Data As Evidence

In today’s modern society, there is countless debates and studies that talk about children living in single parent homes and how they compare to homes where both parents are present. While data about this topic is easy to find, I believe it can be quite deceiving.

Using this data from datacount.kidscount.org, it would be easy to see that the majority of children live in a household with two parents instead of just a single parent. Of those that live with single parents, its much more common for children to live with their mother than their father. To show this, I will compare these statistics in the United States, Michigan, and Detroit.

As seen in this comparison, Michigan follows the nationwide trend where most children live in a dual parent household. Interestingly though, Detroit, the largest city in Michigan, does not follow this trend. In fact, most children in Detroit are in a household where there is only a mother figure. As a person who has lived and spent their entire life in Metro Detroit, these results are not entirely surprising. Most people in the area would say that this is a result of gangs and poorer people who live in the downtown area. While some people would jokingly say that this is a result of men who have children then ditch the mother and child to continue living their own life, it is hard to deny that there is some element of truth to this claim. All you have to do is look at the data and see that there is almost twice as many fatherless children in Detroit as there are motherless and dual-parented children combined. Seeing this data would leave me only one choice, and that is to believe that there is an astounding number of fathers in Detroit who are simply abandoning their family.

So why does this matter? The problem with this whole situation is that there is an abundance of children in the city who now only have a single mother to care for them. With the increasing cost of raising children and the lack of good jobs in the Detroit area, these children will be underprivileged and could have a lower quality of life.

The Sociological Imagination

The first social phenomena that I observed was people using Snapchat to send messages to each other. With this app on your phone, you are able to be connected with people who are right next to you along with people who are hundreds of miles away. This is definitely a social interaction because it allows you to send messages with pictures of yourself or your surroundings, which helps the recipient to feel as if they are there right next to you. By allowing there to be a visual element to these messages, it seems to bring you and your friends together again, and it helps to convey minute emotions and the small gestures that can only be picked up by seeing a person.

The second social interaction that I witnessed was a person who simply held the door open for their classmates as they exited the building after class. While at first this may seem like a casual event, it is actually a social occurrence. At first, this may appear to be something that is just done because it is polite and its what we were taught to do as children, but if you think about it a little deeper, it is more than that. It is indeed a social interaction because the reasoning behind this action is to think of others first and to serve others.

The last interaction that I observed was myself and a friend as we were lifting weights at the gym. While this is a social interaction since we were both working out together and talking during it, the social aspect of this is deeper than what is originally thought of. Most people would only see the talking between friends as the social interaction here, but they are missing overlying cause here that is the basis for a much larger social phenomena. The motivation for people going to the gym is the larger event here, and it is what I will focus on. In today’s modern age, people go to the gym in order to get more fit, lose some weight, or to bulk up. The reason for this being a social interaction though is because it is considered more attractive when a person is in great physical condition, and people who aren’t in the best shape are usually looked down upon. This is all because the expectations for people and their appearance now has a social aspect. This exact scenario wasnt always the case though, as in the past, a person who was heavier set was a sign of royalty as they could afford to eat more. At that time, being a skinnier person would be a sign of poverty since you would be too poor to afford food and you would be more in shape from physical labor.