Social Conflict

The framework that I selected is the social-conflict approach. The social conflict paradigm focuses on social differences as opposed to integration. This framework studies the factors of race, gender, age, class, and religion and shows how they are linked unequally to things such as power, money, and social standing. It concentrates on conflict among dominant and minority groups of people. For example, men compared to women, whites compared to people of color, rich compared to poor, and young compared to old.

Social-conflicts strength against the other two paradigms is that it concentrates on inequality. The structural- functional approach wants to maintain stability and solidarity at the expense of conflict. It also ignores the inequalities of the social-conflict approach. The symbolic-interaction approach ignores factors such as class, race, gender, and class and views society as a whole.

An example from my life would have to focus on gender inequality, men in relation to women. When I was in high school, I played varsity basketball. Within those four years we went to playoffs, city championships, regional championships, and a state championship. No matter how good we were we had to pay for everything and we had no support outside of our parents. Now our boys team was decent. They weren’t as good as us. They made it to city championships but each time they would get dismantled and it seemed like they were getting new uniforms, shoes, locker rooms every year. It didn’t make sense to us because we were one of the top ten teams in the whole state of California for four years straight and they were average. It seemed like people didn’t start taking us seriously until my junior year when we made a run for the state championships. That whole year we had no school support, not even from our own principal but as soon as he realized that we were as good as everybody had been saying we were it was more like, “Boys team? We have a boys team?” It changed from being about the