In response to at least two of your peers’ posts, choose a response from one of your peers who shared a bias that differs from your own. Provide suggestions for controlling this bias.
finalreflectionresponse.docx
final_reflection.docx
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Response 1 to misty williams
Hi all,
The personal bias that I struggled with the most throughout this course has been having
“the psychologist’s mind.” Progressing through my psychology course work, the Code of Ethics
has been drilled into my head time and time again. The American Psychological Association
(2003) states under the principle for Justice that “psychologists exercise reasonable judgment
and take precautions to ensure that their potential biases, the boundaries of their competence,
and the limitations of their expertise do not lead to or condone unjust practices” (p. 3-4). With
that being said, I attempted to approach each social problem in this course as unbiased as
possible, except that I often failed to leave the psychological approach “at home” so to speak.
Sullivan (2016) describes a social problem as on that “exists when an influential group defines a
social condition as threatening its values; when the condition affects a large number of people;
and when the condition can be remedied by collective action” (p. 3). Some of the social
problems that we have encountered in this course can also be explained, or approached, from a
psychological perspective on a personal level. This can be by way of nature vs. nurture, mental
illness, etc. So it has been very hard to evaluate these social problems without bringing in my
knowledge of potential psychological causes. For instance, someone may be addicted to drugs
because of the need to escape the voices of Schizophrenia, or a veteran may be homeless
because of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from fighting in the war, then again there may be a
woman who is a prostitute because she was molested as a child and doesn’t feel she deserves
anything better, and maybe someone is a skin-head racist because he was psychologically
conditioned by his parents to be that way.
As you can see, psychology has a very big role in social problems. Does every drug addict have
schizophrenia or is ever homeless person a veteran with PTSD? No, but these issues could
possibly be approached better on the societal level if they were approached on a psychological
level. So, this is why I struggled to keep “the psychologist’s mind” away from the sociological
perspectives. Courses like this one are great to help students learn to evaluate situations
differently. Even though I had taken Intro to Sociology, The Interactionist Theory of Sociology
was not covered in such great detail as it was in this course. This was literally my saving grace
for this course. The Interactionist Theory has helped me with this course and will continue to
help me on my path to becoming a psychologist. It helped me to try and eliminate the biases I
did have and be able to look at certain social issues more broadly instead of individually. Since
“nature”/society have an impact on psychological diagnoses, it is important to see how these
societal problems can be seen by and affect others. I believe that by using the interactionist
approach I will also be able to better explain to people how society has impacted their lives and
the decisions that they have made.
Good Luck moving forward in all that you do!!
References
American Psychological Association. (2003). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of
conduct.Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/principles.pdf
Sullivan, T. (2016). Introduction to Social Problems (10th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education
In
Response 2 to heather smith
I can honestly say that I held a lot of bias against some of the stereotypes and economic levels
in our country when I started this course. Now that we have done so much reading and research
on prostitution, poverty, LGBT, struggling communities/youth, and worldly social problems my
eyes have opened to a new way of looking at things.
For example: Poverty, I realize now that there are many levels to poverty. There are so many
families in our country that struggle on the line between poor and middle class and due to that
are not afforded the resources that are available to others. Children are divided by imaginary
lines in cities. These lines can be a matter of going to a good school that will encourage them to
do better or the other side of the line they go to a financially unstable school with dangerous
situations that can put the children at risk. I also learned that even though these dangerous
schools have seen violent acts the profile of a student that would bring a gun to school to cause
harm to his classmates is actually middle class to wealthy white males.
The new information that I learned from this class that I will take with me is the three social
theories, functionalist, interactionist, and conflict. In using these new theories I have learned I
can relate one of them to my career as a nurse. “The functionalist perspective, society is a
system made up of a number of interrelated elements, each performing a function that
contributes to the operation of the whole(Sullivan,2016)”. I play a role in our society as a public
servant. It is my job to protect and heal those that are sick. As a whole our community wants a
safe place for our children to grow up. We have police officers, teachers, medical, firefighters,
volunteers, and others that work together every day to keep our streets safe, drugs away from
minors, heal those that are sick, and save homes for those who need them. We all work
together everyday even if we don’t realize it or know the person on the other end helping you
complete this task.
Sullivan, Thomas J. Introduction to Social Problems, 10th Edition. Pearson, 20150202.
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Final Reflection
This course has indeed been an eye opener with regards to social problems. After going
through the various myths and facts of social problems, I have come to understand the dynamic
and complex nature of social problems and the knowledge I have gained has helped to dispel
some of the misconceptions I held about social problems. Before undertaking this course, I used
to believe that social problems are basically a combination of the many personal problems
experienced by individuals in the society and that it was upon them to take action and solve such
issues like poverty, inequality, race, ethnicity, sexism, violence among others. I used to think that
social problems are brought about by the moral and personal failures of individual people in the
society. For instance, when it comes to the issue of poverty, I used to think that poor people are
generally lazy and that everyone has equal opportunities to succeed in life. I used to believe that
individuals are responsible for most of the problems they go through like drug addiction, alcohol
abuse, domestic violence and they are to blame for problems that face them. However, the fact is
that social problems not only affect individuals but also the social world at large. The reality is
that the individual problems that people face stem from the social conditions of the society itself.
The knowledge I have gained from the course has challenged my personal biases and now I have
come to understand the fallacies of thinking and how to avoid them when analyzing and
addressing social problems.
One new information that I have learned throughout the course is that sociological theory
plays an important role in limiting the personal and societal biases when addressing social
problems. Social problems can best be solved when we move away from using the subjective
approaches such as person-blame or system-blame and utilizing more objective approaches such
as the scientific method that is more consistent and can be tested. The course has enabled me to
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understand that blaming the individual or systems for any social problem only distracts attention
away from the real problems, makes it hard to implement systemic change and it reinforces
stereotypes. This information will help me to be systematic and objective when researching and
addressing social problems to avoid any form of bias.
One important concept that I have learned in this course is sociological imagination. The
concept of sociological imagination refers to the ability to be aware and appreciative of the
relationship between personal problems and the wider society when analyzing social problems.
As a future sociologist, this concept will be instrumental in my career as it will help me to apply
critical thinking when analyzing social problems so as to gain more understanding of the social
conditions, identify the root causes of the problems that people face in society and possible
solutions from a wide point of view as opposed to focusing only on a scatter of individuals. This
will be useful in formulating correct problem statements and sound policies for social change.
…
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