sociological themes
...icago and live with her father. Her new home was quite a change. She had to adjust to her new school and neighborhood which was more culturally diverse than her old one. Most of the things she saw were new and surprising to her. She was basically forced to learn a new lifestyle in order to fit in with her new friends. She met an a young African American man named Derek at school and he was able to get her back on track with her dreams of becoming a dancer. He was also forced to play two roles. One as a boyfriend and the other as the best friend of a deviant known as “shorty”, which caused a great deal of conflict. In the movie Derek was forced to make a hard decision between the two. He was to either join his friend “shorty “ in a drive-by shooting to retaliate on a group of hoodlums or attend his girlfriend Sara’s Julliard dance audition. He ended up choosing to attend her audition, but “shorty” went on with the shooting and suffered some serious consequences. In the end Sara’s audition went well, and she was accepted into Julliard. The first concept is role conflict. Role conflict is when a person occupies more than one status and cannot perform the roles of one without violating the other. In the movie Derek and Sara became boyfriend and girlfriend. When he was with her, he was able to play the role of the boyfriend, which was a nice guy who was very sensitive to her needs and feelings. When he was around his friends, he played a different role. He behaved in a different way, which was similar to the way they behaved. The two roles he occupied required him to act differently, but each role limited his actions in the other role which is a prime example of role strain. Next is Culture shock. Culture shock refers to the difficulty people have adjusting to a new culture that differs from there own (Tischler 59). After her mom died in a car accident, Sara had to move from her upper class neighborhood to her father’s apartment in Chicago. In her father’s apartment she didn’t have a bedroom and she had to sleep on the couch. When she went to school she had to walk through metal detectors, which was different from her old school. On her first day of school she sat her backpack on the floor and it was picked up by a girl who would later become her friend. This shows that she must have had some sense of security at her old school. In her old school she wasn’t faced with these situations so it was a little shocking to her. The third concept is sanctions. Sanctions are rewards and penalties used to control an individual’s behavior. There are many different types of sanctions, but the ones I want to focus on are informal negative sanctions. Informal negative sanctions are defined as spontaneous displays of disapproval or displeasure such as frowns, gossip, or bad treatment (Tischler 159). Sara was one of the only white students at her new school, which was predominately a black school. As people began to notice that she and Derek were getting g closer, they began to act differently towards her. The thing they used most to try to discourage the relationship was bad treatment. They began to treat her very badly and they would give her bad looks in an attempt to end their relationship. Their actions were examples of informal negative sanctions and they were used to try to regulate individual’s behavior. The next things I want to illustrate are social functions. There are two types of social functions, they are called manifest functions and latent functions. Manifest functions are intended and recognized function...