turn in to couch potatoes and women turn into cooks.

            Another point includes the fact that you blame black teenagers and adults for the “violence” in our country and in “their’ neighborhoods. Do you not realize that more black people are born into poverty because of the history of our country? Poverty causes violence not skin color. It is sick that a “successful” black person becomes a basketball or football player, but successful white person becomes a doctor or lawyer.

Sincerely,

Abagail Geving

Week One Sociology

Sociology Week One

This first week in sociology has brought up broad sociological terms, such as perspective. We have also been talking about global issues as well as personal issues. The butterfly effect also came up in discussion in a smaller proportion. The Allegory of the Cave displayed the wide variety of viewpoints our classroom holds, concluding in the tying together of sociological perspective and global issues.
The structural-functional approach deals with how a society goes about their life including the rules, traditions, and expectations given. Education systems, government, religious programs and family structure is dependent on how society normalizes certain traditions. The social-conflict approach deals with how people interact in society and problems that arise due to different points of view and ways of thinking. For example, race, religion, gender or social class tend to cause tension within a society. Another example of social conflict is education systems tailored to the higher class, with the best schools and colleges being extremely expensive.

The symbolic-interaction approach is both individual interactions and society as a whole interaction. This approach is about how people chose for themselves the interactions they will face with other people and or how society affects their thinking.
The Allegory of the Cave story consisted of multiple prisoners kept in darkness and only shown what a couple people presented. One day one of the prisoners was allowed to walk out of the cave to see the world, and discover that everything he had thought about the world was wrong. Upon return to the cave to tell of his discoveries he was killed. This one prisoner’s perspective on the world was only what was given to him, relating to our society and government shaping the minds of its people to support what they want best. When the prisoner was released his entire perspective changed, this happens in our world

when people choose to go to school, to educate themselves and become independent minds. When this now changed man returned to the cave to tell of his new found perspective, the prisoners were then frightened by the unknown and killed the man. In our society change is a huge, scary thing for most people so we tend to go about our lives being bossed around by whatever government we have instead of speaking out.

Week Two Sociology

Week 2:

Sociology originated in the 18th to 19th century in Europe because of the industrial economy, growth of cities and new political ideas began to weaken our economy. Example: Charles dickens. The United States defiantly has problems but when using the global perspective those problems seem incredibly small when compared to other countries stricken by disease and poverty. The United States facing issues such as gun control and police brutality which other countries face as well but if compared they are in need of a lot more help than we are. Natural disasters strike our southern states most often with hurricanes, and our coasts with earthquakes but looks at quakes that have hit japan and hurricanes that hit other island countries there is no comparison as well. Children are forced to be married at ages as young as four. Police brutality is a huge problem although in other countries police ISIS. To the United States, this problem is insignificant for some reason. Positivism is an approach to understanding the world based on science. Global perspective can also be used in the other direction for example when compared to other countries such as china or Europe, our debt and financial situation is a lot worse. Our drug trade and sex trafficking is terrible when compared to that of Canada. Although again we could be a lot worse. Manifest functions are the intended consequences positive or negative of a social pattern, while latent functions are the unintended consequences. For example, when getting married an intended consequence would be having children while an unintended consequence would be winning the lottery or a loved one being diagnosed with dwarfism.

Week Three

Any issue we have in our society can be broken down into many different viewpoints. Categories of viewpoints include economic, political, family/educational, religious and environmental perspectives. For example, sports broken down into an economic perspective is a closer look at what social class and money has to do with who plays and who watches what sport. Rich players receive the most amount of praise, while there are people living on the streets that are more talented, just weren’t given the opportunity. Hockey is on the high end of expensive hobbies, and you usually see white children and white grownups playing the sport, this is because racism in our society has caused the majority of people living in poverty to be black. Then going to basketball, something kids can play in the street, the majority of players are black. There are more than these perspectives when

talking about sports, things can happen unexpectedly (latent consequences) such as injury, or unexpectedly (manifest consequences) such as financial gain and fame.

            The sugar cane picture showed how jobs function together, including the boss and the gatherer, the labor workers and the children shown helping out, to make the society work. Power, the boss affects society negatively in this picture, he is either shown watching over the workers intensely ready to punish anyone who does anything wrong or being lazy and taking a nap. The interaction in the picture shows how the children interacting with their mothers and other workers creates how people view this type of slave labor. In our world today, the labor vs. power interaction is not as extreme although there are many issues with it. 

Week Four

Culture in our world today is in no way the same country to country even state to state, but someone people seem to forget about anywhere else in our world besides where they are at and they’re own beliefs. People around the world do have many similarities although they have many more differences. There are even cultural differences in our own country, including religion, family traditions, clothing differences, and many more. A lot depends on where you are located in the world, and how you were raised. But no matter what people decide to practice, it has no weight to what kind of person they are inside. How we interact within a work environment and in relation to power dictates a lot of how a society is viewed and how it functions. Some societies have a equalized system while others have one person in command over all the rest. Social function is also important; it is a system of interrelated parts that is

relatively stable because each part has a particular function in society as a whole. Social dysfunction is the undesirable consequences of any social pattern of the operation of society. Manifest functions are the intended consequences of a social pattern while the latent functions are the unintended consequences of a social pattern. For example, a manifest function would entail serious dating turning into marriage or studying hard for a test turning into a great score in the class. Latent functions would be getting cancer later in life or an unexpected promotion at work or going back to school for a different degree. 

Week Five

           

Nature vs. Nurture debate is strong and everlasting between biologists and sociologists. “Nature” argues that the person we will someday become depends on our genetics. For example, a child born from an alcoholic mother and psychopathic father will turn out to be a criminal no matter what environment you put it in. The nurture side of the debate argues that genetics have no say in how we turn out as people. How we are raised, the tactics used, the amount of social interaction and love given when we are children, the environment we are brought up in has

everything to do with how we turn out one day and what good we do our world. John B. Watson was a behaviorist, meaning he believed that behavioral patterns are not instinctive but learned. The effects of social isolation are brutal, for example the story of Isabelle, she was denied any contact with other people, nobody talked to her and nobody loved her. As a result, Isabelle could not be rehabilitated, she was forever an outsider with about 5 words to her knowledge. Sociologists such as Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg and Erikson dictated what we know about the nurture argument today. They included topics from the levels we accomplish cognitively as we age such as sensorimotor, preoperational, and formal operational, and the development of our moral compass. The agents of socialization also play a huge role in the development of a child, responsible nurturing needs to be provided while growth. The proper love and amount of touch is important to allow the child to trust our world and feel comforted in their environment.

Week Six

         

   “Born to be bad” is a controversial topic. Can people really have a criminal future coming to them from birth? Henry Lucas Lee was a serial killer that committed thousands of murders during his life time. He raped, strangled, stabbed and brutalized all these people, with joy. He felt nothing at all while killing these people, except maybe accomplished. He even said that the favorite time of his life was when he was killing his mother. Many would say this guy was born to be bad, he had no hope, that is until you take a look at his past. Growing up his mom was a prostitute, he was abused at home, left unconscious for days, left alone in a hospital, taught how to have sex with animals, beaten by his teachers, and bullied at school. He lacked the four socialization agents which include, family, friends, media and school. Family is an important socialization agent because even with having trouble at school, a child’s family is never supposed to leave them behind, they are always supposed to have help when they get home. It is important to feel belonging and to nurture and love unconditionally. Friends are important for socialization because they offer a second outlet, people to hang out with where you can’t get in trouble for getting certain things off your chest. They are there to share common interests and be good company when needed. School is good for education and to teach interaction with new people, people of authority, people older or younger and people of the opposite gender. It offers teachers, that can give another safe adult to talk to if a parent is not present. The media can give an easy way to communicate, and share opinions as well as being exposed to lots of other viewpoints. He had no proper outlet and no way out of his awful environment. His life time of killings was a lashing out of anger from his past, Henry was never given the chance to be good, his upbringing made sure he suffered and consequently the lives of thousands.

A role is a behavior expected of someone with a particular status. For example, a mother is expected to be nurturing. A role set is the number of roles attached to a single set. Role conflict is the incompatibility among roles corresponding to two or more statuses. For example, one might be forced to turn down a promotion in order to keep their role as a nurturing and present parent. Role strain is the incompatibility among roles corresponding to a single status. 

Week Seven

Deviance is the recognized violation of cultural norms. An example of deviance would be crime, which is the violation of a society’s formally enacted criminal law. Deviance affirms cultural values, clarifies moral boundaries, promotes social unity, encourages social change, and open lines of communication. The labeling of deviance is different depending on where you are in the world. For

example, in the United States, drinking is illegal until you are 21 while in a lot of other countries it is much lower, or perhaps a set age is nonexistent. In Colorado, marijuana usage is completely legal, although in other states such as Wisconsin, using or carrying marijuana would result in being labeled as deviant and having to serve prison time or a large fine.

Our actions whether legal or not, can be labeled deviant depending on the reaction we evoke from other citizens. For example, a child taking a candy bar from a store without the parents noticing is technically theft, and the action is labeled deviant but others who view the situation only see an innocent child that doesn’t know better. Social class, or where you fit in society has a huge effect on what actions may label you deviant. For example, a white collar crime, crime committed by people of high social position in the course of their occupations, have a much greater chance of being ruled not guilty, while a person struggling with poverty that robs a gas station will without debt be convicted and sent to prison.

The Merton Strain theory groups people based on their level of acceptance, or conformity to our cultural goals and institutionalized means. Those who want to be successful culturally, such as having a nice house, money and more than enough for their kids but do not have the accepted ways to do it, or was not given the opportunity to be successful may turn to unconventional means such as crime. These folks are grouped under innovation. The people that cannot reach cultural goals but still want to be respected in society by adhering to institutionalized means fall under the ritualism category. Those who reject both cultural goals and institutionalized means are the retreatism and usually are drug addicts or those who want nothing to do with our society. Rebellion comes when people want an alternative to our society, want something better. 

Week Eight

        

    Labeling theory says that deviance lies in people’s reaction to a person’s behavior, not in the behavior itself. Stigma is a form of secondary deviance that marks the start of a deviant career by acquiring a stigma; a powerful negative label that greatly changes a person’s self-concept and social identity. A primary deviant act provokes a slight reaction while secondary deviance is the process of a deviant identity, integrating it into conceptions of self, potentially affecting the individual long term. Secondary deviance is what can cause a person to think of themselves as a rebel, or criminal. Once this mindset is confirmed by others labeling the person as so, they can become really dangerous. All morals and values can be thrown out the window for this new identity. For example, a teenager doing bad in their high school classes, might be continually punished for having bad grades, leading to teachers and other authorities to believe this kid is a trouble maker. Since this teenager is being treated like he’s the worst kid in school, when he is only having trouble in class, he/she will begin to believe they are actually deviant. Since grades aren’t working out and teachers and advisors already view him as trouble, why not start to cause trouble? Why not cheat on tests, or take other kids homework, or become a bully to the “nerds?”

            Retrospective labeling is when someone re-interprets someone else’s past. Projective labeling

is predicting someone’s future by using their deviant identity. These terms come into play with first impressions and specifically when people with a criminal record try to get a job. Interviewers will see their criminal past and either judge them for what they’ve done or be fearful that their past will predict their future, meaning that they will become deviant again if given the chance.

The Hirschi Control Theory has four main principles. Attachment, meaning your family and friends. Opportunity, meaning the amount of money you have, the school you go to, and the people you know. Involvement, is the time and energy put in to social activities. Finally, belief, is the conventional morality and religion you practice. 

Week Eleven

Family is a social institution found in all societies that unite people to cooperative groups to oversee the bearing and raising of children. (28% of children in the United States live in single   parent units. 88% of those homes are headed by women) Cohabitation is the term for couples living together before marriage. (40% will marry eventually) There are a million gay and lesbian couples in America that are raising children. Although gay marriage and the right to raise children is still a controversial topic in America many are proving their homes are just as adequate if not much better than straight homes. Gay marriage is someone’s choice and it is also their choice

if they want children. Just because gay marriage is a sin in a certain religion does not mean you can force others to follow the rules of your specific opinions. America is the land of freedom, so it should be the freedom of every citizen living here who they decide to love and how they decide to live their life.

 Endogamy is the marriage between people of the same social category. Exogamy is the marriage between two people of different social categories. Marriages like this can be arranged to affirm alliances between nations and encourage cultural diffusion. Polygamy is marrying 3 or more people. Types of polygamy are polygyny and polyandry. Polygyny is the marriage of one male to multiple women. This is common in Islamic nations and among the incredibly rich and powerful like King Solomon who was known to have around 700 wives. Polyandry is the practice of one female marrying multiple men. Although rare, it allows men to share work, so more time can be spent with children.

Week Twelve

This week people started to present their projects which included, military spending and gun control. Military spending was presented as a much needed expense to keep the United States status high and powerful. Our budget allows us to have more nuclear weapons then other nations and be ready for war at any area of the world. The money is needed for secretive special ops missions such as drug wars and rescue missions. The issue with the amount of spending was the fact that so much of it goes undocumented and with the United States struggling with so many other issues such as poverty, and hunger that money could do a lot of good. We also discussed gun control, and whether or not we need more of it. The United States leads the world in gun related deaths by population. We also have the least amount of regulation. Other countries require training, and safe keeping as well as a complete background check, while here all you need is the second amendment and you’re set. The rate of suicide by gun was also discussed. It is true

that the U.S.A leads the world in suicide by gun, some may argue that increasing gun control will not help this problem because someone that is suicidal will do it one way or another. The rebuttal to that comment is the fact that a gun is deadly, right away. If one did not have easy access to firearms, a different method is much easier to treat in a hospital to possibly save someone’s life. The majority of people that attempt suicide and are rescued do not ever try it again and are thankful they survived. 

            Another topic we talked about this week was religion. 90% of Americans claim a religion. 55.7% claim protestant, and 30% make up catholic, Jewish or other. Typically, Episcopalians are members of a high social class, Catholic members being middle class and Lutheran being the lower class. Secularization is the historical decline in importance of the supernatural and the sacred. The debate of the Westboro Baptist church protesting at the funeral of a fallen soldier brought up the first amendment right of freedom of speech, that even though technically they can protest, it is sickening that people would even think to do that. These people believe gays will go to hell and that god hates them but will never protest a divorce even though in the bible both are technically a sin. And in the bible, it is clearly stated to love ones neighbor no matter what, but for some reason people seem to overlook that part.

Thank You For Reading!!!!

Abagail Geving

Sociology

E-portfolio

Semester of fall 2016

Sociology Portfolio

Sociology is one of the social sciences which applies scientific methods to study human society.

The study of sociology expands knowledge of how culture, religion, and societal norms play into our everyday lives.