Context: On page 309 of Ferris & Stein (2020), Kerry Ferris, a college professor and one of the authors of your textbook, has graphed her occupational family tree. It spans three generations and is limited to parents of each generation only. After reading pages 306 to 308, create your own three-generation occupational family tree and discuss your family’s experience of social mobility. Remember that if your family has immigrated to the U.S., you will need to consider their lives and social forces that impacted them prior to immigration.
Essay #3: Address each of the questions and points below as you examine social mobility in your own family in your third essay. Do not include the diagram as part of your final submission.
· Summarize the occupations of your family members in each of the three generations you have graphed, using Dr. Ferris’ model and discussion.
· Do you see evidence of social mobility over the generations in your extended family? What kind of mobility do you see?
· What patterns do you see in types of occupations within and across generations?
· What explanation(s) can you offer for the variety, or lack of variety, revealed by the observable intergenerational pattern? (Hint—remember what C. Wright Mills said about the intersections of history and biography).
· What social forces might have contributed to your ancestors’ choices?
· What structural factors are contributing to the perpetuation of this issue and making it challenging to resolve?
· What social institutions (identify one for each generation) do you see having played a role in choices made by your ancestors and by you? Do different social institutions shape people in a different way today?
· Discuss the extent to which your family’s intergenerational social mobility pattern can be explained by using Weber’s theory of life chances, the theory of meritocracy, and intersectionality theory.
Required reading preparation: Ferris & Stein (2020) chapter 11, 7-10. Recommended: Ferris & Stein (2020), resources on Moodle.
This is the comment that I got;
This essay addresses some questions in the assignment but not all. Explanations are generally insufficient and the application of theory shows a misunderstanding of what it is trying to show.
No intext citations showing information sources or where the textbook was used.
