at big of a deal until sometimes permanent or short term damage has occurred. Another element is ”they offend the values or standards of some powerful segment of society” (Carter p16) which means no matter what you do someone will always take offense against your actions because everyone has different views and values and what is important to some may not be to others. Another element is that “they persist for an extended period of time”(Carter p16) and everyone can picture that being true because as you solve one problem another always arises. The last element of a social problem is “generating competing proposed solutions because of varying evaluations from groups in different social positions within a society, which delays reaching consensus on how to attack the problem” (Carter P16). This is caused because there are many different social groups that have different ideas and solutions to the problems we may face. Sociological Perspectives on Social ProblemsThere are also different sociological perspectives on social problems such as the functionalist, conflict, interactionist, feminist, and the postmodernist orientations. The functionalist view on social problems focuses on the social structures that hold a society together over time and they also see sociology as the science of social order. The second conflict orientation sees most social problems as arising from disorganization due to group differences. Another view is the interactionist orientation, which concentrates on how people perceive and define the events that influence their lives. The feminist orientation gives women a voice in a world that has been dominated by male-oriented perspectives in the past. The last and final one is the postmodernist orientation which, is an emerging and still controversial approach to studying society. Postmodernist insist that the change is so great that a more complex and far less hopeful world ...
