SOCY

Below is a list of events (well 7 is an exception)- you may recognize some of these from recent newspaper or television headlines.

1a. Choose 2 events listed below and write it above your assignment.

1b. For each of the 2 events- write a list of 10 things that may have influenced or caused this event to happen or created a situation that led to this event. Try to avoid explanations that blame the victim, try to focus on the social or personal aspects of the perpetrator. 

We may often have more than 1 explanation for why an event occurs. Many of the explanations we use to explain events may be personal or psychological (C. Wright Mills- personal troubles) these can often be remedied by removing the person from a circumstance or   changing a personal characteristic. However, many events that people use personal explanations for are not actually personal troubles, they are caused by more widespread societal issues. They are related to our social world and socialization more than they are to our personal traits. These must be remedied by focusing on societal change.  By employing our sociological imagination to look at problems that are sometimes considered personal troubles as social issues we can address the social causes and create social change. This part of the exercise is meant to help you engage your sociological imagination. 

2. Look through your list. Which of your explanations are personal troubles (based on personal characteristics) and which are related to other people or are social or structural issues? Split your list into these two categories when you post it. If you did not have at least 1 social structural issue think of one. In order to list social issues, you may need to change the way you word some of the explanations to gear it as more social and less personal. 

3.  Responses to other scenarios- find at least two scenarios that are on different topics than you selected for part 1. Using the readings from this week about sociological methods.

Respond to the other two scenarios with the following:

3 a. Take one of the social or structural explanations that seem testable and phrase it as a testable hypotheses- explanation is correlated with or causes event

3 b. Explain what theoretical perspective would be most useful for explaining why this type of event occurs.  Why is it the best perspective? (we have three perspectives or paradigms in sociology)

3 c. What type of method would be the best for testing this hypothesis? Why? (don't limit this explanation to qualitative or quantitative methods)

Scenarios

1. Two white teenage boys open fire in a school killing three students and a teacher

2. A young white man goes on a shooting rampage killing female college students and leave a manifesto explaining why it was their fault. 

3. A frustrated father comes home after a long day at work and beats his son hospitalizing him

4. A black homeless man robs a Korean grocery store.

5. A man gets cut off on the free-way and begins to shoot at the offending driver

6. A thirteen year old Hispanic boy accidentally kills a 4 year old child during an gang initiation 

7. Why are there no women in the above scenarios (it is possible to have only social explanations for this one)

 ** 2 explanations rule- if there are at least 2 posts on a topic you must choose a topic that does not have 2 posts until each topic has at least 2 posts**

 **** All discussion posts should integrate information from course readings and lectures and cite that information ***

Example:

This example uses a different scenario than the above and only uses a few explanations rather than 10 just to show you how it might look. Some students get very nervous about this exercise- I am expecting to see your thinking and not perfection. We often learn more from errors than from doing things right so this exercise is meant develop a conversation where I can help you with your thinking about the issue. I recently started adding an example but it seemed to make students more stressed so I want to preface the example with the idea that I am looking for you to really think about the issue but not looking for mastery. 

Scenario: A young black man is shot by a white police officer while playing in the park 

Part 1 list explanations

The officer may be racist or biased

The officer may have bad eyesight that limited his ability to see and somehow made it through evaluations without anyone noticing and bad vision made him confuse what he saw

The officer thought the boy might be a criminal and reacted to protect himself

The officer mistook a toy for a weapon and was afraid

Part 2 divide into personal and structural explanations

Personal explanations (In this part you should only list things that are about individual personal characteristics)

The officer may be racist or biased (Racism is structural but most people who are racist do not use it for violence so as an explanation for a shooting this is still personal)

The officer may have bad eyesight that limited his ability to see and somehow made it through evaluations without anyone noticing and bad vision made him confuse what he saw

Structural causes (I took my 2 explanations that have social structural influences and reworded them to be more about the social structure. These 2 explanations ended up being 4 social structural explanations)

Institutionalized norms about when and when not to use force that is biased against people of color- these result in officer choices of when to use force that are biased

Training materials that depict more white people as innocent victims and more black people as perpetrators causing a bias in judgment of officers as to how often a person of color is actually dangerous and therefore should have force used against them. 

Media and entertainment sources that depict blacks and other people of color as more violent causing a bias that may impact choices for when officers use deadly force. 

Media and officer training that skews or exaggerates issues of officer safety causing officers to be more fearful of violence against themselves and make more rash judgement about use of force. 

Exercise 3A When training materials depict whites as more frequently victims and blacks as more frequently perpetrators this impacts officer judgment about when to use force or deadly force.  (This takes the explanations of training materials above and rephrases it into something that you can actually design an experiment around. this is a hypothesis or an assumption about how two variables relate (openstax 2.1) Now I can clearly build an independent (training material) and dependent variable (officer judgments about when to use violence) and design a study (openstax, 2.1).

3b. I would use symbolic interaction here because it is the paradigm about how interactions are used to generate meaning (Module II). Because this is about how officers develop their understanding of deadly force based on the training material this perspective fits best.

3c There are two good ways to conduct this study 

First you could conduct an experiment - you could give officers two different training courses or use officers that already have training courses that are different. One would have mostly pictures of white victims and black criminals the other would have mixed pictures or mostly black victims and white criminals. Then you could conduct an implicit bias test that shows black and white faces and associates them with being more or less dangerous. The main problem with experiments is that they can be artificial (openstax 2.2) which means lab results may not translate to real behavior so alternately you could conduct content analysis, which is a type of secondary data analysis (openstax 2.2) where you analyze the number of depictions of blacks in training materials in different training programs and then compare officer arrest and violence records to see if differences in training material result in different patterns of arrest by race.