Sociology Questions: The Issue Of Social Stratification (Essay Sample)

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Sociology Questions
Question 1
Many residents of the United States live in poverty because of the issue of social stratification, with a majority of citizens falling in the classification of slaves and lower classes of stratification. Many of them cannot find regular work, and when they do, the pay is low. These classes are also politically weak, so they cannot exercise power to influence their employment opportunities.
Question 2
Some of the causes of poverty include social inequality that is the reason for minimal job openings for those with little or no education. The growth of non-unionized workplaces that only offer a minimum wage and no retirement benefits or medical cover, and rapid advances in technology that have seen human workforce being replaced by technology, are other reasons. To overcome poverty, people must develop class consciousness, through which they will be able to collectively bargain for social change, and end the exploitation by the people who belong to the upper class (Schaefer 190).
Question 3
Social upward mobility refers to rising from a level of being considered unfortunate, to a level where a person is seen as wealthy and has moved from one social or economic class to another. Examples of people who have joined the forces of upward mobility are the former president of the United States Barack Obama and the movie star Leonardo DiCaprio. When a student from a poor background graduates and finds permanent employment, they are considered to have acquired social mobility.
Question 4
The poor in the United States today are the African Americans, the Hispanics, and the Blacks. Families headed by females are also considered inferior. Feminization of poverty refers to the notion that women represent the biggest percentages of poverty in the world. In other words, the burden of poverty, unemployment, and gender biases is widely borne by women, especially because of the rising number of single mother households.
Question 5
The movie Titanic is an illustration of stratification as the wealthy in the first and second classes had better chances of survival than those in the third class. When the ship began to sink, the rich were rescued first, and sixty-five percent of them survived, and only twenty-five percent of those from the lower class survived, yet they were the majority on the ship. This implies that even in a matter of life and death, the wealthy and affluent have better opportunities for survival than those of ordinary means (Schaefer 196).
Question 6
The upper classes may allow persons in the lower classes to attain prestige without granting them power or wealth because they want to maintain a state of neo-colonialism over the lower classes. The upper classes want these people to continue working for them, and to produce the goods that make their lives lavish. If the upper classes grant the weak power, they may revolt against them, and in the process, the upper classes will lose their labor forces. The dependency theory explains that even as the low-class nations continue to become economically powerful, they remain politically weak to the upper-class nations for those countries to continue exploiting them. For example, the third world countries may advance economically, but they still suffer from policies imposed on them by the powerful nations, which force them to devalue their currencies, increase industry privatization, freeze wages of their workers and reduce government employment.
Question 7
A college education may not benefit all sectors of a society in concern to social mobility because there are not enough jobs with stable income and job security. Most college students expect to experience vertical movement after attaining a college degree because they have been socialized to believe that achieving a college education ...