Mid-Term Exam

Format: Take home; short essay

Length: 1500 – 2000 words (around 6-7 pages)
Deadline: 10.00 am, Friday, December 3rd, 2021
Note: Plagiarism is prohibited.

1. What do sociologists study? Do you think society constrains our thought and
behaviors? Why or why not?
2. Structural – Functional Theory, Social Conflict Theory, and Symbolic
Interaction Theory are among the most influential sociological theories.
Which one sounds most appealing to you. Why?
3. Think about a personal experience that can be used as a research problem.
Sketching a short research plan in which you briefly describe the research
problem and propose the research question (s). Which research design suites
your research best? Why?
Instructor: Dr. Nguyen Van Dang

1.
2.
In sociology, there exists some influential sociological theories namely
Structural-Functional theory, Social Conflict theory and Symbolic Interaction
theory. Each of the theories exhibits certain advantages and shortcomings, thus
a clear understanding of their basics is vital in analyzing social behaviors and
events. It appears to me that Symbolic Interaction, despite ignoring large-scale
situations, is the most appealing of all, but preferrably specific issues. The
reasons for my conclusions are as described below.
To my understanding, the Symbolic Interaction theory centers more on the
human factor as a micro and social process. Through communications, our
concepts of everything are gradually defined; those that are widely agreed upon
will remain for long and slowly become widely accepted, to create a sense of
unity within society. Despite not researching on large institutions such as
economy or law, Symbolic Interaction is still able to analyze social cognitives
through the way individuals interact with each other. For example, children
understand that smoking is detrimental to overall health because they learnt that
through families or laws. But as they grow and develop interactions with peers,
some might change their beliefs into thinking that smoking is cool for teenagers
and thus fell into the bad habit. This corresponds to the key takeaways of
Symbolic Interaction theory that the meaning given to anything people
experience derive from communications with other individuals, and that
meaning constantly evolves or even changes within an individual if others
around he or she agree upon the new belief. Thus society is nothing but a shared
reality of human interactions, with its beliefs constantly regenerates and adapts,
leading to changes.
The Structural-Functional theory and Social Conflict theory, with primary focus
on large-scale events, exert major drawbacks that I find quite inattractive. The
theory of Social Conflict sees the society as stages of unrest between the
priviledged and those who do not agree with the status quo, but the methods as
to how the parties change society to resolve conflict or how individuals with the
same interests form parties remain unsolved. Regarding the Structural –
Functional theory, it somehow contradicts the real world society. Heavy
reliance on achieving equilibrium makes it difficult for Structural - Functional
theory to explain social changes. It also separates individuals from society and
places power solely on institutions to ensure social progress. Another criticism
would be that Structural – Functional theory, with its thesis that people have
different tasks to follow and thus the society will become inadaptive if someone
quits their role, does show signs of inequality.
However, the Symbolic Interaction theory is not without shortcomings. It
neglects the role of large-scale institutions on shaping the human behaviors,
which might hinder the real causes of certain social issues. In the smoking
example above, the Symbolic Interaction theory will show no regard to the
influences of media, that this large institution might have communicated the
“smoking is cool for teenagers” message through its releases. An interesting
analogy for comparison would be that the Symbolic Interaction focuses too
much on a single tree, for it to miss out an entire forest. Thus the Symbolic
Interaction should be implemented with care in social analysis or research
practice.
3.
The unprecedented outbreak of Covid-19 has created a social change that has
never been seen before. To counter with the virus, governments around the
world adapted multiple travel restrictions and social distancing policies that
citizens must comply with. This is not a decision that favored any party,
however, within the first few stages of lockdown or even first year of Covid,
people did abide by these restrictions. The reasons for this could be that people
were afraid of something that is new and has yet to be understood. Furthermore,
they hoped that the pandemic would not last long and everything would go back
to normal soon. Notwithstanding, with the appearances of numerous infectious
virus variants including Delta, such restrictions are constantly extended, and
this is when the problem starts to arise. When social interaction is limited,
millions of teenagers, including myself starts to develop negative issues
ragarding mental health.
To be more specific, human is a socially-dependent creature, we interact with
each other to grow and develop our cognitions about the world. But during the
times of the pandemic, distancing policies has put us in an isolated situation.
Social interaction norms such as travelling, face-to-face meetings, playing
outdoors, working in offices or studying at schools; are prohibited to ease up
the Covid-19 infection curve. Online interaction does the job as an alternative,
but cannot replace entirely what people once had. As the third year living with
Covid-19 is about to end, such unwanted change in daily routine has caused the
young generations to develop multiple frustrations; in my case, there are mood
and motivation reduction. Hence, I propose my research question as: “What are
the negative effects of social distancing measures on the mental health of
teenagers?”.
The best method to exploit this research question, I believe, is using
quantitative method, as it provides us with data in a form that is easy to
understand and make use of. Firstly, we can find published data on how the
social changes during lockdown. For example, we may compare family income
or family divorce rates during and pre-Covid; then associate the data with
teenagers’s mental health to see whether or not a correlation exists. Secondly,
we provide an online form asking questions about the social distancing
measures and the participants’ feelings or symptoms that their mental health are
suffering from. By creating an online survey, we can both comply with the
social distancing rules, as well as ensure the anonymity of survey takers. The
survey can be published on a social media platform such as Facebook, where
the population is abundant. The questions are multiple-choice instead of short
answers to diminish the unwanted factor, such as the answers are not relevant to
the questions. The survey takers should be teenagers from the age of thirteen to
nineteen from the same places or country, or from different places or country
but have to comply identical distancing measures to ensure data validation.
After careful scrutinization of data, we compare the survey’s results with
previous corellation, thus drawing final conclusion.