Social Stratification Virtual Tour Assignment
The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize you with some of the sites on the world wide web that provide information useful for the study of social stratification. You will be asked to explore and to locate specific information at a number of sites: governmental, academic, advocacy. While I have selected sites that I have reasonable confidence in, you should always take a critical approach to evaluating internet resources.
You may do this assignment wherever you have access to a computer with an internet connection, but part of it involves having Adobe Acrobat reader installed on your computer. All computers in the Rutgers lab have this plugin; if you want to download it at home, you may follow the instructions I have put up for Project VILLAGE, a collaboration between Rutgers and the city of Camden. Print out this assignment and follow the instructions below. I expect each of you to do this exercise on your own. I encourage you to explore on your own as you do.
We'll start with the U.S. Census Bureau, one of the most
useful sources of up-to-date information on a variety of aspects of social stratification
and issues of sociological concern generally. At the Census homepage (this will
generate a new window), click on News, then News Releases by Subject.
Take a look at the subjects listed, and feel free to explore them. To continue,
click on Poverty and then find the following release: Poverty Rate Down,
Household Income Up -- Both Return to 1989 Pre-Recession Levels, Census Bureau Reports
(9/24/98). Click on that title and answer the following questions:
(1) What was the poverty rate in 1997? _____________________
(2) What was the poverty line (threshhold) for a family of four in 1997? $__________________
(3) How many people were classified as poor in 1997? __________________
(4) Which of the following groups had the highest poverty rate in 1997?
_____children _____adults ages 18 to 64 _____ people ages 65 and over
Now close this window to return to the assignment.
Although less than one-half
of people below the poverty line are on welfare, let's find out more about what has
happened to welfare payment levels over the past 20 years or so. Go the the
Twentieth Century Fund's Welfare
Quiz and check out the question about whether welfare recipients get too much
and you will find out that in constant (1993) dollars the average family receiving welfare
got
(5) _______________per month in 1970 and ______________ per month in 1993.
Close this window to return to the assignment.
Now that we've looked at
poverty a little bit, let's look at wealth. Find out how much wealth Bill Gates owns
by checking out the Bill Gates Personal Web
Clock, and fill in the following:
(6) $______________billion at ____________________________ (date and time)
Click on "Back" to return to the assignment.
Various commentators have
coined the phrase corporate welfare to describe the subsidies
and special tax breaks that the federal government provides corporations and the corporate
elite. Find out more by inspecting a graph about Who Is Really
On Welfare?
(7) AFDC (since 1996 renamed TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) is by far the largest welfare program for the poor in the United States. How much was spent on AFDC in 1996?
$_____________ billion
(8) How much did the richest 1% of the population receive in tax breaks in 1996?
$_____________ billion
(9) How much did corporations receive in subsidies and tax breaks?
$_____________ billion
(10) Print out this graph and attach it to this exercise when you hand it in (black and white is fine)
After you think about who is really on welfare, click on "Back" to return to the assignment.
Time Magazine recently
published an investigation
of corporate welfare by former Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Donald L. Barlett and
James B. Steele. I encourage you to read the whole article, but on the first page
you can learn:
(11) their estimate of total annual corporate welfare: $______________billion
(12) what corporate profits have come to so far in the 90s: $___________trillion
Click on "Back" to return to the assignment.
Let's return closer to
home. The Census Bureau has a site called 1990 Census Lookup that
enables you to call up data about your zip code area. Scroll down and click on
STF3B. Then enter your zipcode in the box and click
on Submit. Then click Submit again to choose the tables you want.
Now click on the following boxes on the left (as you do, notice the large array of data
potentially available):
P9 |
P17 | P57 | P78 | P80 | P107A | P117 | H61A |
Then go back to the top of the table and click on Submit. Then Click Submit again (for HTML format).
(13) Print out the table and attach it to this assignment when you hand it in. Then answer the following questions (some elementary math on your part is required for some of them):
First, enter your zip code and town here: _____________________________
(14) What was the total population of your zipcode area in 1990? ____________
(15) What proportion of that population was minority (non-white)? ___________
(16) What was the modal educational attainment? ________________________
(17) What was the modal occupational category? ________________________
(18) What proportion of households earned over $75,000? __________%
(19) What was the median family income? _____________
(20) Calculate the number of persons for whom poverty status was determined and then calculate the proportion that was below the poverty line.
% below the poverty line: _______
(21) What was the median value of owner-occupied housing units? $_____________
Now close this window to return to the assignment.
(22) Enter that figure here: _____ years
Feel free to back up and explore this site further. When you are finished, close this window to return to the assignment.
On
average, full-time working women earn 26 cents less per dollar than their male
counterparts. Go to the AFL-CIO's Working Women/Equal Pay page to learn how much a woman is
likely to lose over a lifetime because of this gender pay gap. Read this page and
then click on Next. Fill in the information requested (men: put in data for
yourself and see how things might be different if you were a woman) and then click on Submit.
How much would you stand to lose over a lifetime as a woman
(23) without union membership? $_______________
(24) with union membership? $__________________
Now close this window to return to the assignment.
To
explore one facet of racial inequality, let's look briefly at a 1997 Gallup Special Report on
Black/White Relations in the U.S. Look at the first table, which compares the
perceptions of blacks and whites about whether blacks are treated equally in one's local
community. According to this table,
(25) _____% of whites, but only _____% of blacks felt that people of the two groups were treated the same when it came to getting a job.
Click on "Back" to return to the assignment.
"Bridging the
Digital Divide" analyzes differences between whites and blacks in computer
ownership and internet use. After documenting a significant difference between the
two groups, the authors then control for social class by using measures of income and
education. Scroll down to the second set of tables where the authors do this, and
explain briefly below whether the difference between whites and blacks disappears when
social class is controlled for.
(26)
Click on "Back" to return to the assignment.
| Finally, we
will return to the U.S. Census Bureau to look at one of its most useful publications, The
Stastistical Abstract of the United States, that is now available in full online.
However, Adobe Acrobat Reader must be used to read it. Click on the image to the
right. Then click on the pages for Vital Statistics for 1998. This
should start up Adobe Acrobat Reader automatically. When you see the first part of
this section, use the scroll button on the right to move down to page 30 (of 42), and
examine Tables 140-142. |
 |
(27) Tables 140-142 present data on causes of death. These death data are broken down by three variables in these various tables. These variables, typically used through the Statistical Abstract, are:
1.________________ 2._________________ 3._________________
(28) On the basis of this course (and on the Navarro reading at the beginning), what additional variable is strikingly absent in these tables on variation in the causes of death?
_____________________
(29) Is your answer in the previous question in line with Navarro's claim about U.S. government statistics in "Class and Race: Life and Death Situations"?
_____Yes _____No
(30) Print out these tables by either clicking on the print icon or else File, then Print. When the print box pops up, be sure to specify pages 30-32 only. Attach these pages to your assignment when you hand it in.
Close this window to return to the assignment. If you have completed all the questions above, you are finished. Be sure you have put your name on the first page and attached all the necessary printouts.
Want to explore more on your own? Two good entry points to a large array of sociological resources on the internet are:
A Sociological Tour Through Cyberspace
Robert E. Wood
Associate Professor of Sociology
Rutgers University, Camden
wood@crab.rutgers.edu
http://camden-www.rutgers.edu/~wood/
July 13, 1999
Return to the Social Sratification course home page