Brooke Whipp



Brooke Whipp

Sociology 1010

TR-11:30

Short Paper #4

STRATIFICATION: OPTION A

When I was growing up, I lived in a neighborhood called Fox Shadows. This was a little neighborhood in the city of West Valley. I had lived there from the time I was three years old, until I was eleven years old. The houses weren’t the nicest houses around, I mean, they were at least 20 years old. They weren’t the crappiest houses either. I would say they were right in the middle. I remember the streets weren’t the nicest. They always had a whole bunch of large cracks. Whenever I would try to ride a scooter or skateboard on the roads, I would not get very far! They had a park in the neighborhood. My parents would never allow me to go to it after dark. They would say that “bad people” go there and do “bad things” after it got dark. I’m assuming that teenagers would go over there and smoke marijuana or something to that extent but I could be wrong. The people here were nice for the most part. There were some houses where the tenants had three to four families living in them.

When I was eleven, my parents decided that they made enough money and we would be moving to West Jordan. Now this neighborhood was extremely nice. The houses were only a couple of years old. Cool yards with the fancy landscaping. People had big boats in their driveways and super nice cars. When we moved here, I was kind of surprised to see how some of our neighbors would act, even the children. People here were so on top of everything. Their yards would be mowed and weeds would be picked whenever necessary. In contrast, the yards that were in the neighborhood that I previously lived in, were not kept up like they should have been. Some of the lawns were brown; some of them were so long that you would have to mow it twice in order to get the grass cut right. I’m not sure if people in my new neighborhoods were just so responsible and got them done as an act of responsibility or if they just made enough money with one job that they had extra time to be doing those sorts of activities. In contrast, I’m also not sure if people in my West Valley neighborhood were too lazy to keep up on their yards and maintenance of their houses, or if they either just did not have the money for the resources or if they were always working in order to make ends meet as they were.

I feel like people in my new neighborhood were sort of both of what I described above. They were really responsible people and they also made good money. With some of them (not all) I feel like they are responsible as people so they keep up on the things that need to be done as well as are responsible when it comes to making the money to live. Some of them may have just been born into having lots of money; they may have had more positive life chances. On the other hand, I think that some people in the West Valley neighborhood were just too lazy and too caught up in other things that they found important to care about what they were doing with their lives and I think that some people were working their hardest and were really responsible people, they just had other things going on in their lives that would prevent them from living the same lifestyles as people in the West Jordan neighborhood. For example: Maybe one of their kids had got really sick and they had to pay huge amounts of money for their medical bills.

People in the West Jordan area are most likely to have different experiences than the people in the West Valley area. People in the West Jordan Area may have more money to go do activities whereas the people in the West Valley neighborhoods may not have extra money. Also, more criminals are thought to live in the more poor areas so there may have been more living in West Valley rather than West Jordan. This would mean that things may have gotten stolen more often in West Valley, and people might be worried about their cars being broken into.

When talking about Max Weber’s term “life chances,” I would have to say that people in the West Jordan area had more positive life chances. If a child is growing up in a household where his/her father is a doctor and his/her mother is a lawyer, they are going to have more opportunities to become something like that of his/her parents. They will have the money to do it and they may even have connections through their mother or father to accomplish their career goals.

Another important aspect of the differences in these lifestyles is the relationships. Sure there may be a mom, a dad, and a child, but not all the time are they married and living happily with each other. Based on my experience, I think that more people are likely to be married and have kids that they planned on having in the neighborhood of West Jordan. Of course this may not always be true but it sure seems like it. I noticed that the majority of families are happier in West Jordan. This may be because they aren’t stressing about bills, or are constantly angry with some of the kids that aren’t as dedicated to school as they should be.

This example of social stratification goes along the lines of caste and class systems. The fact of the matter is, people live completely different lifestyles when comparing and contrasting these two different social classes. Responsibility, laziness and their life chances all play major roles in why people live the lifestyles that they do.

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