Understanding Social Problems

400 Words2 Pages
In the book, “Understanding Social Problems” by Linda A. Mooney, she discusses about what does social problems mean and how does it affect our society today. In this paper, I will be discussing about a newspaper article "Before a Test, A Poverty of Words" and will be discussing the terms achieved status, objective and subjective nature of Social Problems, and values. What does the term social problem mean? In the book “Understanding Social Problems”, Mooney says “There is no universal, constant, or absolute definition of what constitutes a social problem. Rather, social problems are defined by a combination of objective and subjective criteria that vary across societies, among individuals and groups within a society, and across historical time periods.” What does this really mean? For me, this means that social problems are characterized by the “objective” and “subjective” standards, which allows us to determine whether or not the values of the question are valid. In the article "Before a Test, A Poverty of Words", it can be shown that the achieved status of people (who are colored and Hispanic) in a middle schools in the Bronx, have a for more lack of vocabulary- compared to children that come from a families that have a higher standard of living- which are effecting their education. The term achieved status is defined as “a status that society assigns to an individual on the basis of factors over which the individual has some control” as illustrated in Understanding Social Problems. This shouldn’t be true for the children that are in poverty stricken families. A child doesn’t have the power to decide where he or she may want to live or how well their education should be. So why should society have the power to determine their status? By allowing society to disregard a child because of their background or where they came from is only a subjective view with
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