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Substance Abuse and Sexual Deviance
Select one question set from the two listed below and provide a detailed answer to the question set in your initial post. Be sure to indicate the number of the question set you selected at the beginning of your answer. In addition, respond to two peers’ initial posts who answered different question set than the one you selected.
Question Set 1: Drug Use as Deviance
Using the information provided in Lecture 8 and Goode’s discussion on drugs and drug use in Chapters 8, answer the following questions.
Please do not try to answer all the questions in one post—there are actually several discussion topics listed under this question. Select one question to answer at a time. If you would like to address all the questions, that is fine—even great! But please do so in separate posts. Keep each post to one topic (question) only.
1. As we have discussed throughout this course, the positivist and constructionist approaches view social phenomena through different “lenses”—that is, the different approaches are valued because they address different research questions.
What are some of the questions that might be of interest to sociologists using a positivist approach?
Why are these questions important?
If we learn something about the answers to these questions, what are some of the potential benefits?
What particular theory or theories do you think help us understand and explain alcohol and drug use from a positivist approach?
2. What are some questions that would lend themselves to a constructionist approach?
What do you think are the most important questions we should try to address about alcohol and drug use using this approach?
What do we hope to learn and how might this ‘knowledge’ be of value?
What particular theory or theories do you think help us understand and explain alcohol and drug use from a constructionist approach?
3. One of the exciting aspects of being a sociologist (or at least in studying sociology!) is that we live in a working laboratory. Just like the biologist who comes to work each day to watch his cultures grow in petri dishes, sociologists are able to observe the world around us and watch social change occur. There have been two excellent examples in the past several years where changes in attitudes, beliefs, and values have resulted in major shifts in norms and in both formal and informal social control. One such change we will address next week: gender identity and same sex marriage.
The other we will examine here: the changes regarding drug use, especially marijuana.
There are several dozen questions we could ask…but let’s start with these (which, of course, you will NOT try to answer all in one post!):
What might a positivist approach help us understand this large change in our norms related to marijuana use?
What might a constructionist approach be helpful for us to understand the change?
Based on what we understand of this phenomenon, what is next?
Are there other, co-occurring social changes that might help us understand the larger social, economic, and political context (for example, have changing attitudes on use of alcohol and perscrption drugs influenced the debate on marijuana directly or indirectly?)?
Have the statuses of other drugs, legal and illegal, also changed? If so, how and why? If not, why? Reflect on the White Collar Crime discussed in the documentary “Opioids, Inc.”
Question Set 2: Sex and Deviance
Using the information provided in Lecture 9, Goode’s discussion on sexual deviance in Chapter 9 in the text, and the film – Alfred Kinsey social science in America’s Bedroom, answer the following questions.
The work by Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson have all helped to inform our attitudes regarding sex. One only needs to stand in the check-out line at the grocery store for a few minutes, listen to popular music, or watch television or films to be aware of the powerful role that sex and all things sexual play in our society.
How would the positivist approach help us to understand the attitudes, beliefs, values, and norms that are associated with sex in our current society? How would the constructionist approach contribute to this discussion? (You do NOT need to address both approaches in your post; you can pick one or the other.)
What do you think explains the ‘power’ of sex? There are any number of examples you can use to explain the role of sex in our culture – including same sex marriage, LGBT, film and video game rating systems, fashion, the rising incidence of sexual assaults on college campuses and the military, pornography, prostitution – the list could go on for days! Also, consider what theory or theories might help explain sex as a form of deviance.
