Are you going to eat that? The Social Construction of Reality; 1SocPerspective Lesson 5

We have learned about three paradigms that influenced the beginnings of sociology as a discipline.  They were the foundations of sociology as a discipline and most of what sociologists study can be viewed through one or more of these three paradigms.  These three paradigms are also three ways of having a sociological perspective.  Other sociologists have tried to explain the sociological perspective in their own ways.  There are three other theories or ways of having a sociological perspective that are helpful and important within the discipline. 

Saliva in a spoon?

The first theory that will develop your sociological perspective involves spitting into a spoon.  Yes, spitting. into. a. spoon.  This is a lesson first published in Teaching Sociology (2003) by Brouillette and Turner and updated in ASA's Trails.  Simply put, the average American will be repulsed by the idea of spitting into a spoon and then swallowing it back again.  However, we are constantly swallowing our own saliva all day long.  But we have defined a difference between saliva and spit.  Saliva is in our mouth and is not gross.  Spit has left our mouths and is gross.



Sociological Literacy: What is the social construction of reality?  What is the Thomas Theorum?

There is no difference between spit or saliva except for how we think about each.  But how we think about each matters greatly to how we feel about the experience.  In other words, our reality is how we experience the world. The social construction is that our society or the people around us influences how we experience the world. Hence our experiences(reality) are created (constructed) by others (society).  This is called the social construction of reality. Spitting in different cultures or different situations (baseball) can be experienced differently, i.e. more or less acceptable.  For example, many of us have been to baseball games and watched players spit all throughout the game. We didn't get repulsed by that.

During one World Series, Reggie Jackson averaged 19 spits per at-bat! Another example is when parents or siblings use their saliva to wipe off a baby's face. We don't find that repulsive, but if a teacher drops saliva onto a desk it becomes gross. This can be true for nearly all of our experiences; feelings of happiness, sorrow, stress, worry. Nearly all of these are created within us by the society we are in.

"Food" as a social construction

Another example is how your society makes you feel about food.  For example, how do you feel about these recipes from Time Magazine or these from AtThirstForFirst.  How would you feel about eating mountain chicken or closer to home is this recipe for Rocky Mountain oysters.


Here is an example that you might not realize. The Japanese would be grossed out by the typical American bathroom. In Japan, toilets are located in a different room than the shower and bath. And the Japanese shower is always separate from the bath. They see the shower for cleaning and the bath for soaking after you have cleaned. 


Another way social construction can be illustrated is in our symbols and how they shape our reaction. For example, there is a feeling that you should not walk on the Patriot.



There is no real reason why, but it is a social construct. Finally, another example is the faculty restrooms. Some of the restrooms are for individual use, which is one person at a time. These restrooms are exactly the same: one toilet and one sink. However, the rooms are labeled with "Men's" and "Women's" signs. That makes men feel weird if we use the "women's" room, even though the men's room is exactly the same. (and vice versa). The sign is a social construct that elicits that feeling.  There is a restaurant like this at Voodoo Donuts in Austin, TX.  The donuts themselves challenge our feelings about what a donut should be, but the bathroom goes even further.

Applying social construction of reality to teen-parent conflicts:

How is the idea of "teenager" an example of a social construction?

How does the article say that the idea of "teenager" gets constructed?

What is the reality of "teenager" to adults?  To the teens themselves?

                 

What are some moments in your own life where you experience these feelings, but when you stop and think about it, you realize that the feelings have been created for you by society?

Applying social construction of reality to your own life:

Think about  something from your own life; your religion, sports, fashion, or something.  How can social construction of reality apply to your life?

Hello, My Name is Max; Symbolic Interactionist Paradigm: The Sociological Perspective Lesson 4

Please review the lesson from yesterday.  Please explain the answer to one of these questions with the partner at your table or someone near you.  If have trouble explaining the answer, please discuss it with your partner or a neighbor or ask me.

What does Marx's conflict paradigm focus on?

How might the conflict paradigm be used to examine teens?

Max Weber and Symbolic Interaction Paradigm

Max Weber's contribution to the development of sociology during the  Industrial Revolution

Max Weber (pronounced VAY-ber) studied the development of capitalism in European countries.  He found that countries that became more Protestant also became more capitalist.  This is peculiar because religion and economics seem to be separate.  But Protestants held shared meaning with each other about their wealth and finance.  They saw living within their means and investing their money as signs that they were living righteously within their Christian beliefs.  This created an economy that was based on investment.  It led to the creation and expansion of capitalism, investing profit to make even more profit.   It might seem strange for religion to be connected to the economy, but in their interaction with each other, it was real for them.  


The development of the symbolic interactionist paradigm 

Building off of Weber's work, two sociologists created a third paradigm for which sociologists view the world.   The symbolic meaning in the Protestants' lives was in their everyday interaction with other people.  Stemming from Weber's work, Randall Collins and George Mead focused on the shared meaning in everyday life between people.  This paradigm became known as symbolic interaction.  It is usually more focused on face-to-face interaction, or small groups, as opposed to large scale institutions.  Much of our interaction with each other holds symbolic meaning to us.  The words we chose, our body language, our clothes all hold symbolic meaning for us.  They convey an identity we have to the world. 

Let's add Weber and symbolic interaction to the graphic organizer:

How might symbolic interaction paradigm connect to names?

A name isn’t just a random set of syllables.  It has meaning.  

And it can be interpreted by people differently.  Read "Conventional Wisdom Tells Us...What's in a Name? That which we call a Rose by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet" from Cerulo and Ruane.

According to Cerulo and Ruane, what are the different meanings that names hold?  How do these meanings affect people?

For more on names and symbolic meaning, you can listen to the Freakonomics podcast episode by Wells, Katharine.  How Much Does Your Name Matter? Freakonomics Radio Podcast. April 8, 2013.

The episode draws from a Freakonomics chapter called “A Roshanda By Any Other Name”and includes a good bit of new research on the power of names. It opens with a conversation with NYU sociologist Dalton Conley and his two children, E and Yo. Their names are a bit of an experiment.  Indeed, there is some evidence that a name can influence how a child performs in school and even her career opportunities. There’s also the fact that different groups of parents — blacks and whites, for instance — have different naming preferences. Stephen Dubner talks to Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney about a mysterious discrepancy in Google ads for Instant Checkmate, a company that sells public records. Sweeney found that searching for people with distinctively black names was 25% more likely to produce an ad suggesting the person had an arrest record – regardless of whether that person had ever been arrested.  Names do, however, reveal a lot about the people doing the naming. Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, talks about his new research (with co-authors Thomas Wood and Alexandra Bass) that looks at how children’s names are influenced by their parents’ political ideology.

If names do affect their bearers' chance of success, it may not always be because of the reactions they cause in other people (the "looking-glass self"), they might also be because of "implicit egotism", the positive feelings we each have about ourselves.  Brett Pelham cites the concept in explaining his finding that individuals called Virginia, Mildred, Jack and Philip proliferate in Virginia, Milwaukee, Jacksonville and Philadelphia - he believes they are drawn to live there.  

Another intriguing 2007 paper, entitled Moniker Maladies, found that people's fondness for the initials of their names could get in the way of success. Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons analysed almost a century of baseball strikeouts and found that hitters with the initial K had a higher strike-out rate ("K" denotes a strike-out in baseball). They also found that graduate students with the initials C and D had a slightly lower grade point average than A and B students, and A and B applicants to law school were more likely to go to better colleges.

Parent-teen conflicts and Weber's symbolic interaction paradigm

Think about the teen-parent conflict reading.  What are the meanings that "teen" might hold for parents?  For society?  How might this affect their treatment?  How did this meaning come about?

Hello, My Name is Karl; Conflict Paradigm

As students arrive, take out your note packet and review from yesterday:

1.  What does Durkheim's structural-functional paradigm focus on?

2.  Try to apply that to teens - How can you apply the structural-functional paradigm to the Parent-Teen Conflict article?  What parts of the article would a structural-functional sociologist focus on?

Listen for the Silence


Karl Marx's Conflict Paradigm

The second paradigm that emerged from the changes of the industrial revolution is called conflict paradigm which developed out of the influence of Karl Marx.  He studied the inequalities in industrial Europe and how those inequalities affected individuals.  For example, Marx found that a working-class person lived an average of 25 years less than a wealthy person.  Like Durkheim, Marx concluded that his findings were not just the result of individual choices.  Instead, people were forced to work in unhealthy conditions and forced to yield to the demands of the wealthy owners of the factories.  

Marx's Focus   

Marx's focus led sociologists to examine who had power in society and who did not.  The natural extension of that became the effects of power on groups of individuals and how those in power gained and maintained that power.  Initially, Marx's focus was on social class, especially in Europe, but early sociologists in the U.S. like W.E.B. Dubois applied the conflict paradigm to race.  It has also been used to study gender in the U.S.

Applying conflict paradigm to names

Small group discussion:
Hypothesize:  What are some ways that names might create power or inequality?


Small group discussion (from this lesson):
Has your name ever been mispronounced?  By who? When? How often?


Has anyone had their name changed or taken on a  nickname because of mispronunciation?  If so, were there any benefits to the new name?  Were there any negative consequences?


Race and names
These articles provide research-based evidence of the importance of conflict perspective in examining names and power:

Emily and Greg v. Lakisha and Jamal

In a study from 2003, called Are Emily And Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan sent nearly 5,000 CVs in response to job advertisements in Chicago and Boston newspapers. The CVs were the same, but half were given fake names that sounded like they belonged to white people, like Emily Walsh or Greg Baker, and the other half were given names that sounded African American, like Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones. The call-back rate from employers was 50% higher on the "white" names then the "black" names. The effects were noted even for federal contractors with "affirmative action" policies, and companies boasting they were "equal opportunities" employers.  The researchers inferred that employers were using first names to discriminate unfairly against black candidates, perhaps at an unconscious level. Those same prejudices might also come into play at the interviewing stage, but a black applicant called Greg Baker, who receives an invitation to an interview, has at least got his foot in the door.

Drew to Dwayne to Damarcus to Da'Quan

There is also striking evidence of names triggering different outcomes for schoolchildren.

David Figlio, now at Northwestern University, analyzed the scores of some 55,000 children in a school district of Florida. Instead of just distinguishing between "white" and "black" names, he codified what aspects of names meant that they were more likely to belong to black children and children from low-income families. This allowed him to create a sliding scale, which went, for example, from Drew to Dwayne to Damarcus to Da'Quan. Figlio found that the further along this scale he went, the worse the school test scores and the less likely the student was to be recommended for the schools' program for "gifted" students. Strikingly, this held true for brothers within a family, and even - although the sample size was small - for twins. Figlio believes that the fault lies with the expectations of schoolteachers and administrators - at schools with more black teachers, the effects were less marked.  In separate research, Figlio used the Florida school data to show that black boys who are given names more common among girls are more likely to develop behavioral problems when they reach puberty. The problems increase significantly when there are girls in the same year group with the same name.

Both of the above is an example of how conflict sociologists view society and how inequality is created and maintained.  Read the following and look for how studying names can be viewed through a conflict paradigm.

Ethnicity, immigration and names

From American Immigrants and the Dilemma of the White Sounding Name in the Atlantic (2019),

A lot of research on immigration and names examines the subject from an economic perspective. A 2016 paper in the American Sociological Review looked at the first names given to the generation that came after the wave of immigration to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. “Native-born sons of Irish, Italian, German, and Polish immigrant fathers who were given very ethnic names ended up in occupations that earned, on average, $50 to $100 less per year than sons who were given very ‘American’ names,” the researchers wrote. “This represented 2 to 5 percent of annual earnings.” (They determined the “ethnic-ness” or “American-ness” of a name based on how frequently it was given in each immigrant and native-born population at the time.) 

Some of this effect, the researchers estimated, was due to class differences among parents (which remain a strong determinant of a child’s future job prospects), but most of it had to do with the symbolism of the name itself. Interestingly, the economic advantage that came with having a “more American” name still applied to people with surnames that clearly indicated their parents’ foreign origins. The researchers surmised that American-sounding first names, then, functioned more as a signal of “an effort to assimilate” than a means of “hiding one’s origins.” 

Immigrants in that era frequently felt pressured to change their own first name. A separate study, also from 2016, found that “at any given time between 1900 and 1930,” about 77 percent of immigrants had an American-sounding first name, and it was the norm for them to have dropped their original name within a year of entering the U.S. There were economic overtones here too: Male immigrants were more likely to change their name if they lived in counties where other immigrants had trouble getting jobs.

School and Conflict Paradigm

From PBS's, Why Getting a Student's Name Right Matters

For more info, you might want to visit the My Name, My Identity website[vi].

For students, especially the children of immigrants or those who are English-language learners, a teacher who knows their name and can pronounce it correctly signals respect and marks a critical step in helping them adjust to school.  But for many ELLs, a mispronounced name is often the first of many slights they experience in classrooms; they’re already unlikely to see educators who are like them, teachers who speak their language, or a curriculum that reflects their culture.

It can also hinder academic progress.

...the dropout rate for foreign-born and immigrant students remains above 30 percent, three times that of U.S.-born white students.

• Mispronunciation can hinder academic progress, and make students feel invisible.

...the dropout rate for foreign-born and immigrant students remains above 30 percent, three times that of U.S.-born white students.

Carmen Fariña, a native-Spanish speaker, had a teacher who marked her absent every day for weeks because she didn’t raise her hand during roll call. The teacher assumed Fariña was being defiant, but the future New York City schools chancellor never heard her name called; the teacher had repeatedly failed to pronounce it correctly, including rolling the r’s.

Mispronouncing a student’s name essentially renders that student invisible, Fariña said Teachers Please Learn Our Names! Racial Microaggressions and the K-12 Classroom, is littered with stories of students who endured shame, anxiety, or embarrassment, and sometimes a mix of all three, when their names were called in class.

There’s the tale of a Portland, Oregon-area student with a traditional Chinese name who had her name garbled by a vice principal during an honors ceremony. Set to present the student with an award, the principal laughed at his mistake, drawing chuckles from the audience.  To avoid embarrassment, the student slumped in her seat, refusing to rise to receive the prestigious award. She later skipped her graduation.  The mispronunciation wasn’t an isolated event. Having endured years of slights, she felt the need to become invisible long before the principal’s laughter marked the tipping point.  The woman, who went on to become an educator, changed her first name to ‘Anita.’ “If someone mispronounces your name once as a high school student, you might correct them,” said Kohli, whose parents immigrated to the United States from India. “But if this has been your entire existence in education, what do you do?”  Kohli’s own brother had a teacher mispronounce his traditional South Asian name, Sharad (‘shu-rudth’) as Sharub during a ninth grade class. The teacher and the students decided it was easier to call him Shrub, and it stuck for the rest of high school. The nickname forced him to check part of his identity at the door.

While the diversity of the nation’s public school student body has exploded in the last few decades, the number of African-American, Latino, and Asian teachers hasn’t kept pace. Gonzalez, a former teacher in school districts in Kentucky and Maryland, said she often observed a ‘these people’ attitude from her mostly white female colleagues. “They approached it like, ‘It’s your fault for having a weird name,'” Gonzalez said. To some degree, Gonzalez understands the struggle students face. She grew up with a Russian surname, Yurkosky, that befuddled teachers and classmates. She said it rhymes with “her-pots-ski,” minus the “t” sound in pots. “But I did not experience all the other stuff and other ways that a person can feel discriminated against,” said Gonzalez, who is white.

Butchered names are not just a problem for English learners and immigrants; students from a number of cultural backgrounds have their names garbled or ridiculed. Hawaiian and African-American students, with names that link to their ancestry, also shared stories of how constant mispronunciations made them feel uncomfortable with their names.

• Names can even lead to direct mocking of a student.

In an extreme case, a teacher in Wayne Township, New Jersey, lost her tenure status and job in 2015 for mocking a student’s name on Facebook. Several letters in the student’s name spelled out a profane word, legal documents show. More often, the mocking is more direct and reflexive: laughing off pronunciation, asking the student to take on a nickname, or making a spectacle of their name, Kohli said. “It matters what you do when you’re in front of a child and struggling with their name,” Kohli said. “Is it framed as my inability to say someone’s name or is it framed as the student doing something to make your life more difficult?”

The episode called "Substitute Teacher" from Key and Peele is a funny take on how student names can be messed up by a teacher and how that can affect students.

Applying conflict paradigm to teens

Finally,  can you apply conflict paradigm to the teen-parent conflict article?