All of a sudden I found myself thinking sociologically when I was walking to my English class. I noticed that my senior class mates kept on complaining about how freshman are so annoying, and that they hate school and all sorts of complaining. Immediately when I heard this I was able to classify the seniors and freshmen in  groups. I could see how based one each of their behaviors I could tell so much about them. They each can be placed in different groups that we talked about in my sociology class, depending from which view we see things by.

For example, from the senior's view the freshmen are consider an out-group because they are viewed as immature, dumb, and annoying kids. It can be that the seniors, as the in-group, bug the young ones because they feel like they are acting the way they are supposed to, which is conformity. This makes them all be in a coercion group because is like seniors force one another to act superior towards those freshmen. When the freshmen are told to shut-up in the hall way by seniors they respond by getting louder, laughing and continuing doing their own thing. To me this shows that they do not care about what others think and they feel like they are at the top, so they are the in-group now. The way that the freshmen stood up to those seniors, showed cooperation. Overall, this competition between grades, which is unnecessary, shows conflict within the seniors and freshmen.

All of a sudden, I found myself thinking sociologically when I was at the mall with my friends. I began to notice that I have different types of friends all throughout school and out. I could tell right away which group I enjoyed being with the most, and those that I chose just to be far from. At the mall I was having fun, and began to think of how my true, close friends are the right ones to be with. Yet I found myself having a relationship with other people, even though it was not as great. I knew from here that everyone has many groups he or she belongs to, but more importantly a group that they actually like.
All of the group arrangements within me and my friends connected very well with the different social groups I learned in sociology class. When ever I was with my closest friends, or with family I knew they were my primary groups. This was because when ever I was with them I saw all of the characteristics that a primary group holds. That would include being helpful to one another, caring and relatively small. In the other hand those distant friends of mine, which are in school or even outside of school, are my somewhat of a reference group. I consider them this because they are not close to me, there can be a variety of them, and the only reason we speak is because we are in the same class. This group is nothing like my family or close friends, because with them we have so many things in common that we have fun and respect each other, which makes them fall as an interest group.

2/3/11

All of a sudden, I found myself thinking sociologically when I was building a snow hill on Thursday. My family, some neighborhood friends and I decided to build a snow hill over the weekend, and I noticed there were some challenges along the way. Since there were many people doing one thing things did not go too smoothly at times. For example, while some were adding snow to the hill some were sliding down it, destroying the hill. Another conflict that occurred was that there weren't enough shovels for everyone so some people at the beginning were doing more work than others.
I was able to connect this experience with the puzzle activity and the Conflict Theory. The way that there was many people doing one single thing reminded me of the group of people trying to form a puzzle. The Conflict Theory applies because there was things getting in the way of both, trying to build a snow hill and forming a puzzle. In both activities there were many ideas going on at one time, which created made things more complicated at times. From both if these experiences I concluded that the solutions to the conflicts, from lack of supplies, too many hands, too many ideas and confusion were similar for both. We all had to simple accept each others ideas, and take turns, making everyone's jobs easy and equal. In the puzzle strategies from different people were used, and in the snow hill everyone had an equal job.