You will write a minimum 2500 word paper analyzing two examples of sociological peer-reviewed research about a social problem affecting human dignity that interests you such as social inequality or discrimination related to class, race, gender, (dis)ability, environmental, or global inequality, etc. Your paper must draw on two peer-reviewed sociology articles. Both articles must be published in a sociology journal or written by sociologists if published in an interdisciplinary journal. You may likely encounter intersecting problems, for example race and class studied together. Sociology journal articles are typically longer and have more narrative than natural science articles. Part of the challenge of this assignment will be finding two articles that both deal with the problem you are interested in and are at a scale and scope of analysis that are comparable. Some articles will be too broad and others two narrow for your topic of interest. Sorting through the literature is part of our course’s learning objective to develop the basic skills of information literacy, including searching for information, critically evaluating information from sources, and appropriately using and citing information. The paper format is as follows: Critically discuss 2 scholarly sociology articles on the problem you choose for your topic. The paper should be organized as follows: 1) how does each article relate to the social problem? (This will be the first section of your essay but you may find these question easiest to answer last in the drafting process) Sociologists study both how social problems claims are constructed and seek to generate social science knowledge that serves as the grounds for social problems claims. Some articles will clearly make a social problem claim themselves while others will analyze or explain an important component of a common or well-known social problem claim. Is the article providing information to generate or analyze grounds for a claim about a social problem? These can be descriptive facts and causal explanations of how and why the problem takes place. If an author has decided to do a study it means they think an issue is important for one reason or another. But sociologists, as we have seen, also seek to explain how and why some people, but not others, come to see an issue as a social problem, or not. This can involve beliefs about facts relating to how the world works, but also social values about how the world should work and normative beliefs about what is good and bad. Is the article putting forth its own warrants relating to the problem and or is it focused analyzing how the social values of other groups relate to the problem or its social construction? Finally, by providing causal explanations for social problems sociology can help generate conclusions about what should be done about a social problem by creating knowledge about what the likely impacts of different actions will be. Many times an article will focus on evaluating which causal explanations of a problem are supported by evidence (and often the answers are uncertain). Is the promotion or evaluation of a conclusion about the social problem a central part of the article? For example, many articles have been published that analyze the distribution of pollution in US cities and find that racial minorities are more exposed to these harms. These analyses may be simply descriptive or they may include explicit causal arguments or explanations of why and how the racial disparity occurs, and these causal argument may be directly tested or just background or speculation. (e.g. are minorities more exposed because more waste sites are built in their neighborhoods or are they more likely to move into already polluted neighborhoods? what is the importance of race as distinct from income?). Some of these articles go on to provide warrants as to why this is unjust and policy makers should act while others simply report the “facts.” Other studies examine how well actions taken to deal with social problems are succeeding (e.g. are racial disparities in pollution exposure decreasing?). Not every article will include all elements. It is up to you to identify which are explicit and to fill in the blanks where they are implicit (e.g. an article on racial disparities in pollution may not reference social values of racial equality and human dignity but they are implicit in why the research question was asked in the first place). Note important overlapping or intersecting types of social problems or inequalities in how the authors frame your problem of interest (for example, race and environmental, gender and class, etc.). 2) What do the authors discuss as the social cause(s) or source(s) of the problem? Or, if they are focused on construction of the social problem, what do they describe as the causal or predictor variables of differing views among the public? Most social science proceeds by building upon and/or criticizing previous research. Some articles rely on previously collected and analyzed data while others are original studies where the author collect new data or conducts their own new analysis of previously existing datasets. In social science it is more common than in natural science to see articles that seek to create new concepts, or argue over which concepts and theories are most useful for a given problem. But every article will include a discussion of relevant previous research.
******CLICK ORDER NOW BELOW TO GET THE ANSWER TO THIS ASSIGNMENT OR ANY OTHER ASSIGNMENT, DISCUSSION, ESSAY, HOMEWORK OR QUESTION*******."
