 In this video, we're going to be looking at the preface and chapter one of Donalene Lowsky's book, Thinking About Social Problems. We'll be going over concepts that will be important in the course. Lowsky begins by asking the question, what is a constructionist approach? As you probably know, there are several ways in which sociology approaches the study of societies. One is to pay attention to its functions, which is the idea behind the term functionalism, in which you try to describe the things that work in each society. Another approach is often called conflict theory. And the idea behind this is to understand the power relationships between various groups of people within a society. And the last approach is sometimes called symbolic interactionism. And it has contained within that the idea that we construct our society through the idea of what is meaningful. That is, we pay attention to the way a society is built based upon the social meaning that people give to different actions and symbols within society. So a constructionist approach to social problems is going to pay attention to what things mean in order to understand how we think about social problems, how we define social problems, and how we respond to social problems as a society or as groups within society. It's important under the constructionist approach to pay attention to subjectivity. Subjectivity means the point of view of the person who is talking or expressing their interaction with other people. So constructionist approach cares about the way individuals think about what they are talking about, what they are going to act upon, and so forth. Oftentimes subjectivity gets talked about as being the opposite of objectivity. Objectivity meaning the truth that is sort of outside of our experience. The material, empirical view of the world. But subjectivity actually goes with objectivity because we not only experience the world in the objective way, that is we encounter things that are outside of us, that we ascribe meaning to those things as part of that experience. So a constructionist approach is not rejecting objectivity, but it's saying that the way people interpret the objective is as important as the objective reality itself. And what that means when we're talking about social problems is that it's not only important to understand the statistics and data that suggests that there is a problem, but also to understand that how people feel and think about those, that objective reality is important in terms of what we think of as a problem and what we think of as a solution to that problem. Loski asserts that by looking at a constructionist approach, it can be empowering to people who are studying social problems. Now what does she mean by that? What she means is that by examining how something becomes considered a social problem, you begin to understand what your part is in constructing that problem and constructing the solution to that problem. In other words, it's a tool for critical thinking. It's a tool for getting into the minds and attitudes of other people and not just yourself. And it is empowering because once you begin to understand how something is constructed, you can look for ways to change it. It becomes a methodology for critical thinking and also for understanding the most effective ways to go about addressing social problems. So what is a social problem? Well, you have to have a couple of things for it to be called a social problem. First of all, it needs to be a problem. That is, something has to be wrong and we start defining that thing as wrong, what she calls a troublesome condition. So there are lots of times in debates about public issues that the debate is whether or not it really is a problem. There are things that people think are wrong that other people think are okay. And so we have to come to some sort of agreement of what is wrong and that debate can take place at that level. Like if we can't agree that it's something that is wrong, then we can't agree that it needs a solution or that we need to work on it. So the very first thing we have to do is agree that something is wrong. It also needs to affect a lot of people. That's the social part of social problem. So there are lots of things that we say are wrong that we do not regard them as a social problem because we either believe it doesn't affect enough people for us to address it. Or we believe that a social solution is not the answer. So let me give you an example. Oftentimes when we look at criminology, we talk about the number of people committing crimes as a problem. So there may be some discussion about whether or not it truly is a problem. Like for instance, if the data of crimes committed is considerably less than it was 10 years ago, then we may regard it as something that is being solved rather than something that is troublesome. But even if we get past that and we decide that crime is a problem, then we have to ask ourselves, well, is the solution a social solution or not? Is it widespread enough and needs to be addressed by a community of people in order to be solved? And there are a lot of people who argue that crime is not a social problem in the sense that they believe that it is a matter of individual behavior in which certain people are just bad people and they do bad things. So the solutions that we would look at if we believe that would be personal solutions, not social solutions. So when we take somebody to court, we don't ask questions about what that means to the community, but rather when somebody is accused of a crime, then the problem is solved by either convicting that person and putting them in jail, or the problem is solved by finding out that they weren't the person who committed the crime and they are acquitted. So you can see where these two things are not necessarily always agreed upon. There are a lot of people who argue, for instance, that the troublesome condition is white collar crime and that it is widespread and that it hurts a lot of people and therefore is something that should be looked at more seriously. This kind of argument is not accepted by a lot of people, especially people who happen to be wealthier and probably don't want anything that they've done to be defined as criminal. And so they would argue that no, crime is something that happens on a personal basis and it is something that happens that is violent and aimed at a particular victim. So anyway, you can see how even these two conditions can create different ways of thinking and different ways of making meaning about words that people talk about that are not easily defined. Also, it is very important when we talk about a social problem that we believe it can be changed. If we don't believe that it can be changed, it's just human nature, that's the way people do things. There's always going to be fill in the blank. You'll hear people say things like there's always going to be poverty. But if you really believe that poverty is just a fact of life and that some people are not going to be able to ever get out of poverty, then you may not define poverty itself as a social problem. You may define certain kinds of poverty as that, that you're not trying to eliminate poverty itself. There has to be that belief, a generally accepted belief that some change can be made for the better. So there's the kind of inherent optimism and constructing and understanding what is a social problem. But it also needs to be a belief that it should be changed. See, some things that can be changed are not regarded by people as something that should be changed. A good example of this is the debate over healthcare. Over universal healthcare, what has come to be known Medicare for all. So people agree something's wrong. We spend way too much money on healthcare. People have access to healthcare in unequal ways. It's a troublesome condition. And it's widespread. There are millions of people who do not have access to healthcare. And we hear that cited often as the reason why healthcare should be an issue. It can be changed. We know this because there are other countries that have universal healthcare. It can be done. But where the argument happens is, should it be changed? Because there is a group of people who believe that if we go to universal healthcare, we will be taking away individual freedom. And because of the value of freedom, there is a belief that we should not change this or we should find a less than universal solution because we don't want to give up that choice and that freedom that might come with universal healthcare. So you can see that all of these factors are what make up public debates about social problems and where we're at and understanding and defining something as a social problem can affect how much people talk about it, how much money they give to it, how much time they give to it, whether or not it's going to end up being a public policy or a change in law or whether it's going to be a local question as opposed to a national question and so forth are all tied up in these understandings of what is actually a social problem. So the other thing that Lowsky is interested in is, okay, if we have these social problems out there, how do we go about studying it? So in most social problems courses and college level, the way it gets studied is to look at those objective facts. To spend a lot of time showing what the conditions are. So we're going to talk about crime, then we're going to talk about crime statistics and we're going to talk about healthcare, we're going to talk about statistics about healthcare access and so forth. So these objective conditions are important in understanding social problems that what Lowsky and other people who have adopted the constructionist viewpoint are saying is objective conditions are not enough. We really, really want to understand how something gets defined as a social problem and why it becomes important and why people give their time and their money and their effort to it, then we have to go beyond those objective conditions. So the objective conditions are measurable, they're concrete, they are harder to dispute in a way, and they often make a strong case for a particular kinds of solution that these objective conditions are not the entire story. So understandable as part of objective conditions is that people live under these conditions. That is when we say, for instance, people have unequal access to healthcare and we look at the stats, we often look at these stats according to social categories. For instance, we might look at whether or not race makes a difference or people of different racial backgrounds have easier or harder access to healthcare. We might take a look at age being a difference in our country. People over the age of 65 have universal healthcare where people who are younger often only get their healthcare via either their job or since Obamacare they may belong to a collective within their state. So if they are particularly poor, they might also get Medicaid. And so we might look at social categories that have to do with poverty and socioeconomic level. These are important, but what Lowsky and other people who are social constructions are saying is that this is not a complete picture. And they argue that if we want to have a sociology of social problems, we need to take it a step further. So we want to take a look at subjectivity. Why subjectivity is important? Well, one of the ways that we need to understand social problems is the way people worry. And people don't worry in proportion to the problem. So for instance, a lot of people worry about when they worry about the murder rate, worry about stranger encounters. But statistically, stranger encounters account for very few murders. The chances are very high that if you end up being a victim of murder, you will be, you will know who killed you. It's usually either, it always, it almost always is somebody you know, it may be a deal going bad, like a drug deal, that kind of thing. So it might be somebody, you know, you're engaging in deviant behavior and the people that you're engaging in that deviant behavior with may hurt you. But also domestic and relationship murder is oftentimes the reason that somebody is killed. So we worry a lot about, you know, strangers on the street and everything, but really what we should be worried about is we are worrying to the data, like if our worries paralleled the data, then we would be more worried about domestic violence and about people that we know and whether they would hurt us or not. Oftentimes people have worries that are out of proportion or do not agree with what the objectivity says. Well, that affects what gets talked about and what policies get made and so forth. Because the people who make policy don't just make it from the data, they also make it from the what's important to people so that studying of that subjective worry is a way of studying what might affect our leadership and the kinds of issues that they're going to address. Subjective worry is usually not immediate, meaning that we worry about things that are not necessarily right in front of our face. And oftentimes are based upon older problems that have happened or older ideas are conditions that may have changed. For instance, there's a lot of discussion right now about the murder rate in the United States and especially about mass murders and so forth. But the truth of the matter is, we live in a far less violent society than we once did, that violent crimes have been reduced considerably in the last several decades. But anytime a very dramatic shooting takes place, especially if it involves a lot of people or a lot of vulnerable people, that brings up a worry that may or may not really match current conditions. Also, we sometimes think things are better when they're not really better or things are getting better when the objective reality is that they have not improved or they're actually getting worse. People tend to get bored. We've seen this with COVID and we've seen this with the ways in which people have complied to requests to mask up and to do social distancing and to stay at home. There are people who make claims, we shouldn't worry and things are getting better. And the data does not necessarily support this, but the pressure to open up to not restrict people's movement is still there, even though the data doesn't necessarily match the perception that things are getting better. So what are some problems with taking an objective only approach? Well, first of all, there is a consideration with the objective approach that only expertise may be relied upon. So there is a kind of paying attention to only what the experts are saying. Why is this problematic? Well, it's problematic in part because oftentimes experts have other agendas. This idea of latent problems, latent is a word that means hidden. So oftentimes, when you are looking at the objective approach, you do not pick up on problems that are hidden or aspects of the problem that is hidden. Because the experts are going to concentrate on their expertise, what they do know, and they may miss things that they don't know about. We often see this with oppressed groups who are over here going, hey, these things are a problem that because the expertise is not part, the experts are not part of that oppressed group, we miss those problems that remain hidden. The other thing is that not everybody experiences everything in exactly the same way. An objective approach is suggesting that the data is the end of that experience. And data tends to homogenize things. Data tends to say, okay, most people are like this, and therefore this is the problem. But the truth is that that word heterogeneous means that there is a wide variety of experiences. That the experiences are not all the same. Homogeneous means the same. Heterogeneous means different. So oftentimes, because we are relying upon data with the objective approach, we miss the outliers, the people who don't quite fit are not part of the majority. The other problem with the objective approach is that it kind of smooths over this question of how do we know what we know? How do we know that this is important? See data, objective data has to have a beginning, and that beginning is we're going to study that. And we look at that problem and we form questions about that problem and we collect raw data about that problem, and then we interpret that problem. But what if we miss a factor? What if we miss something that turns out to be very important but isn't part of the mix? Because the original people who studied it and collected the data didn't think about it. When you take subjectivity and add it to the objective approach, what you have is the question, what is meaningful to individuals, the people who you are studying? And if you listen to them, you may find out that there are some things that need to be looked at that need to be studied that have not been part of the data set. So we always come back to that question, how do we know what we know? How do we know what we know is answered often in the subjective? Because we've got to figure out what it means and what the data collection process was all about in order to understand whether we have good information or not, whether we have thorough information or not, whether we have enough information that we can know what we think we know. The other part of this is that the objective approach kind of assumes that things are set in stone. But the truth of the matter is if you study something scientifically, you are going to find new things all the time. And in order to get that message out and to change with that message, you need to be able to do more than the objective approach. You need to know what people think they know and get the message out to them about the ways things are changing. So when a study was done, how a study is done is an important part of understanding what that study is telling us. And if things have changed since that study was done, we need to be able to account for that and rework that, which is good. That's part of what science is, but it also means that we need to change the mind and the beliefs of the people that we are giving this information to. And an objective approach can be kind of confusing sometimes to a populist who have to support this policy or that policy because of those changes. Social problems have to be seen as experienced by practical actors in everyday life. Now what does that mean? It means that people are being affected by this on a material level in their lives, in their everyday lives. And they have to react to this. If unemployment is high and you don't have a job, you have to react to this. If there is crime in your neighborhood and you're not sure what to do about it, you react to this crime. You react to health care. You react to all of these problems that come up in discussions about social problems and how you experience it and how it affects your everyday life is an important part of understanding social problems. So what do we mean when we're saying that we want to have a subjective approach added to this objective approach? Well, the subjective approach is always going to start with the idea of meaning. When you talk about symbolic interactionism and social constructionism, what you really are talking about is how do people come together and know what each other means? How do we know the meaning of what people are saying, what people are doing and so forth? And this subjective approach adds to our understanding of the objective approach because it's through this meaning that all that objective data gets interpreted. So what's involved in this objective approach and meaning making? Well, categories are important because categories are kind of the first way that we start sorting out the world and helping us understand the world. And what categories you pick is important will affect how you think about something. So categories can be things like demographics, the way we think about people. It can be categories about how we think about particular problems and what this problem is more important than that problem. It can be categories that are based upon personal experience and this rings true to me. It's in the true category. This rings false to me. It's in the false category. We categorize things all the time as part of the way that we make meaning. We also pay very strict attention to the reactions of other people. And as such, we're always anticipating and sort of reworking what we're going to say and how we think based upon the reactions we receive. Now, most of this have an expectation of what that reaction will be and whether that expectation is net or not will affect whether or not we make changes in how we think or what we do. Our belief system also affects us if we believe something is right versus wrong or we believe something is good versus bad. Or we believe that something is superior and more valuable than something else. This will affect what we think is important and what we don't think is important when we encounter objective data. Sometimes it's all the way to whether we believe that data or not. We oftentimes talk about the source of information as important and understanding whether or not we believe that information. So beliefs are part of meaning making and our belief system and our value system can color the way we think about something. It can make us biased towards one kind of thinking versus another kind of thinking and understanding people's beliefs and biases can help us sort out the debates about policy that are going on because we can understand that if this belief is very important to this group and not that important to another group it can create a conflict that can make solving a problem very difficult. Typifications is a word that you're going to become more familiar with later in the semester. Typifications is basically shortcuts in the way that we talk about things. So a stereotype is a typification but not all typifications are stereotypes. So for instance if I say child you have a vision in your head of what a child looks like. That's a typification. What you think of when I use that word is a shortcut. I don't have to describe to you everything about children in order to evoke some meaning around the word child or children. So we'll talk more about typifications later but typifications are very important with subjective approaches because this is this affects and gives bias to our meanings. And if something is easy to talk about because there are typifications for it that makes it easier to make an argument rather than new things that do not have. Typifications become harder to make the argument because we don't have those kind of cultural and verbal shortcuts that will get us to what we're trying to say faster. And like I said we'll talk about that more later in the semester. And then finally social resources are important. Now what do we mean by social resources? Well we're really talking about like things that are important within our own cultures. So you can think of culture as kind of a well that has a whole lot of things in it that you learned about and probably take for granted. That is now available to you when you talk to other people who share your culture. So we draw upon those resources in order to get people to understand what we're talking about and what we think is important. So social resources can include the meanings of words and so forth but it can also include like different privileges we have because of the social positions that we have within our society. It can include works that people have done before about this. So instead of having to start from scratch we can say okay we're going to base this on you know like for instance in discussions about health care one of the social resources we have is discussing other countries. So because there has been a lot of work in studying other countries systems and whether or not universal health care works. We don't have to start from scratch talking about universal health care. We can start by saying well do we like the British model more than we like the Canadian model more than the Swedish model and so forth and so the idea behind this is that because those resources people have already written people have already studied people have already discussed and talked about it those things exist. We don't have to reinvent the wheel we can go and evoke those you know reference those things that have already been talked about that have already been said. So this chapter is introducing the idea that we are going to be taking a constructionist subjective approach to understanding social problems and that is the basic premise of the book thinking about social problems. And we'll pick this up when we start with chapter two.