Sociology 211.92
Social Problems
Presession 2002
Dr. Scott SchafferFinal Paper Assignment -- Solving Social and Sociological Problems
Due Date: Fri Jun 7/2002 at 2pm. Your paper and journals must be submitted to me no later than 2pm, either in person to my office or as a Microsoft Word attachment to an email. Should you email me your paper, ensure that: the file is saved as a Word file or RTF (Rich Text Format) file; that the filename is "<your last name> Final Paper.doc"; and that it includes a title page with your name on it as the first page of the document. Failure to ensure these things may result in your paper being overwritten by other files or not being accepted. The time that the email is received - not the time it is sent - will count as the submission time. Should some kind of emergency manifest itself, you must let me know as soon as possible before the due date and time; I am leaving town on Saturday and will not return before grades are due, so any paper submitted late will receive a zero (0) if I am not informed in advance.
The Rules of the Game: This paper must be a minimum of six (6) full and complete pages in length. There is no maximum length for this paper, so you should write until you've completely answered the question. Your paper must be typewritten, double--spaced, on 8 1/2" by 11" paper. Your paper must have a cover page, on which a creative title ("Final Paper Assignment" is simply not creative enough), your name, and any other pertinent information should appear; your name should not appear anywhere else in the paper.
Your paper must be spell- and grammar-checked; papers that have copious errors will automatically lose one full letter grade. You must also include a bibliography detailing all sources utilized in this paper; the format for this bibliography will appear below. You should follow all guidelines in the "How to Write a Schaffer Paper" handout; these guidelines will serve as the basis for my evaluation of your work. And finally, no direct quotations are permitted in this paper; any materials you use to support your argument must be paraphrased and cited following to guidelines in the paper-writing handout.
The Assignment: You should write a well-argued paper that answers the following question:
How would your solutions to the social problems discussed in this course be better than the ones currently in place, and why?
In order to successfully and completely respond to this question, you must do the following:
Go through the "sociological problem to social problem" analysis of fundamentalism as a social problem and one other social problem, making sure to discuss the way in which American society prioritizes particular structural norms;
Discuss the ways in which American society attempts to solve these two social problems (fundamentalism and the one you've chosen) - this might require outside research, such as academic journal articles or Internet research, which must be listed in a bibliography;
Highlight the element of the "sociological problem to social problem" analysis in each case that you would change, discussing what you would change about it and how it would lead to a better solution to the social problem (making sure to give the principle and evaluation criteria you're using to show how your solution is better). You should attempt to make the principle and evaluation criteria you use here consistent, i.e., the same for both cases;
And finally, discuss what the macro, meso, and micro levels of your better society would look like - in other words, the social structures, the ways in which people would interact, and how the people would think of themselves.
Use this bulleted list of tasks as the basis for your outline of the paper, and be sure to "reverse outline" your paper to ensure that a) all of your claims flow logically from one to the next, and b) that your completed paper matches the intended outline.
Bibliographic information
If you are used to a particular citation format, please feel free to use it; otherwise, you can use the following format to identify the texts, articles, and web sites you're using for this paper assignment. Ensure that every reference to an outside text is cited and listed in the bibliography; failure to cite all sources in the body of the paper will result in at least a one--third letter grade deduction, and failure to include a bibliography will result in a full letter grade deduction.
For the selections from the Heiner book, you can either use the citation from the Heiner book or the original citation.
Make sure that in your bibliography, all entries are alphabetized by author's last name.
In--text: (Author Year: Page) (note: for web sites, use paragraph number instead of page number)
Book: Author. Year. Title of Book. City of publication: Publisher.
Book section/chapter: Author. Year. "Title of section/chapter." In Editor (ed.), Title of Book. City of publication: Publisher.
Journal article: Author. Year. "Title of article." Pages in Journal Title, volume #: issue #.
Web site: Author. Year of last update. <Organization's name> web site. URL (the address of the page you reference, not the site itself)
Evaluation criteria and "the principle"
You want to ensure that you detail the principle and evaluation criteria by which you're comparing your proposed solution to the social problem to that which American society currently pursues. In order to do that, you can do one of two things to figure out what the general principle would be:
1. Figure out how you would solve each of the social problems you discuss, and then examine those solutions and the ways you'd know your solution is better to find what the solutions have in common (issues they address, a common prioritization, a common goal, etc.);
2. Come up with a general principle first - caring for the community, collective responsibility, or something else along these lines - and then figure out how you would use that principle to evaluate our current solutions to these problems.
Happy writing.