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Essay on Deviance
| Date: |
07-31-99 1:14pm |
| Subject: |
Social Issues |
| Word Count: |
523 |
| Page Count: |
2.09 |
Deviance
When we speak of deviance, every individual can have a different definition of what
deviance is and what it stands for. What I may take offensive, might be element of
survival in your community. So to give a more specific definition of deviance, we can
refer to a socially disapproved behavior or a violation of a social norm. Not everyonecan
say that they would refer to deviance in the same aspect which is shown through the field
experiment I have conducted.
I conducted a field experiment in which I interviewed ten individuals, giving them a
list of deviant acts in our society. I asked them to rank them from 1-15 where 1 is the
least deviant act and 15 being the most deviant.. Each individual has a different view in
relation to there personal lives and the communities they live in The outcome of the my
research found many links between the age, sex and economic backgrounds, and the
rankings
There was a basic trend to the survey that did not surprise me. The highest
ranking numbers were almost always, murder or rape, while the lowest numbers were
given to embezzlement, and setting prices of machines. We see that the crimes that have
immediate effects of a certain individual, such as murder, are on the “high” end, and the
crimes which effect a part or the whole community over time, are on the “lower” end.
The explain a lot about how our society is trained to think as a whole. We look at acts of
violence played out on a single individual being worse than those on a whole economic
system. Killing a young boy is worse than selling liqueur to him, that could kill him easily.
In our culture we seem to be concerned only with the “now”, not the future.
When we step back and look at gender for a moment, we see some obvious
differences. I first noticed that rape was rated number very different between men and
women. Where as women rated rape 15-13 on the scale, men rated in 14-10. Think is
because sociologically speaking rape effects more women then men, and therefore effect
the scaling of the items.
In differences between age group there is slight differentiation in the higher
numbers, but the lower numbers, were very different from adults. While younger people
rated selling liqueur to minors and being drunk in public the lowest on the scale, older
adults rated them much higher. The economic based acts were also rated lower on
average in younger people, than older people.
Through the “scoring” of each act, we can see how even the same society can
influence different groups of people in different ways. We learn that age, sex, and
economic background all have a great impact on of you view deviance. People in a with
low economic status, rated violence and crimes against the individual higher. This could
because they see violent acts happeninig in everyday life, whereas a person with high
economic status, sees events that happen to the economy, or in the “high-society” as more
serious.
The society “teaches” us that deviance is not acceptable, and to be successful you
must at all cost not stray from the path. The deviant act one chooses to participate in
shows us how well the acts have internalized the cultures
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