Status and RolesFor this assignment, you will complete a two-part essay on status and roles. Please label the sections in the essay as Part I and Part II.Part IDescribe some achieved and ascribed statuses you possess that are important to your identity. Make sure to label which is achieved and ascribed to. Why are those statuses important to your identity? Discuss how at least one social factor (i.e., culture, demographics, occupation, group membership, or social class) impacted at least one of your career or educational achieved statuses.Part IIRole strain, role conflict, and role exits occur in connection to our status. Discuss one example you have experienced with role exiting. To what extent does your experience match Ebaugh’s four stages of role exiting described in Chapter 5 of the textbook? How did role conflicts or role strain contribute to the role exit?You are required to cite the textbook at least one time in the essay, and other peer-reviewed references are optional. Adhere to APA Style when constructing this assignment, including in-text citations and references for all sources that are used. Please note that no abstract is needed.The essay must be at least two pages in length.READ THIS PART OF CHAPTER 5 BELOW TO DO PART 2 OF THE ESSAYRole Exit In addition to having to learn the social roles expected of us as we enter into new statuses, there are also steps we go through when we are leaving a status. Sociologist Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh (1988) used the term role exit to describe the process of disengagement page 103from a role that is central to one’s self-identity in order to establish a new role and identity. Drawing on interviews—with, among others, ex-convicts, divorced men and women, recovering alcoholics, ex-nuns, former doctors, retirees, and transgender individuals—Ebaugh (herself a former nun) studied the process of voluntarily exiting from significant social roles.
Role exit The process of disengagement from a role that is central to one’s self-identity in order to establish a new role and identity.
Personal Sociology
Structure Matters
Although I love teaching, I hate grading. When I mention that to students, they say I have no one to blame but myself; if I didn’t assign things, I wouldn’t have to grade them. But I don’t teach in a vacuum. If I didn’t assign papers and tests, students would focus their time and energy on their looming chemistry test or their literature paper instead of reading for, participating in, or even attending my course. It is not that students aren’t interested or sincere; it’s that they are forced to budget their time for which professors compete using assignments. Because we exist in social systems, the expectations of those systems limit the amount of innovation we might desire. In what ways might the structures we are embedded within—school, work, recreation—inhibit us from making changes even if we would like to do so?
Ebaugh has offered a four-stage model of role exit. The first stage begins with doubt. The person experiences frustration, burnout, or simply unhappiness with an accustomed status and the roles associated with that social position. The second stage involves a search for alternatives. A person who is unhappy with their career may take a leave of absence; an unhappily married couple may begin what they see as a trial separation. The third stage is the action stage: leaving. Ebaugh found that the vast majority of her respondents could identify a clear turning point when it became essential to take final action and quit their jobs, end their marriages, or engage in some other type of role exit. Only 20 percent of respondents saw their role exit as a gradual, evolutionary process that had no definitive turning point.
The last stage of role exit involves the creation of a new identity. College students, for example, may experience role exit as they transition from their high school identity, going from a mostly dependent child living at home to a somewhat independent college student living with peers in a dorm. In doing so, they may leave behind the objects associated with their prior identities, such as trophies, letter jackets, or stuffed animals (Silver 1996). In their place they may filltheir dorm room with objects symbolizing how they wish to be perceived. Clothes, posters, and room decorations, for example, are calculated to say, “This is me.”
list this Citation:Witt, J. (2020). Soc 2020. McGraw-Hill Education.