Sociology 1101, Exercise 2

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In "The Sociological Imagination," sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959) writes: "Consider unemployment. When, in a city of one hundred thousand, one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief, we may properly look to the character of the man and his skills. But when in a nation of fifty million employees, fifteen million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed."(p. 9) Mills suggests that the essential element of what he calls the sociological imagination is our ability to understand the connections between private troubles and public issues. All those Minnesota high school seniors who have at some time in their lives attempted suicide--that's not just thousands of troubled individuals, that's a public issue that reflects some basic change in our society compared to my growing up years in the 1950s. I

Question 1
Identify a problem you or a friend or relative of yours faces that is not just a private trouble but also a public issue, and show why it is so difficult to solve on a purely personal level, unless there are also societal changes.

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Question 2 How did first Morselli and later Durkheim account for the rising suicide rates in many of the European countries in the later part of the 19th century (the late 1800s, in other words)? And why did a question like this require not just a psychological but a sociological explanation?

Question 3
How does Stark distinguish sociology from other social sciences, including psychology, economics, and anthropology? ,

Question 4
Sociological theories consist of statements about what we think are the causal relationships among concepts. For example, one of my special interests is social movements--like the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, or the gay and lesbian movement--and one current theory is that people who already belong to organizations are more readily recruited into a social movement than people who have few or no such memberships. In the civil rights movement, many of the main activists were drawn from black churches or black colleges. But when we think about applying concepts that way, there's always the issue of measurement validity. Are the methods we are using to measure social movement involvement or organizational membership generally accurate (or in the technical language of science, valid)? What are a couple of ways in which Stark suggests we can assess the validity of our measurements?