Sociologists know that the only effective approach to a social problem is to figure out its structural roots. Let’s take the example of young people dying by gun violence in the United States.
We recently discussed the topic of school shootings in class. School shootings are all over the news. And they are terrifying for good reason. However, the statistical chances of a young person (14-24) dying in a school shooting remain minimal compared to the statistical chances of a young person dying through other forms of gun violence.
For this assignment, I’d like you to do a mini-research project so that you can get a sense of just how out-of-proportion the concern is over school shootings — that is, out-of-proportion IF our main goal as a society is to prevent all gun-related homicides. Here is what to do:
Please use the Internet to find the answers to the questions that follow, cutting and pasting the websites from which you gather the data to answer each question. Make sure that you use legitimate scientific data. These can come from non-profit groups, academic researchers, think tanks, or governmental statistics sources. Do NOT use journalism sources like newspapers, non-scientific sources such as Wikipedia, etc. (although you can use them to help identify good sources since they will often cite exactly the types of sources you’ll need).
There’s a little math to do here, but it is very basic and I will talk you through the calculations.
What is the overall annual statistical likelihood of a young person (14-24, or somewhere in that range) dying from gun violence each year? Your statistic should be expressed as a number out of 100,000 (e.g., 4/100,000,etc.)
How does this break down by race for Asian youth, Black Youth, Latinx youth, Native youth, and White youth?
How does it break down by gender in each category?
How many times more likely is a young Black boy or man to die from a gun-related homicide than a young White, Native, Latinx, or Asian boy or man? Calculate this by dividing the larger number (out of 100,000) by the smaller number (out of 100,000). For example, if one group’s statistic is 10/100,000 and another group’s is 5/100,000, then you’ll divide 10 by 5 to discover that one group is 2X more likely to die.
Based on your research, what conclusions can you make about how much value U.S. society as a whole places on different kinds of lives (Black lives, Latinx lives, White lives, etc.)?
Brainstorm three sociological questions that we could ask to try to understand the differences in these statistics. In other words, what information would we need in order to uncover the structural roots of these disparities