 In this video, we're going to be talking about Chapter 6, Social Problems in Everyday Life from the book Thinking about Social Problems, and we will be reviewing concepts that are on the exam. So in this chapter, Lowsky is taking a look, kind of stepping back from the process and asking, what are the effects of successful social problems claims? What makes them successful and how do they affect changes both in policy and in our culture? We change the world by shaping policy and what she means by this is the objective world. So if a social problems claim gets to the point where it actually makes changes in policy, those changes in policy change the conditions in the world that we observe. These are objective changes. It changes the facts about our social world. But it also changes how we think about other people, how we evaluate people, how we evaluate those conditions. So there is this objective change, meaning something is now different in our world, and there is this subjective change, meaning people have changed their minds and their hearts and their values around evaluating people and conditions. So she talks about how social problems claims construct the images of how we think about people and how those things affect real people in real life. So one of the things that happens is we start to change how we think about types of people. A good example of this is before the disability rights movement and before the changes in laws such as the ADA, most people who were disabled were thought of as defective. There was a term when I was a kid called shut-ins, S-H-U-T-I-N-S, and this was referring to older people or disabled people who could not get out and be a part of society. Since access has an accommodation has changed. There's a real facts. There was a law that changed. It was called the Americans with Disabilities Act. That law was implemented in such a way that sidewalks changed, doors changed, ramps were added. All of these real objective changes happened. But also what happened is we changed the way we thought about persons who live with disabilities. These are now images of these people. It's a very different image than it was like 50 or 60 years ago. In fact, the term shut-in is never used anymore because people who have disabilities are able to get out and get around and be a part of society. They are not considered only worthy of staying home and being cared for. We also changed the way we think about what is and is not a problem. Perfect example of this is marijuana. So 33 states now have laws that have legalized to some extent or decriminalized to some extent possession and use of marijuana. It hasn't been that so long ago that marijuana was considered a really big problem that needed to be solved, that needed to address. There is this term called the gateway drug and the image that we had is that if you took marijuana, you couldn't help but go on to take all of these other more horrible things. And now people don't think that way. They see it as non-addictive. They see it as an alternative medication to opioids and other kinds of drugs that do create bad addictions. They see it as a personal choice on the part of people and not a public nuisance. We also, because of social problems claims, begin to rethink what needs are, what people actually do need and what they don't need. A really good example of this is related to marijuana, but the idea of drug addiction itself. So for a while it was considered the need of a drug addict to be put in jail and be punished for the things that they have done, the crimes that they've committed in, you know, taking heroin or whatever. Now a lot of people are beginning to see that as a need for rehab, a need for counseling, a need for, you know, going to Narcon or to Alcoholics Anonymous or something like that. So we have shifted in our focus from the criminality of it, which needs to be discouraged through the medicalization of it, which needs to be treated. And also it changes how we think about law, how we think about physical environments, how we think about services. So with the passage of the ADA, there were a lot of changes to physical environments. There were laws that were passed that had to be passed on the local level in order to get federal funding. And when those laws were passed on the local level, it changed the physical environment. It also created a whole class of attorneys that are well-versed in disability law who represent both businesses and persons with disabilities in order to work out the negotiation of accommodations. So here you have social issues that have been, that solutions have been argued for, that policies have changed, that the way we, that in turn has changed the way we think about specific things, specific people, specific problems, specific needs, laws, environmental services and so forth. And what Loski is talking about is that this is a change in cultural climate, that this actually goes further than simply being an objective change that we can measure. It's also a change in how we socialize our children, what kind of symbology we use in talking to each other. It evokes, you know, a difference in the way that we see our world. It changes some cultural themes. When we talk about battered women now, we don't have just the theme of a family anymore. We have a theme of a functional family versus a dysfunctional family. So we have new terminology that we use, that word dysfunctional family is a term that nobody really talked about before the 1980s. It also creates new emphasis on different cultures. So, you know, now that we have, for instance, legalized same sex marriage, then the emphasis on family is no longer an emphasis on man, woman, child. We have an understanding of family life as being a much broader category with an emphasis on people who want to live together and want to create a loving home, rather than just that nuclear family idea that we have in our head. And also in a change in cultural climate will change the way we evaluate conditions and people, because this is a change of values, and that just means a change of what's important and what is not important to us. We begin to have a different understanding of what is acceptable. We go back to the marijuana example on this, you know, people can talk freely about their marijuana use in a way that they couldn't do before. It changes what is at least tolerable. So, while a lot of people are not comfortable with same sex relationships since the same sex marriage has become the law of the land. You hear people evaluate that as they have a right to that. That's their thing. And it may not be acceptable to a highly religious person, but it is tolerable because it is part of freedom in their mind. It also can change what is unacceptable. Go back to mothers against drunk driving, driving while drunk, driving after having a drink has changed quite a bit. It's even changed during the time that mothers against drunk driving has been addressing the social issue. In the 1980s, it was the motto was not don't drink and drive. It was don't drive drunk. And it morphed into and changed in the 1990s to if you are going to drive, you shouldn't take one drink, a single drink, even though for most people, unless you're very, very low weight. One single drink will not make you impaired. It will not make you drunk. But that has become an unacceptable thing to take a drink of alcohol and then get behind the wheel. And then we have things that are no longer tolerated at all. And you see people say that in certain circumstances. A good example of this is the distinguishing between a person who is a child molester and a person who is a pedophile. Okay, so for a very long time when people talked about sexual abuse of children, they made a distinction. And that distinction was people who were sexually attracted to children. Those were pedophiles and people who abused children but did it for different motivations than sexual attraction. And they were called child molesters. Well, there is become a zero tolerance to people who abuse children sexually. And so the word pedophile has come to be a broader definition. Almost anybody who actively does something sexual, even if it is not considered under the law to be actual rape, is still considered pedophilia. And people talk about it in terms of sexual predators. And there is very little toleration for anybody who gets put in that category. Because it is a not tolerated condition where it used to be a little more nuanced in the way that people talked about it. Drug driving is also in that, you know, people who say I took one drink and I'm going to drive among some people that is just not tolerated anymore. You should not consume alcohol in any amount and get behind a wheel. So these are social evaluations of conditions and people that have changed considerably as social problems claims have been made and have been accepted and solutions have become public policy. And this, of course, has changed our real life, everyday life experiences. Now, Leweski turns to the topic of complexity. Now we've talked about how formula stories have a tendency to make it, to make talking about social problems much more simplistic than real life. So in this chapter in talking about real life, she begins to address the idea of how social change is not, is more complex. It's not like you have a problem, and you fix the problem, and now everybody's happy and we've successfully changed the world. It is a lot more complex than that and a lot more ongoing and not so neat. So both objective and subjective changes occur. And, you know, as we've been discussing, and those, those objective changes might be measurable and might be factual, but the subjective changes that interpret those objective changes make things a little bit more complex. Often because not everybody's point of view is the same, it creates counter claims, things that people are reacting to this. And now they're making changes that are different from the changes that have been made. And this is why political controversy continues. So you may have, for instance, see a good example of this would be Obamacare. Okay, so the Affordable Care Act, which essentially changed how insurance works in our society was passed in 2009. And it was an effort to bring insurance coverage to more people. And the hope was that that would make healthcare more fair to people would, and it would also create better health for people. To a certain extent, it has done that. There are a lot more people who have access to higher quality care than before, before this was passed. And there are some objective studies that demonstrate this. But people have different interpretations of this. And you have people who make counter claims all the time, who want to take back some or all of this, who have worked very hard over the last nine years, or sorry, 11 years to make, to make something different or to repeal that, or so forth. So, you know, it didn't really change everybody's subjective view, like the facts are there you can see more people have access. There are a number of studies that have demonstrated many benefits to that change in law. It's not perfect benefits. There are people who have are now required to buy insurance that weren't required to buy it before. And they see that as putting a burden on them. There are people who feel like it's not gone far enough. And therefore see it as too small of a change. So it still remains a controversy. It's still an ongoing discussion. Even though some objective changes have been made. Political power can often overcome general support or something. And boy, are we seeing this nowadays. Probably the best example of this is that in most research that has been done on public opinion around pro choice and people being able to choose women being able to choose whether or not they will terminate a pregnancy. It's something you know, like really like 70 to 80% agree with that in our country. Most people are pro choice. If you ask the question, they will support that idea. It has become law that there is a group of people who have a lot of political power who are who call themselves pro life and do not like the fact that we have legalized abortion. And they are constantly shaping the ways in which people are elected. They're constantly are shaping the policies that are made. It's been a big factor in the shaping of the Supreme Court and who has been appointed. And this is shows that even though objective changes have been made and a lot of a lot of data exists to show that there is general support for this. You still are up against some very powerful forces that would like to change it. Oftentimes changes are unchallenged. They get taken for granted and become popular wisdom, meaning that everybody just knows that that's the way it is. And as such, it can create a new set of problems without taking a look at how we got there or why we got there and so forth. So again, you know, something has changed. The social change is there that people don't remember why it changed that way. It becomes part of the way things are. And if the way things are create other problems, it becomes harder to change those other problems because of that taken for granted aspect of that change. And again, you know, she's emphasizing there is the objective reality and you can measure things. She wants to make sure you understand that because we are concentrating on subjective interpretation of that reality, we are not saying that it's not real. Things are real, but what matters also is how people think about that, interpret that, talk about that, how they create those ideas about people and conditions, even as that objective reality has changed. And our understanding of objective reality is not enough in our understanding of how social change works. We also must understand how people are thinking about those changes and objective reality. And the last point that she's trying to make about this and the reason that it remains complex is that the game is always on. And the reason by that is one solution of a social problem can lead to a number of other social problems. It can be reversed because of political power. It can be misinterpreted or the interpretation can change over time. So it's very rare that things change. That's it. We're done. We've successfully changed it and it's over with. And that is true of quite a few things in the realm of the social world. You know, there's a kind of history repeating itself that often happens as well. I mean, we're seeing this in terms of fighting for civil rights. In the 1960s moved us forward, but it seems like, you know, in some ways we're back to some of the problems that are still there. And we've slipped back a little bit by having these very prominent white supremacy groups that pick up steam and social media, get media attention from the mainstream media and so forth. So it's just the work is always ongoing. It's very rare for social change to be done. And that's because, you know, one of the basic tenants of social construction is that we are always creating our world. It is not ever a done deal. And so because the social problems game is a game of social construction, it is always going to be a part of. So how does this affect everyday life? You know, what does this mean to you in your everyday life? Well, for one thing, social construction is done by practical actors. These are people who have, you know, skin in the game, if you will, and as such, because they are practical actors, they may not be consistent. We also have changes in categorizations. So we may, in our everyday life, think in some categories when we're younger and as we grow older, we begin to change the categories that are important to us. We may decide that somebody is a victim or not a victim because we have changed the category of what victimhood is. We may also change who is a villain or not a villain and all because in our everyday experience as problems change, we begin to pick up on who are the bad guys and maybe not see some of the bad guys that were there before. So an example of changing who the type of villain, again, going back to marijuana legalization at one point, anybody who did drugs, including marijuana were considered bad people. Not so much anymore. They're just considered somebody who has, who's making a choice that is their personal choice. So we no longer see them as a villain just because they use marijuana. Somebody that we see that we've seen as a victim in the past might be a young man who just got a little drunk, had a bad night, ended up having sex with somebody that may or may not be that willing. And we kind of saw them as a victim of sowing your wild oats and being boys will be boys kind of thing and we no longer think of those guys as victims at all. We now put them in the category of villain and we talk about how men should be more responsible about the ways in which they treat women. So this is a, since the you two, me two movement and the, and the testimonies of women who have been sexually assaulted and sexually harassed by men. We've changed our minds and the way that we construct victims and villains and what used to be thought of as, you know, like that thing that happened at the party kind of thing so our everyday life is changed and not in always comfortable ways for a lot of people. There is always going to be competition when you make social change there. Nobody is ever going to propose a social change that everybody agrees on. There's going to be competition and how we categorize things. When you hear people talking about something is being quote unquote politically correct. So to one group of people that action is a just action that should be done out of consideration for people to another group of people that is a set of rules that are being imposed on them for by somebody else. That is very much a surface it's mint. They see those people is trying to look good, rather than actually doing something from their, from their own experience or their own mind and feeling. Another way that competition happens is that who gets to be the categorizer and who gets to be the categorized is often where the fight happens right. Good example of this is disability rights activism. So for a very long time when people talked about working with people with disabilities. The category was you are a victim, and you are somebody who needs help, and you don't speak for yourself. And as the movement came into being there was a motto among disabled activists, nothing about us without us. And what that means is that if you want to talk about making changes that makes the lives of people with disabilities easier, you need to include the voices of the people who are living this in their everyday life. So instead of categorizing them, they become the categorizer. And then of course you can't talk about social change without talking about power dynamics. Power dynamics are an important aspect of the social problems work and the reason that power is always going to be part of the equation is because people who have power would have already made the change. It wouldn't be a problem, right? It's a problem because people in power don't see it as a problem and have not used their power to make a change in it. So that's why you are always going to be trying to get somebody in power to change their minds or their hearts about something. This work, this process of evaluating and categorizing low ski calls social problems work and what she means by that is that people actually have to think and do things in order to make this change happen. It isn't just a matter of thinking. It's a matter of money. It's a matter of time. It's a matter of effort. It actually is a kind of work that gets done. And that work can be hard sometimes because as we're evaluating and categorizing things, our experiences are complex. They are not easily categorized. We don't always see them as totally good or totally bad. The other thing is that very often when we're talking about categories, categories, especially categories of people, there are always exceptions. Because while groups of people can be measured and talked about as a group, you can't assume that what you're talking about on a group level translates to understanding each individual that is in that group. And oftentimes those categories can be imposed by somebody else. And people within that category do not have a sense that they are part of that category. They see themselves in a much different light. Also, what we think is right and what we think is wrong is not necessarily going to stay the same our entire life. This is true on a personal level and this is true on a collective level. Morality is not fixed. And because of that, we are always going to be doing this work of reevaluating and recategorizing. The other thing is that these evaluating and categorizing might be used by practical actors in their everyday lives, but it could be regarded as so far away from your everyday life that you don't make this change. You don't reevaluate, you don't recategorize. It just isn't relevant to some practical actors. And then of course cultural resources can affect this. So cultural resources are things that are available to people within a particular society that they can draw upon to be able to understand these categories and reevaluate things. If these cultural resources need to change considerably, then it can be very difficult to convince them to do this reevaluation, this recategorization. And also if those cultural resources are actually working against the stuff that you're trying to reevaluate and recategorize, then it can be a very uphill battle to get that change. Because culture, the nature of culture is that people who are within a culture, who have been raised within that culture, internalize what they've learned and they internalize these resources. And they don't think, especially if they're part of the dominant culture, they don't think, oh, that's the way I understand it. They think this is what people do. They take it for granted. And because of that taking for granted aspect of these cultural resources, if a cultural resource needs to change in order to affect this reevaluation, this recategorizing, it can be very, very difficult. The next thing that Lowsky gets into is what she calls personal identities and collective identities. These are the way that people think about themselves, the way they identify who they are and the way they identify who other people are. So personal identity is asking the question on a very individual level, who am I? Now we use a lot of cultural resources, a lot of categories, a lot of ideas about what is valuable and what is not valuable to define who we are. Very rarely, and I would assert never, but I don't like to use that word never, do people see themselves in a vacuum? They always are going to consider at least what my family thinks, what other people think about me, what society thinks about me and so forth. But we also, on a personal level, when we interact with somebody else, are asking ourselves who are you as well. So there is this understanding of who we are and who the other person is, and we draw upon these new categories, these social changes to change our understanding and answer these questions differently. But there's also a collective aspect to this, because we're talking sociology and we're talking social forces here and social problems. And so that collective change in identity changes the way we categorize people. It changes the way we evaluate what is good and what is bad within our society. It changes our practical experiences as a collective. So these, these affect our everyday life. If we are given new types of categories of people, if we are given new resources to evaluate our social worlds, this may not change every individual in the collective, but it does give context to your personal identity. And she deals in the latter part of the chapter with this problem of constructing a victim. So there, you know, we've said a number of times, formula stories are stories that simplify things. And one of the problems with simplifying the definition of a victim is that most victims are not that good, right? Not that perfect. But the pros are that, you know, if you call somebody a victim, then you're saying they're a good person. You're saying they're not to blame. You've released them from responsibilities. So, you know, being a victim can kind of be a good thing under this construction because you no longer feel guilty. You no longer feel like it's you that has to change. The cons, though, are that you are no longer in control of your life. I mean, if you're not somebody who's responsible for this, then you are somebody who has lost control or is constructed as somebody who is not controlled in what happens to them to yourself. Also, you lose a sense of self-sufficiency because we're constructing you as somebody who has had bad things happen to you through no fault of your own. We are also saying that there are things that you can't take care of yourself. And oftentimes a lot of people who are put in the victim role feel like they are a failure, that they've done something wrong. Even though they are not to blame, they still are not able to take control of their lives the way most of us feel we should do and act positively on the world. So we have to be careful in constructing the victim role because we can make, impose upon people a sense of failure and helplessness that is an unintended consequence of trying to help them. And therefore, you hear a lot of people who are constructed as victims talk about themselves, not as victims, but as survivors. And this is a language that came up, especially in the 1980s when people started talking publicly about childhood sexual abuse, about being raped and other types of crimes that have been committed against them. And they rejected this label victim and started arguing that they were survivors, that they were somebody who had been through this and had faced a lot of issues through no fault of their own. But they were taking control of their lives now and they were moving forward by dealing with the impacts that this victimhood had had on them. And they prefer to think of themselves and construct their personal identity, but also asking other people to construct the collective identity as somebody who has survived, not somebody that was a victim.