Teen Pregnancy

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Sociological Imagination Exercise: Teenage Pregnancy

"The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions."
- C. Wright Mills, 1959

"Teen pregnancy is one of the most difficult experiences a young person might ever face ... It can create an emotional crisis resulting in feelings of shame and fear, and it may appear that you will crumble under pressures in your environment...finding help may seem an impossible task."
- teenpregnancy.com, 2010

As individuals, we are social agents in society. Society is a dynamic system of social agents and social agencies (structures that allow for socialization to happen) allowing for the exercise of social exchange that leads to culture and identity creation. People on their own affect society just as society affects them. In a social setting, individuals are members of groups - they are either primary (intimate, informal and familiar groups like family and circle of friends), secondary (bigger, either formal or semiformal groups like school and the workplace/organization) or referential (organizations that affirm personality and identity that one joins by choice like a hobby group, a library, a gym, a fan club, etc.). Society is an open system. Unlike controlled scientific studies, variables in society cannot all be accounted for making events and phenomenon in society less predictable and verifiable than in the study of the natural sciences. Hence in the natural sciences, the goal is to establish universal laws, in the social sciences, the study of society, the goal is to establish working social theories not necessarily universally applicable but applicable nonetheless according to context. Now, above we have a quote from the work of Mills, the scientist behind the notion of 'sociological imagination'. What does this have to do with the information of what and who makes up society? What does this have to do with one's self? As a social agent, we are affected by the dynamics of society. But ...