Social Location Essay

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Social Location: New Family, New Outlook Every day in our world we encounter new situations, experiences, and theories, but what we can pull out and learn from them is determined by how we choose to look at things. Our outlook on life isn’t personally formed with our own minds though, and is instead shaped by society. To better understand how that works, we must look from a sociological perspective; this means actually examining how the social contexts in which people live influence their lives. Our social location is a part of the sociological perspective and also in determining why people do what they do, but a social location isn’t merely picked from a list. This is actually determined by the areas of life people occupy because of where they are located at. For example, your career, how much you make per year, your years of education, whether you’re male or female, your ethnicity, and even just your age puts you in a social category within your society. These categories limit how you view the outer world because they’ve already shaped how you see things, such as a society’s history has shaped the ideas they believe in. In the textbook “Essentials of Sociology” by James M. Henslim, it explains what Sociologist’s C. Wright Miller sees through his eyes; “The Sociological [perspective] enables us to grasp the connection between history and biography” (4). History is simply the broad stream of events that each society is located in. The history gives a general idea of how that society thinks- whether they support homosexual rights or believe in the Custom Family Values. Those events that that society lasted through have actually helped form that society’s beliefs, morals, and way of living. But a person’s biography can also change their sociological perspective. Their biography, or experiences within that society, has a bigger impact on how they look at life then
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