Sarah Frost
September 11, 2014
Soc 241
Dr. Banerjee
Video Paper 1
1) In the video “Ain’t I A Person” the sociological issue depicted in the video is poverty and the perspective of poor people that are experiencing poverty. It also touches on; what is poverty, who are poor people, is it a real problem, what is the ‘official’ definition of poverty, and how they seek help. Poverty is underrated measure by absolute poverty. If you are one dollar over the ‘line’ of absolute poverty you are not considered to be in poverty, when that is not accurate. One dollar will not make a difference on if you can pay your rent on your house, which is ½ the budget on low-income families budgets. That is more than the budget for food to provide for yourself and…show more content… More than 15 million people are in poverty that is 13.2% of people, and in just one year 2 ½ million people will go into the poverty category in the world. The one fact thrown at me in the movie that completely took me by surprise was that about 14 million of those people who are in poverty are children. So 25% of children are raised in poverty. We know that we need to essentially double the actual percent of what people say are in poverty because poverty is so underrated. Another reason why this issue is affecting the lives of people is that so many people are trying to make ends meet to just gain basic needs such as; food, water, clothes and a roof to live under. People in poverty pay for fast food because it is cheap, with it being cheaper there is a lot of ‘empty calories’ meaning that the foods they are in taking are not fulfilling the needs their bodies need as if they were eating healthier foods with high protein and good sugars. The lack of access to adequate healthy food is called food insecurity (Dolgon and Baker…show more content… In the textbook, conflict sociology is described as the development of inequalities of recourses and power (Dolgon and Baker 2011). Money is a resource in the case of poverty and the people are deprived from the resource of money. This then leads into the issue of power, the more money you have, essentially, you then have more power. Money, power and prestige are the melting pot of social issues. C Write Mills states that people who have power are elite. Meaning that if you are elite you will succeed higher in the world. Therefore the poor people in poverty have no power and no resources or money.
4) The research method I would choose to conduct a similar study would be the quantitive method. I would use quantitive research method because it is designed to be used for more large-scale groups. You cannot use the other method of qualitative because that method is used for more in-depth studies in smaller groups. Poverty in the country is too many people to observe to put into a research method, unless you take it and do the research in one community within the