Understanding Social Problems

Running head: UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL PROBLEMS
Understanding Social Problems
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UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL PROBLEMS1
Fulfilment of being employed gives a sense of importance, a purpose and a role to the
individuals and this further aids to their physical and mental health positively as it is widely
opined that the mental and physical health of individuals are improved through work
(Hyland, Lee and Mills 2015). However, the rate of unemployment in Australia among the
people from the age range of 15 to 24 has been hovering at about 12.5%, which is more than
double the normal rate and this is making it a serious social problem in Australia.
Unemployment is commonly regarded as a situation where the able-bodied people who
search for job cannot find any. As per the ABS (Australian Bureau Statistics), the rate of
unemployment eased to about 5.4% from 5.6% in the month of April (Tradingeconomics.com,
2019). According to Gould-Werth (2016), unemployment verbatim comments ranges from the
shortage of employment and jobs opportunities that are available, job security, permanent
hobs getting replaced with the contractual ones and the problems of automation. This essay
shall elaborate on explaining the ideas of “social construction” and the “sociological
imagination” and applying them on how the issue of unemployment is understood as a social
problem in the Australian society.
It is to mention that the subjective fact of social issue tends towards how a problem
finally comes to an end, characterised as a great difficulty. This is the idea that is based on the
notion of social improvement of facts. Sociological imagination is “the vivid awareness of
the relationship between experience and the wider society” (Panjwani and Brown 2019) It is
the way in which people realise the relationship in between their experience of society and
their own experience of reality as a whole. Such realisation allows them to make a sense of
the world around them. It is to mention that when a person applies the sociological
imagination, they strip their own personal experiences from their thoughts for analysing the
social world around them. It further allows them to gain a good understanding of the diverse
perspectives of the world without a narrow lens of their personal experiences and the biases.

UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL PROBLEMS2
It is particularly more important in the contemporary society. For example, in the field of
politics, it is very important for holding back the personal belied when it comes to the
question of making laws. The politicians refrain from applying their own moral beliefs to
their political agenda in an attempt of creating a better society and in this way, they make use
of social imagination. They remove their personal perspectives of the world for seeking the
views of the society as a whole and act accordingly. In simpler words, social imagination is
all about “taking the role of others” for gaining a wider understanding of different perspective
(other than one’s own).
According to Lilley, Barker and Harris (2015), social imagination has described a
mind-set for doing sociology that focuses on being able to link the individual experiences and
the societal relationships. The three different elements that frames the sociological
imagination are social structure, biography and history. It is to mention that the social
structure is about the way in which different institutional orders in a society take place, which
among them are dominant, how they held together and the way they might be changing.
Biography on the other hand is all about the nature of “human nature in a society”, the kinds
of people who inhabit a specific society. Lastly, history is about how society came to be, the
way it is changing and how the history is being made in it.
It is to note that the influences one’s society and their personal experiences aid to the
ways in which individuals interpret the world and this is called the social construction of
reality. Social constructionism, which is also known as social development of the fact, is
actually a hypothesis for understanding the human technological correspondence and know-
how that looks at the growth and development together that is developed comprehension of
the entire world. According to Michailakis and Schirmer (2014), “social constructionism is
characterised as a viewpoint that considers that there are loads of human lifestyles that exists
due to relational and social influences, regardless of the social additives and hereditarily