Okay, let's take this one word at a time. First, it's a problem. It's bad. It has undesirable consequences.We could call them 'social bad things,' but that doesn't sound very, well, scholarly. Second, it's social. A social problem is one that involves not just a few individuals. It is social--caused by people, whether by their actions or inactions, whether deliberate or unintentional, and it affects people. And we often think of people in terms of groups (families, organizations, cultures, nations, etc.) or categories (ethnicity, race, gender, age, geography, etc.). Most of the time you would think that the people causing a problem were not the same people being affected by it. But can you think of a situation where that might be the case?

Social causes

First, caused by people's actions: Let's take the case of pollution. We might want to define what kind(s) of pollution we're talking about. Air, water, land . . Obviously factories dump stuff into the air, water and ground, but it's waste products from things made/generated for consumers--paper, lumber, electricity, plastic action figures, computers, etc. And they're not necessarily made where they're consumed--in fact less and less. But consumers have a role to play in the problem of pollution, if they're creating demand for products whose manufacture causes pollution. And how much of this stuff ends up in a landfill somewhere? Some might talk about noise or even sight pollution (e.g., what if all of the hillsides in the Grande Ronde Valley were opened up to development of subdivisions? Check out Gatlinburg, TN). For our purposes, since most of us would agree that air quality can have an important effect on human well-being, we'll stick with air pollution here. A society's activities create pollution--people drive cars, burn fuels to generate power, release toxic materials as by-products of industrial processes, use appliances that release CFCs (that damage the ozone layer ). The carbon-based (i.e., anything that was at one time living organisms) fuels that we burn produce greenhouse gases, which lead to what scientists refer to as the greenhouse effect.

Most of the actions that produce these effects are deliberate, not accidental. But few think about filling up the tank as a contribution to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Few think that if they buy inexpensive clothing at Wal-Mart that they may be supporting child labor or sweatshops in Asia (that is, our actions are contributing to social problems in other locales). Few think that if they buy a ream of paper, some town somewhere smells like nasty pulp ponds where the paper is produced, and the effluent put into the river. You like the paper; you may not want to live to close to where it's produced, though. But in that town, citizens may call this the 'smell of money' (that is, some benefit from the industry with jobs, profits, etc.).

How can inaction contribute to air pollution? Think about things people don't do, that if they did, might reduce air pollution--mass transit in cities is often underused, underfunded, or practically nonexistent (especially in some Western cities). I once saw a bumper sticker on a Tri-met bus in Portland that said 'because of me 216 cars are off the road today.' (I know a few drivers who could use one of those for their cars . . . ). Conservation is often seen as a source of energy. In other words, what we don't use is available for others to use.

So, even if we don't mean to cause pollution, our lifestyle of consumption may contribute. Sometimes causes are more direct, for instance when a company violates environmental laws to save money on disposal of toxic waste. Social problems have social causes.

Social consequences

Who is affected by air pollution? Are we all affected equally? Hardly. What groups would you think of first? Urban residents might be near the top of the list. Residents downwind of factories as well. Coal Country in Appalachia. The Northeast U.S. receives acid rain as a result of coal-fired power plants in the Midwest. People who live in downtown areas where traffic congestion is worse may suffer disproportionately. They often tend to be poorer as well, and we know that racial and ethnic minorities make up a larger proportion of the poor in the U.S. Generally, the more money you have, the more you can pay to remove yourself from some of the risks of pollution--e.g., moving out to the suburbs, the country, etc. But . . . when problems become global, it's a bit trickier. The United States, with 4% of the world's population, consumes 20% of the world's resources, but we haven't figured out a way to insulate ourselves from the environmental effects of all that consumption.

Social problems have social consequences--some people are harmed. Usually that harm is not randomly or evenly distributed. For instance, we know that people in inner cities, where property values are lower and there is less tax revenue for schools, suffer from less educational opportunity. They're less likely to do well in K-12 schools, less likely to go to college, and if they do, less likely to go to an 'elite' school. They're more likely to be non-white also. So problems with the public education system don't affect all groups equally--those with money in higher income classes can avoid the traps of poor public education systems, and they're more likely to be white, statistically speaking. When it comes to the death penalty, blacks are more likely to be wrongly convicted and, tragically, wrongfully executed. Why (if you can figure out this logic, you're on your way)?

Problems

Hopefully this part has been answered in the previous discussion. Social problems have undesirable consequences for large numbers of people. We could say 'social bad things,' but somehow it doesn't sound very impressive. Also, keep in mind that if states leading to problems weren't benefiting some group or groups, they probably would be addressed rather quickly, or wouldn't appear to be 'problems.' How might this work for crime (warning: always watch out in this class for broad, general words, like 'crime' or 'pollution')? Think beyond benefits to individual criminals here.

Sociologists look at groups in society--organizations, families, communities, etc. We also try to disaggregate the population--do things affect people by race, by ethnicity, by age, by gender, etc. Different theorists look at the world differently--we've talked about Marx and how he focused on social class (the workers and the owners). We've talked about social class in other ways--low, middle and upper (with respect to wealth and income). When you're thinking about who might be harmed/who might benefit from something, you might think in broader terms.

Scale

Does the 'large numbers of people' part mean that small towns can't have social problems? No. But it's also wise to think about whether problems seen at the local level resemble problems at some broader level, whether regional, state, national, international, etc.

Process

Social problems and people's perception of them change over time. As Mills points out in his piece, 'The Promise,' we are in a sense products of the times in which we live. Though we don't often think of ourselves as part of an historical current, people who grew up when Mills wrote were terrified of the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. The Cold War between the Soviet bloc countries and the European and Western nations brought citizens to the brink of a nuclear war. Citizens of the Soviet countries were as terrified as Americans of the consequences of using such destructive weapons, and they set a tone for the times. Now we live in different times, but governments still try to paint the world in easily digestible terms. What is the modern variant of the Cold War? Who are the villains of the West? Who are the villains from the perspective of Middle Eastern and Arab countries?

Think about progress made in terms of civil rights for blacks, for ethnic minorities, for women, over the last several decades. With them come other issues as well--think about the rise in divorce rates, the decline in marriage. Imagine 50 years ago anyone speaking publicly about same sex marriage. Yet today it's controversial, but still a public issue debated in every community. Social problems change over time. Some groups in society perceive rapid change as dysfunctional, others see changes like expanded civil rights as trends toward economic or social justice. New ways of thinking about social problems emerge, old ones fade away (for instance, the idea that homosexuality constitutes a social problem is now shared by only a minority of Americans).

Other questions

There are other things that will help you identify and think about social problems:

• Is anyone being harmed? What kind of harm (Physical? Economic? Psychological?)? This may be an easy one with war (or maybe not), but for some social problems you'll have to delve in greater depth.
• What groups are being harmed? (sociologists tend to look at social groups, organizations, classifications for looking at variables such as age, gender, ethnicity, race. The unemployed may be a group particularly affected by a social problem, such as economic recession and loss of investor confidence in the stock market).
• What are some alternative constructions of the social problem as you've defined it? Think about 9/11, and the different ways that different groups are trying to control the debate on what is and isn't a problem.
• What can be done about a particular problem? Are there policy issues? Should we let the market decide (e.g., should we raise the price of gasoline to reduce consumption and air pollution)? Should we build more mass transit systems? Will we have to reduce other government budgets (e.g., welfare programs) to do so, and will that exacerbate other social problems? Should we push for greater energy conservation, and greater development of renewable sources of energy? Others say that the market will eventually adjust itself, that people won't be willing to pay for pollution, and that better technologies will come along as a result of private investment and consumption. What do you think?

Thinking about social problems

A good exercise for you would be to take a problem, and go through the process of trying to identify exactly what the problem is. For instance, is unemployment the result of 9/11 and the economic consequences? Is it the result of irresponsible corporate practices that lead to layoffs of thousands? Is it because of foreign competition and cheap labor overseas? Wall Street corruption and predatory lending practices? Capital substitution that replaces human workers with machines? Inflexible working conditions that make it difficult for some groups of workers (e.g., single mothers) to hold on to their jobs? There are different arguments to be made, a bit of truth in each of them. But each one also would lend itself to a different set of possible solutions. In other words, how you define and 'frame' the problem affects how you will go about responding to it.

While there is no 'right' or 'wrong' answer, some social problem constructions are more persuasive than others--they account for complexity, they back up claims with evidence, they identify groups that are being harmed, and try to identify possible causes of problems, they admit that reasonable people can disagree, that how one views social problems depends on one's perspective (e.g., welfare recipient versus social worker versus republican/democratic Congress member), and they often admit that they may be espousing a particular political viewpoint. But neither can we dismiss others' views as either 'liberal' or 'conservative.' You need to do more than say someone is a 'liberal.' You need to show how that viewpoint is liberal, and how it may be biased. Same goes for conservative viewpoints.

In the end, the goal here is to get you to think about problems in a different way, in a structural way. You're already beginning to do it, whether you realize it or not. It comes with trying to tie the details to a bigger picture (for instance, local school board clashing over book censorship or curriculum issues, or Nevadans protesting the siting of a nuclear waste repository). Problems are more than just the sum total of the individuals affected by them. We can make predictions about where we're likely to find them, how they're likely to be defined, which groups are more likely than others to benefit or be adversely affected, etc. That's what sociology has to offer--a way to look at the world, at social problems, that gives us lenses that hopefully are useful, but that you'll need to get accustomed to wearing.