Blog – Sociological Lenses
The blog activities in this course are designed to be public between all students in this course as well as your instructor. A course blog is generally made up of
many individual entries.
Overview: While Milestone One and Two helped you organize your thoughts and research plan about the familial trend you will be writing about for your magazine article, Milestone Three provides you an opportunity to practice writing something that will be seen by the public.
Prompt: Write a blog post analyzing your chosen familial trend using the three relevant sociological perspectives: conflict perspective, functionalism perspective, and symbolic interactionism perspective.
Sociologists use paradigms, or sociological theories, to help explain social life. For example, a functionalism theorist might look at the changing mealtime experience in purely structural terms. Quite simply, a family may be unable to coordinate its schedule to allow for time together at a common meal because of work, technology, and other commitments. However, a symbolic interactionist may analyze this changing family dynamic by asking how families have come to define food and communication. Or a conflict theorist might point to disparities and hunger as core reasons families are not eating meals together. This blog post will serve to help you look at your familial topic from the three core sociological perspectives and be useful to you as you compose your magazine article’s section on theory. Use the final project’s Sociological Analysis (section III) to guide your writing.
Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:
III. Sociological Analysis: You will now analyze your chosen scenario, using the three relevant sociological perspectives: conflict perspective, functionalism perspective, and symbolic interactionism perspective.
A. Apply the conflict perspective to explain why the familial trend affects families differently. Apply this perspective specifically to your previous comparisons to explain any differences in how the trend affects cultures. If there were not any differences, use the perspective to explain generally why different families have different experiences.
B. Apply the functionalist perspective to explain the benefit of the familial trend in society. How does the familial trend influence the family dynamic and therefore positively influence other social institutions and society as a whole?
C. Apply the symbolic interactionist perspective to analyze how families define their meaning and how this definition changes. How does symbolic interactionist theory explain the ways that families define themselves and how this definition evolves?
