Category: Sally Raskoff

Learning Sociological Lessons from Party Crashers

On By econnellIn Sally Raskoff, Social Psychology, Theory3 Comments

RaskoffBy Sally Raskoff

I recently had the pleasure of attending a major decade birthday party (40!) at a winery. The party was up a hill in an area separate from the winery’s general tasting/party area. There was a sign at the bottom of the hill that said “Private Party.”

Well into the party, two men came up the hill, looked around, and headed toward the table with the wine bottles. They were engaged in conversation by one of the guests who was not aware that they were not invited. They were both well into their wine drinking and not very logical in their conversational abilities. Some other guests encountered them and let them know that we were aware that they were there and that they were crashing a private party.

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Junk Mail and the Sociological Imagination

On By econnellIn Sally Raskoff, Sex and Gender, Social Institutions: Work, Education, and MedicineLeave a comment

RaskoffBy Sally Raskoff

As you learn more and more about sociology and how to use your sociological imagination, keep an eye out for the many everyday items that cross your path. You can use those items to know more about our society.

For example, the following two-sided laminated flyer came my way a few days ago, thanks to a good friend. She had received it in her mailbox.

One side is bold, red, white, and blue, announcing “College Men” who can move your stuff. They are friendly, use tools and trucks, and “customers prefer us 1 bijillion times more than the other guys.”

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Why Does Gender Matter in Sports?

On By econnellIn Popular Culture and Consumption, Sally Raskoff, Sex and Gender9 Comments

RaskoffBy Sally Raskoff

In 2009, I posted a blog about sex categories, intersex, sport, and cultural norms about identity.

Has much changed since then? In professional sports, categorizing eligibility to compete as a female is based on testosterone levels. They have moved from typing genitals—are the ”right” parts there? To chromosomes—is she an XX? To hormone levels—are her testosterone or androgen levels in the appropriate range that signifies female?

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Racial Construction and Appropriation

On By econnellIn Behind the Headlines, Race and Ethnicity, Sally RaskoffLeave a comment

RaskoffBy Sally Raskoff

Have you heard about the woman in Spokane, Washington, the former head of the local NAACP chapter who resigned when people discovered that her identified race did not match her ancestry?

I’m talking about the case of Rachel Dolezal. With white ancestry but a strong identification with African American realities, she maintains that her racial identity is black. She passed as black by changing her appearance until her parents spoke to the media about their confusion with her mismatched self-identity.

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Work and Technology

On By econnellIn Sally Raskoff, Social Institutions: Work, Education, and Medicine, Theory3 Comments

RaskoffBy Sally Raskoff

NPR recently ran a story with a fun interactive calculator that estimates the chances that technology will automate or replace people in a specific type of job.

Of course, I had to look up sociologists! The good news is that we only have a 5.9 percent chance of being automated. Whew!

Many sociology graduates use their skills to work in marketing or other types of jobs that require survey research. What are the chances of those types of jobs becoming automated? A bit higher, at 23.1 percent. Sociology graduates often go into social work or counseling of some type.  Those in mental health and substance abuse fields have only have a 0.3 percent of being automated.

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Surrogacy: An International Birth Market

On By econnellIn Globalization, Relationships, Marriage and Family, Sally Raskoff5 Comments

SrBy Sally Raskoff

News about the terrible earthquake in Nepal drew attention to the practice of Israeli citizens using Indian surrogates who give birth to their babies in Nepal. The newborns have been sent home with their Israeli parents, yet these surrogates, along with other pregnant surrogates, were left behind. Many of the news articles mention that 26 newborn babies just went home, some with their new parents, while the remaining 100 pregnant surrogates – and those 26 women who had recently given birth – are left in Nepal. Israel’s Interior Minister has evidently just approved allowing the other pregnant surrogates come to Israel to avoid the earthquake aftermath and give birth to healthy babies.

How do we interpret what’s going on here to make sense of it? Use your sociological imagination, of course! Think of theories, theorists, research, terms, and concepts that can help us make sense of this practice.

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Measures of Central Tendency

On By econnellIn Relationships, Marriage and Family, Sally Raskoff, Statistics and Methods4 Comments

RaskoffBy Sally Raskoff

Have you taken a statistics course? Don’t wait too long if you are procrastinating. Mastering that material helps with other classes and in life.

One of the key concepts within statistics is measures of central tendency: mean, median, and mode. Each one tells us about how the data, for one variable or concept, cluster together although each are calculated differently.

The mean is the numerical average. You’ve probably already been calculating means —also known as averages. Add up however many scores or values in your data and divide by how many you have.

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Engendering Sex and Gender

On By econnellIn Sally Raskoff, Sex and GenderLeave a comment

RaskoffBy Sally Raskoff

In sociology, and some other social sciences, we take a close look at sex and gender and identify how those concepts are quite different even though society conflates them together.

Sex, being the more biological dimension of body type differences, and gender, the more social construction linked to identity and social roles, both define us as individuals and both are built into the very fabric of human societies.

In our society, we have long had the assumption that sex has only two categories, male and female, and upon that we build gender into two categories, men and women. Biology informed us that those two sex categories are the way it is. Since we put sex and gender together, our society then has traditionally recognized only those two genders.

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Sharing Sociological Knowledge

On By econnellIn Race and Ethnicity, Sally Raskoff3 Comments

RaskoffBy Sally Raskoff

The more you learn about sociology, the more opportunities you might notice to use it. In our personal and professional lives, this can get tricky.

How you share it may be important. When you learn something and try to share that information, sometimes our loved ones don’t want to hear it, so they don’t listen, or they discount what you said, so they reject it in whole or in part.

This may happen more often for first-generation college students. Personal conflicts with family and other loved ones may arise for students from households with no college experience.

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Fear, Travel, and Anomie

On By econnellIn Behind the Headlines, Sally Raskoff, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change, Theory19 Comments

RaskoffBy Sally Raskoff

Sociologists explore the ways in which societies experience and produce fear. Frank Furedi and Barry Glassner both wrote books with nearly similar titles in the late 1990s on the culture of fear. Within the Everyday Sociology Blog, Karen Sternheimer has written about how fears of media itself distract from other issues, such as poverty and inequality.

Societies spend a lot of resources on issues that are not as much of a threat to most people than other issues, as in the case of Ebola or the Flu, as Sternheimer wrote in a recent post. One of those is much more likely to affect more people—and kill more people—and it’s not the first disease mentioned. Sociologists explore how and why fears are manufactured, as well as who benefits from the construction of fears, particularly fears of things that are unlikely to harm most people.

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