Sociological Imagination Assignment Paper Example

The sociological imagination is a concept created by C. Wright Mills, and it is the skill of seeing things socially and the way those things interact and impact each other. Sociological imagination can also be referred to as the application of imaginative thought to the asking and answering of questions of society. An individual should have the ability to pull away from the situation and thinking from a different approach to have a sociological imagination. In other words, it is the understanding that social outcomes are based on what we do. People in the community experience social problems in many instances either knowingly or unknowingly.

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The importance social imagination is providing an outline that helps us understand our social world which outdoes any common sense concept that we can develop from our limited social experiences. Social imagination helps us to differentiate the personal problem from the more significant social problem that we face in our lives. Personal issues are the individual challenges that a person experiences within oneself and the range of their direct relationship with other people. On the other hand, more considerable social problems are the challenges lying beyond individual control and the scope of a person's inner life.

A problem that I experienced while growing up in an immigrant household was the strict and protective rules I suffered from my parents. My parents whose origin is Italy raised me in a strict home whereby they could not allow me to stay out late with friends and they prohibited me from drinking alcohol until I reached 18 years. My schoolmates in a school located in the suburbs of North Jersey were given freedom because their parents were less restricting than my parents. As I grew older, I noticed that the problem was becoming more cumbersome because as my friends grew older, their rules from the parents were diminishing. On the other hand, my life was becoming harder as I had to fight with my parents to allow me to join the events that my friends were attending.

After high school, I came to realize that my parent's strictness was part of a more significant social issue of my parents making sure that they had set some rules so that I would not get into any trouble and that they were able to protect me from trouble. This is because I later came to realize that in my town, the use of drugs like bhang and alcohol in high school was higher than the wealthiest suburbia neighborhoods. Also, the students were practicing unprotected sex during the night events that would lead to early pregnancies.

Conclusion

I came to realize that my parents were very strict towards me because they knew about the drug use and unprotected sex practices in our town and that they wanted to protect me from being exposed to drug usage environment at such a critical stage in my life. I can only conclude that they felt that if they did not watch over every aspect of my life, make the decisions of the places I went to and they did not allow me to go out until I was over 18 years, I would have fallen into an individual that would have pressured me to use drugs. Therefore, by them restricting me from attending certain places and staying out past certain times, it was their way of protecting me.