Sociology Unit 3 Socialization & Group Life

Unit 3: Socialization & Group Life Key Terms: ● Culture - the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group. ● Material and non-material culture - Material culture refers to the physical objects, resources, and spaces that people use to define their culture. Non‐material culture refers to the nonphysical ideas that people have about their culture, including beliefs, values, rules, norms, morals, language, organizations, and institutions. ● Culture shock - an experience a person may have when one moves to a cultural environment which is different from one's own ● Ethnocentrism - the belief in the inherent superiority of one's own ethnic group or culture. ● Cultural relativism - the idea that a person's beliefs, values, and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture, rather than be judged against the criteria of another. ● Countercultures - a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, often in opposition to mainstream cultural mores. ● Subcultures - a small segment of the larger culture, which is usually defined by shared socioeconomic status or a common cultural interest. ● Cultural universals - elements, patterns, traits, or institutions that are common to all human cultures worldwide. ● Socialization - the process of internalizing the norms and ideologies of society. ● Nature versus nurture - Nature is what we think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Nurture is generally taken as the influence of external factors after conception, e.g., the product of exposure, life experiences and learning on an individual. ● Resocialization - the process by which one's sense of social values, beliefs, and norms are re-engineered. ● Ageism - prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of a person's age. ● Age cohorts - A group of people born around the same time period from a particular population that typically shares certain events and experiences over their life course. ● Disengagement theory - A group of people born around the same time period from a particular population that typically shares certain events and experiences over their life course. ● Activity theory - claims that staying mentally and physically active preserves older adults happier. ● The “sandwich generation” - middle-age adults (often in their 40s and 50s) who are caring for both elderly parents and their own children. Social Class ● A social class can be defined as a group that’s similar in terms of income, education, power, and prestige in society. o The American society can be split into five social classes: upper class, upper middle class, average middle class, working class, and lower class. ● The upper class is the top of the income and wealth distribution. They are the ones who earn at least $250,000/year and control much of the country’s wealth. This group tends to wield a lot of political and social power. The upper-upper class mostly includes those who derive their wealth from inheritance rather than work. ● The Upper middle class families typically have incomes between $115,000 and $250,000 per year and make up about 15% of income earners. About 2/3 of the adults here have college degrees – and many have post-graduate degrees. Adults in this group tend to have jobs that are considered prestigious – doctors, lawyers, and engineers. ● Families in the middle of the middle class make between $50,000 and $115,000. This bracket makes up about 35% of income earners. About half of this group is collegeeducated and average middle class jobs are typically so-called white collar jobs – think office workers, teachers, middle-managers. ● About 30 percent of Americans are in this category, with incomes ranging from about 25 to 50 thousand dollars a year. Lower middle class families are less likely to own their own homes and typically hold little to no wealth. Most blue-collar workers, or those whose work is primarily based in manual labor, fall into this bracket which is why they are also known as the working class because they do a lot of manual labor. ● Lower class Americans are blue-collar workers at the bottom of the income distribution. They make less than $25,000 a year and tend to work hourly jobs that are part-time, with unpredictable schedules and no benefits, like health insurance. About 20% of Americans, or the bottom quintile, fall into this group. ● Social class is a very big determining factor of many of the most fundamental aspects of modern life – from education, to beliefs, as well as values. ● A large component of class differences plays out through educational attainment and its consequences for success later in life. ● Education is sometimes called the “Great Equalizer.” The more people who have access to quality education, the more equal a society gets. Mortality and disease rates also vary by social class. ● Upper class Americans tend to live longer and healthier lives. ● Class gaps in health outcomes are about more than just having the money to pay for better healthcare. ○ It’s about occupation, neighborhood, income, education, and even about simply just having the time. ■ Those in the working class have less leisure time to cook healthy meals and often live in food desserts where there is little access to fresh foods. ■ Those in the upper class tend to have more flexible jobs and live in neighborhoods where organic foods and fresh produce are readily available. ● Social institutions are mechanisms or patterns of social order focused on meeting social needs, such as government, economy, education, family, healthcare, and religion. Social Institutions Family & Marriage ● Families are groups of people who are related by genetics, marriage, or choice. ○ They often share material, emotional, and economic resources. members of a family are held together by the commonly shared goal of the well-being and mutual support of its members and they organize people and power based on positions of social status within the family, like mother or daughter. ● Family relationships are created in a traditional sense or through legal bonds, like marriage or adoption. For many people, family is a matter of choice. Marriage is the #1 example of this. You choose who you get married to (in most cases). ● When close friends are considered family that relationship is considered to be a term called fictive kin. These families consist of people who have chosen to care for each other, share resources, and share their lives together. This can make a family bond as strong as any based in ancestry or law. ● The family that you grow up in is known as your family of orientation, because it orients you to the world and teaches you how families work. The family that you create when you are an adult is known as a family of procreation. ● Families often form around marriages. Marriage can be defined as a legally recognized relationship, usually involving economic, social, emotional, and sexual bonds. Cultural norms also limit romantic love by marking some people as acceptable spouses, or not. Some norms promote endogamy, or marriage between people of the same social category. ● For example, college-educated Americans are more likely to marry other collegeeducated Americans and people are more likely to marry others of the same race (this pattern is slowly changing). ● Exogamy is marriage between people of different social categories. Interracial marriage is a good example of this. Another example of exogamy is ‘marrying up’, where a person of a low socioeconomic status marries someone of a higher socioeconomic status. Schools & Social Inequality ● Social-conflict theory helps to understand how the US educational system can disadvantage some people, while giving advantages to others, so that schools ultimately play a role in causing or perpetuating class differences. ● A meritocracy is a system where hard work and talent is recognized and rewarded. This plays into the idea that many hold where they believe that as long as they work hard they can be successful in life. This belief is heavily tied into the idea of the American Dream. ● Grades don’t just measure an individual student’s effort or ability, they’re also influenced by many factors outside of the student’s control, like the quality of their school or their access to resources like books or computers. ○ For example, In the US, there are large class gaps in educational attainment. 83% of students from high income families enroll in college after high school and only 63% of low income students do. ● Kids with parents who have more time or money to devote to education in the home are also the kids most likely to be in well-funded, high quality schools. But the US education system doesn’t just contribute to class gaps in educational achievement. There are also persistent achievement gaps by race in the US, and they’re made worse by elements of our education system that advantage white students. ● Kids who are suspended or expelled are more likely to engage in risky behaviors like drug use or other criminal behavior. This contributes to what’s known as the school to prison pipeline. ○ This is an informal ‘tracking’ for students that criminalizes deviant behavior in schools, even minor disciplinary issues, like talking back to teachers. ○ For minority students, schools are more likely to escalate disciplinary issues to the juvenile justice system, putting students in contact with the criminal justice system at an early age. Health & Medicine ● Many of the factors that determine your health aren't biological, they can be social or cultural. Factors like race or class, for instance, can both have huge outcomes on health outcomes. ● Medicine is the social institution responsible for treating disease and restoring or improving the health of a population. Medical sociology seeks to understand the ways that society approaches and shapes health, disease, and illness. ○ This is necessary because the diseases that society deems worthy of research, or even treatment, vary across societies. ● The Father of Ancient Medicine was known as Hippocrates. ○ He is credited as one of the first Western physicians to believe that disease was the result of a person’s lifestyle habits and the social environment in which they lived. ● In 1847, the American Medical Association, or AMA, was founded to promote a more systematic approach to medical practice, by lobbying for Federal and state regulations in medical training. The AMA also worked to set standards for the professional practice of medicine. By incorporating a more scientific approach to practicing medicine, the AMA helped shape how we think about and treat disease. ● Health is a sociocultural phenomenon, where the boundaries between being ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ can vary a lot, depending on who you are or where you were raised. o Sick roles are the behaviors associated with having an illness. To be seen as sick – and get the treatment deserving of being sick – a person must act the way society expects a sick person to behave. The function of the sick role is to create a “social space” for non-normative social behaviors related to being ill in society. ● For example, when you don't feel well (or you just don't want to go to school) you have to convince your parents that you’re really sick. This involves following social norms associated with being sick like staying in bed, throwing up, coughing, looking miserable, etc. ● To be ‘properly’ sick, a person must want to get better. They must also seek the care of medical professionals. ● When you fulfill the sick role, you get a pass on the normal social behavior expected of well people. But if people don’t perceive you as being ‘properly’ sick, you might not get the same amount of respect or understanding. (This is a huge reason why people who have invisible illnesses (like mental illnesses) are often dismissed as just being ‘lazy’. ● Some diseases, like HIV/AIDS are heavily stigmatized, this forces some people to hide their illness and “pass” as being well. Unfortunately, even medical professionals that we depend on may refuse to accept our claims of sickness, which basically withholds your ability to engage in the sick role. ● These things all prove that being “sick” is as much a social and cultural experience as it is a biological dysfunction. ● While a disease defines a dysfunction of the physical, an illness is the social and cultural response to a disease and your perception of an illness is likely to vary a lot depending on who you are. ● People have what are called illness beliefs. These are assumptions about the severity and nature of symptoms. An illness belief doesn’t have to be accurate, but the accuracy matters less than how the beliefs make you feel. ● Illness beliefs help explain why some people seek treatment for symptoms while others may ignore them. ● Factors like race, social class, gender, or age can shape illness responses to disease as well. ● For example, women consult doctors significantly more than men. Men are more likely to ignore pain, or downplay the significance of symptoms.