Address the following questions as you write a literature review.
What theories/concepts do scholars use to explain a social phenomenon you are interested in? How do theories contradict or compliment with each other?
How have other scholars answered to your research question (or a similar question)? What kind of data did they use to do so? What are limitations of their research?
What are common findings across different studies on this topic? What are contradictions among them? How can you explain contradictions?
What questions are left unanswered, and are worth further investigation?
Based on what you have read, what would be a likely answer to your research question?
In other words, what hypothesis does this set of literature lead you to?
Category: ASA
You will write a research paper including a theoretical analysis. The purpose of this paper is to examine a particular form of deviant behavior. For example, you might choose to research a very serious form of deviant behavior, such as terrorism, or you might choose to research a milder form of deviant behavior, such as tattooing. You will provide basic information on the topic. As well, you will provide a theoretical analysis. In this analysis, you can focus on either the rule-breakers, or the rule-makers. For example, if you focus on the rule-breakers (for more serious forms of deviance), you will provide an etiological analysis on why individuals become rule breakers. So, in the case of terrorists, you will first address basic information about the topic and then provide the theoretical analysis of what social scientists know about the causes of this form of deviant behavior. If you choose a milder form of deviance, you might want to focus on the rule-makers (or you can still focus on the rule-breakers). If you focus on the rule-makers, you will address the question of why the behavior came to be defined as deviant in the first place. So, for example, if you
address the issue of hyperactivity, you could focus on basic sociological information about hyperactivity and then examine the societal forces that led to the redefining of previously defined bad children to sick children or how the rule-makers defined/redefined the deviance (and not why deviants break the rules). In either case, you will utilize academic references: books from the university library or journal articles. You will need to use ASA citation formatting.
You will write a research paper including a theoretical analysis. The purpose of this paper is to examine a particular form of deviant behavior. For example, you might choose to research a very serious form of deviant behavior, such as terrorism, or you might choose to research a milder form of deviant behavior, such as tattooing. You will provide basic information on the topic. As well, you will provide a theoretical analysis. In this analysis, you can focus on either the rule-breakers, or the rule-makers. For example, if you focus on the rule-breakers (for more serious forms of deviance), you will provide an etiological analysis on why individuals become rule breakers. So, in the case of terrorists, you will first address basic information about the topic and then provide the theoretical analysis of what social scientists know about the causes of this form of deviant behavior. If you choose a milder form of deviance, you might want to focus on the rule-makers (or you can still focus on the rule-breakers). If you focus on the rule-makers, you will address the question of why the behavior came to be defined as deviant in the first place. So, for example, if you
address the issue of hyperactivity, you could focus on basic sociological information about hyperactivity and then examine the societal forces that led to the redefining of previously defined bad children to sick children or how the rule-makers defined/redefined the deviance (and not why deviants break the rules). In either case, you will utilize academic references: books from the university library or journal articles. You will need to use ASA citation formatting.
Based on YRBSS Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, I will attach an Introduction for this assignment after you get some background information based on this assignment the TASK is to Review the 3 tables I attached based on 2019 tables of trends through out the years on 1991 through 2019 on YRBSS. Identify three trends in numbers of noticeable patterns that are intriguing, surprising and add some knowledge and challenges. Recognize the pattern between categories for each trend (Only 3) write 1 page identifying the trend, identify the exact table the data came from, record the exact information and then explain what is being observed, what is surprising and a challenge.
So, reflect on the nature of a victimless crime. What do you think is the best policy for dealing with prostitution? Should it be the current legal response which primarily concentrates on prostitutes and not the buyers. Or, do you think it should be more deviantized than made illegal? . What about the small group of FDLS, for example, who engage in polygamy and are very deviant from the perspective of the dominant society? What is the best policy for dealing with this group?
I have attached the instructions instructions below in attachments and also a template to follow
the first theory is functionalism based of Emile Durkheim
The second theory is Marxism based of Karl Marx
you will need to find two media sources dated from the past 3 years if it is a news article further instructions attached
Research Paper Assignment
Title Page (ASA Style)
Abstract (this should be the only thing on the 2nd page of your paper)
ALL PAGES SHOULD BE DOUBLE SPACED.
Brief summary of paper (purpose of paper, major findings, and implications).
**Write this section after you have finished writing your paper.
Section I. Introduction (no heading for this section: 1-2 pages)
Describe in detail the scope and trends in the social phenomenon that you are investigating. Ensure that you include information about why this is an important topic to study (what are the consequences to individuals, groups or society) if relevant and if possible provide national statistics or the best information available that describe the scope (size) of the problem.
***Use academic journal articles or government publications/statistical information available on the web as sources for this section.
The last sentence of this section should be the thesis statement (or research question) for your paper.
Section II. (1-2 paragraphs)
Methodology: describe how articles for your literature review were collected, describe how many articles are used in your review (should match the number on your table) and summarize the topics included in the literature review Section. Include a Table that summarizes the important aspects (themes) of the literature in this area.
Literature Review. (6-8 pages)
This section should be comprised of a review of the literature that is relevant to your thesis statement. This section may have multiple sub-headings that should be consistent with aspects (dimensions/ themes) of the problem (phenomenon) identified in your research question or thesis statement. Fully describe each area that has been researched by integrating results from all articles that address a particular sub-topic of your research area. You may have some sub-topics that have been addressed by only one research article; but, where two or more articles investigate one topic the information across articles should be integrated in your description of results of the research. You can also discuss the conclusions drawn by the authors of the studies about the results, again these should be organized according to the sub-topics. So for each sub-heading in your literature review, there should be a discussion for research finding and then authors conclusions about these results.
(This section should consist entirely of information obtained from academic journal articles or scholarly books that are displayed on your Table).
Section IV. Discussion (1-2 pages)
In this section you need to briefly summarize the important findings from the literature review, then you should identify 1.) the gaps in the literature; 2.) policies of CJ system and/or other institutions and 3.) practices that need to be supported, modified or investigated in order to prevent or reduce the likelihood of this type of problem from occurring in the future.
References (1-2 pages)
The reference list and the in-text citations should be in ASA format. References are double spaced in hanging paragraphs; the list is double spaced.
Dont forget that all pages should be numbered with the exception of the title page.
The Question:
Let’s talk Marx. Some questions to prompt your discussion: Of the concepts we have studied which are relevant today (give examples)? And what are your reflections on the central thrust of Marx’s argument?
Videos To Use:
Marx Theory of Alienation:
http://openmedia.yale.edu/projects/courses/fall09/socy151/embed/socy151_10_100609_emb.mp4
Marx Theory of Class and Exploitation:
http://openmedia.yale.edu/projects/courses/fall09/socy151/embed/socy151_13_101509_emb.mp4
Why Marxism is On The Rise Again:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism
Notes(s) To Use:
This week we plunge more deeply into Marxs thought studying some of the key concepts in his work. So, I thought it might be good to provide something akin to a Cliffs Notes guide to some of these concepts in this weeks introduction.
By now you no doubt have begun to see that Karl Marx is both a complicated person and a complicated thinker whose work sometimes contradicts itself, but is always undertaken in pursuit of a grand vision of what he believes will be a better world. He wants to know why things are the way they are so they can be put aright. As his famous quote which is inscribed on his grave puts it: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
As we noted last week, Marx drew upon Hegels dialectic to explain the progression of society from one stage to another. Each form of society carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, generating in effect, an antithesis. The tension and conflict arising from this would result in a synthesis, a new form of social organization.
Marx believed the society around him had moved into a form of social organization shaped by capitalist production. This was a system in which money ruled. Those who had money invested it in the production of commodities to sell to make more money. Famously expressed as:
M C M
It seems all well and good, right? The capitalist invests money n the production of goods. That creates jobs. People with jobs can provide for their needs and buy stuff. The capitalist sells the goods they produce, has money to invest back into the business and also turns a profit which rewards him for his role in the process.
So what is wrong with that? What are the seeds of its own destruction buried inside this system?
Well, to get at that, you have to think about what Marx says capital is the product of labor. And to get at that we need to go one step deeper and examine his labor theory of value. Marx thinks the value of a good produced in this system can be defined as follows:
Value = constant capital + variable capital + surplus
Where constant capital is the accumulated labor (i.e., the portion of investment) required to produce a good; variable capital is the wages paid to workers, and surplus is the extra amount of money (above the other costs) people are willing to pay for the item.
Here is where the rub begins. The only thing workers get out of this are the wages paid for their labor, the very labor that makes it possible for the capitalist to produce the good in the first place. They dont get any of the surplus which goes into the pockets of the capitalist as profit and/or accumulated capital for future investment. This, says Marx, is a form of exploitation. The capitalist gets rich and the workers if they are lucky get by. And in Marxs day most just barely got by; to be a worker then was to live a precarious, poverty-filled existence on the edge of calamity. No system built on this sort of exploitation could go on forever before the exploited rose up and overthrew it, Marx reasoned.
Wait, wait, you say. Havent things always been like this?
Not according to Marx. Commodity production, the form of social organization that preceded this capitalist mode of production was fundamentally different on one critical point. It was a commercial system built around individual artisans, farmers and merchants. People produced commodities to sell in the marketplace for money to buy commodities they needed. The formula looks like this:
C M C
Note that unlike the other formula which begins and ends in money meaning money is the driving force this one begins and ends with commodities. Self-employed people make or sell stuff to buy what they need from other self-employed folks.
To illustrate, lets take the example of a cobbler. This person gets to design and make shoes just the way they wish. They pick the color, choose the style and set the price. They determine how many they will make and, thus, how hard they will work.
Things are very different for our cobbler in a system of capitalist production. The capitalist tells them what color and style the shoes will be, as well as how many hours they will work. The cobbler has simply become a cog in an industrial machine producing a product to make more money for the capitalist.
All of which brings us to a second seed of destruction within the capitalist system. Remember our observation from last week that Marx believed humans are creative beings by nature? Well, the cobbler in the second scenario above doesnt get much chance to be creative. In fact the system turns him into a cog on an assembly line, robbing him of control over his own creative capacity. Work becomes a necessary means to earn the necessities of life, not a means of self-fulfillment achieved by the exercise of ones creative capacity. Not only does the worker become alienated, but the very thing necessary for survival the sale of ones labor is the source of that alienation. Thus, the worker cannot escape the source of his alienation without overthrowing the system.
At this point, you are probably wondering if the system is so bad, if it exploits and alienates the workers, why dont they just rise up and overthrow it. The answer, according to Marx, is that the workers have false consciousness. They know something is wrong and that their lives should be better. But they have identified the wrong things as the cause of their problems, focusing on this, that or the other racial or religious minority, etc. as the source. Once they develop class consciousness and understand the capitalist system is the real source of their lot in life, they will revolt.
Wow, thats a lot and it is only the tip of the iceberg. You could spend months studying Marx some folks even make a career of it. But we only have a couple of weeks, so I am focusing on a very broad outline of the main thrust of his work.
In the end, was Marx right? I would say yes on some things and no on others. His ideas certainly had a huge impact on the world, often bent and transmogrified by others into distortions that caused great harm. Some of his observations about the nature of capitalism seem right on target; others are way off base. But 130 years after his death, you cant begin to study sociological theory without exploring the work of Karl Marx. That is a pretty long shadow.
Some key concepts in Marx
As we start this second week of studying about Marx, I thought it might be helpful to post the following thumbnail of a few of his key concepts.
Alienation – One of the fundamental assumptions upon which Karl Marx built his theory is that man is by nature a creative being capable of altering the environment to suit his needs and desires. It was this characteristic, Marx believed, that set man apart from the other members of the animal kingdom. Work is a means to provide for the necessities of life, but it is also something much more than that for Marx. It is a way for an individual to transform the substance of the world into the product of his or her imagination. This engagement in an activity so fundamental to our human nature brings fulfillment, a sense of meaning and joy — as well as our daily bread.
In earlier, pre-capitalist societies people exercised great control over their work life. The cobbler decided what style shoes he would build, how many he would make, and was free to spend as much time as he wished to produce an excellent product. Work not only filled his tummy, it filled his soul as well. In a capitalist society, our cobbler no longer owned the means of production. Instead, he was one of many workers in a factory producing shoes. Someone else told him what style to make, in what color and how many shoes he must make in a day. Our cobbler was reduced to being a cog in an industrial machine geared to make money for someone else. Gone was the fulfillment that once came from being the master of his own work. With each day in the factory, the worker felt more and more alienated from his true nature.
The insidious thing about capitalism, according to Marx, was that it created a trap for the proletariat. To provide for their material necessities, most people had to work in settings where they did not control the means of production. The very work necessary for survival also denied them the fulfillment, satisfaction and joy that work should have provided. Thus, alienation was built into the system.
Commodification – Marx argued that it was inherent in the nature of capitalism to turn everything and anything into a commodity that could be bought and sold. This is one of his most prescient insights, I think. Here we are nearly 150 years after the publication of Capital and we are engaged in a frenzy of commodification. Crime and punishment? We have turned prisons into real estate investments. Companies that once made their money running prisons now entice wealthy investors to turn a profit off building and owning prisons. Water? Water rights are bought and sold as companies move to privatize this natural resource. Clean air? There is always cap-and-trade.
False consciousness Marx faced a conundrum. If things were so bad why didnt the workers of the world unite as he urged them to in The Communist Manifesto? The problem was certainly not that the proletariat was not conscious of the fact that life was not going as it should for them. The problem, Marx said, was rooted in false consciousness; i.e., the tendency of the proletariat to blame the wrong things (people of other races, religions, nationalities, etc.) for their lot in life. The counter-point to false consciousness is class consciousness, a realization that capitalism is the root cause of their problems and that consequently the proletariat must stand united.
Means of production The things such as land, natural resources, technology, etc. that are necessary to produce material goods are known as the means of production.
The means of production fit hand-in-glove with the relationship of production or the social maneuverings that people enter into in order to produce material goods. Together the relationships of production and the means of production create what Marx referred to as a mode of production.
It is the mode of production, i.e. the interplay between means and relationships of production that defines a historical age. Remember, Marx took an evolutionary view of history in which each historical age paved the way for a higher order. Capitalism was a mode of production that would ultimately give way to socialism.
My own take on all of this is that if you squint and look at this process of means of production and relationship of production giving rise to mode of production, you can see the influence of the dialectic. Thesis and antithesis giving rise to synthesis means and relationships of production giving rise to mode of production with very real-world factors like changes in technology and the shifting importance of land as a catalyst for the process.
Social Class For Marx social class essentially revolved around one thing ones relationship to the means of production. If you owned the means of production, you were a capitalist. If you did not, you were a member of the proletariat. As they used to say in the South: You either own the farm or you pick cotton for the man. (Although, I would be remiss if I didnt mention the bourgeoisie, the affluent middle class who did not own the means of production but maintained a comfortable standard of living by serving the interests of the capitalists.)
As we move through this second week on Marx, I wanted to offer this brief review of the dialectic. It is a key idea and one that under-girds Marx’s idea that human society will evolve toward a higher state until it ultimately reaches a communist utopia. This line of thought, the idea of progress, stands in marked contrast to Khaldun’s cyclical theory of the rise and fall of empires.
Darwin envisioned evolution as adaptation that made an organism better fitted to survive in its environment. If life forms evolved from simple to complex, it was because complexity made them better suited for survival. Subsequently, however, we have often come to think of evolution as a progression toward higher orders of life. For Marx, social evolution was driven by dialectical materialism. Each age bore the seeds of its own destruction, and in the conflict between thesis and antithesis a new synthesis – a new age — is created.
Many scholars argue that as a young student Marx was heavily influenced by Hegel from whom he borrowed this thesis-antithesis mechanism. Hegel believed this process was drawing humanity ever closer to God. But where Hegel thought this pattern was driven by a clash of ideas, Marx saw it as being powered by material conditions.
Oddly, while Marx rejected the idealism of Hegel and argued for a more material view of the world, he kept the idea that this process was leading humanity toward a utopia. Marx seems to have thought he had found the mechanism driving human history, and he believed there was definitely a predetermined destination. To me there is something rather messianic about Marx’s vision of the communist society.
References:
Edles, Laura D. and Scott Appelrouth. 2010. Sociological Theory in the Classical Era. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
Grenfell, Michael James (ed). 2012. Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts. New York: Routledge.
Scott, John. 2014. A Dictionary of Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marx Theory of Alienation:
http://openmedia.yale.edu/projects/courses/fall09/socy151/embed/socy151_10_100609_emb.mp4
Marx Theory of Class and Exploitation:
http://openmedia.yale.edu/projects/courses/fall09/socy151/embed/socy151_13_101509_emb.mp4
Why Marxism is On The Rise Again:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism
Read and summarize the article attached below.
Things to include:
1. Introduction- What is the article about?, What is the author’s research question?, Does the researcher present a hypothesis?
2. Methods- What methods did the author use (e.g., interviews, surveys, secondary data)?, Who made up the authors sample?
3. Results- What were the researchers main findings?, If the author presented a hypothesis, was it supported?
4. Are there any limitations of the research?
5. How does the author explain the significance or implications of their article?
6. What questions did the author leave unanswered?
7. How will you use this to advance a proposed policy?
The topic I am selecting for the annotated bibliography is: “The conservative tradition in Southern Politics”.
NOTES:
Bibliography reviews 15 or more items, at least 10 of which should be scholarly sources (books, peer-reviewed articles from academic journals, original sources such as diaries or government documents and reports). Reference entries conform to American Sociological Association (ASA) style guidelines.
(Failure to adhere to ASA style guidelines will lower point score to 68 regardless of number of entries reviewed.) Once you have studied each source, write an extensive summative annotated bibliographic note for the work. (https://lib.trinity.edu/creating-an-annotated-bibliography/) work.
The reference entry must be formatted according to American Sociological Association (ASA) style. (For examples of ASA style reference entries see https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/asa_style/references_page_formatting.html (Links to an external site.) Entries should be grouped according to type (scholarly and substantive) and numbered. The annotated bibliography will be scored using the following rubric.
