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Sociology and Perspective Essay

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Sociology-Family Page 1. Family A family is “a set of people related by blood, marriage or some other agreed-upon relationship, or adoption, who share the primary responsibility for reproduction and caring for members of society.” (Schaefer, 2009) A family is considered a social institution. This social institution is one that can be applied to all three sociological theories which are functionalism, conflict, and interactionism. The first sociological theory is functionalism. A functionalism perspective is a “sociological approach that emphasizes the way in which the parts of a society are structured to maintain its stability.” (Schaefer, 2009) This simply means for in the instance of a family that the family in a whole is …show more content…

Though all three of these perspectives have this one major characteristic in common they also have some differences. For instance the functionalist perspective sees an unconscious smoothness to how the family interacts with each other. It is like a well oiled machine that each piece is important and without that one piece the machine will not work properly or at all. Functionalist view these interactions as something that is positive and rarely have many conflicts to overcome. While the conflict perspective seems to view consent struggles with many aspects of the family. There is first the conflicts that fill the inside of the family. Those are the struggles a member has with other members of the family for roles within the family. The other is the conflicts the family has as a whole with other families. These are usually over status's such as power, money, housing, political representation and etc. Families competing against other families to have more than the other families. Basically they want to outdo and be more important than others. Interactionism perspective is a mixture of both the other two perspectives. It is mircosociology and looks at every action to see meaning in them. They tend to look really close at how one thing effects other things. The best way to describe it is a cause and effect. Interactionism also looks at the dramaturgical approach. The dramaturgical approach is "when people are seen as theatrical

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