Teenage Wasteland

Donna Gaines is a journalist, cultural sociologist; New York State certified social worker and an international expert on youth violence and culture. Gaines also has taught sociology at Barnard College of Columbia University and at the graduate faculty of New School University. In the article “Teenage Wasteland” Gaines examines the causes of teenage suicide using both the history and the biography of suburban teens. She mentioned that when a teenager commits suicide it is a personal tragedy, but when groups of teens form a suicide pact and successfully carry it out, it becomes a matter of public concern. In the book “experience sociology” chapter three they talk about culture and that can relate to this article because in my opinion culture is what makes us who we are, we  believe in something or somebody because of culture who we followed is also related to culture. Most cases of teen’s suicide are bullying, abuse or even you family issues can be a reason. As I was reading the article I found something very important, the techniques Gaines uses to investigate, she was not only interested on finding why teens commit suicide but she also went deep, meeting with teens to find out who they really are; their thoughts, feelings, and the weak side of them. Gaines also said that back in the 80's high schools were divided by the Jocks, Preps, nerds, cheerleaders etc depending on where you live. That wasn’t only in the 80’s we still have this types of division in high schools like Hispanic hand out with their people, backs, Chinese, Indians etc. Everyone with their group, taking it back to when I was in high school it was like that too, but I think this is because when you are a teen you think “Well they coming form the same place as I did so we might have a lot in common, we will agree all the time etc”. There are so many reasons why teenagers commit suicide, most of these reasons are unknown but teenage suicide is increasing and I ask myself why are they doing it? Is it because they are afraid of something or, they can’t take it anymore? I ask myself the same question every time I see this on the news. My mother always tells me to be myself everywhere I go and to always have in mind that there’s always a limit where you have to stop and say “no I am doing this wrong, I am not going to do this, I don’t want” in other words to have my own personality and not change my mind about something just because my friend doesn’t like it. My point you have to love yourself everyday more don’t let anyone trample you, because when you don’t love yourself your personality becomes the public’s opinion about you. From there you star to get depressed and to think that nobody understand you, feel so down until you get to the point of killing yourself or find a bad company. (Teenage Suicide needs to stop; a lot of teens need more family support).

Sence and Nonsense About Surveys

This article was written by Howard Schuman, the reason why I choose this article is because I believed in surveys 90%. By reading this article I understood so many things I never thought of, surveys are not always true there are so many different ways to make a survey and not all the interviewers use the correct techniques to make it right and what I mean by this is that sometimes they don’t include the whole population or they can simply manipulate it. Howard discussed that understanding a survey is critical to being an informed citizen, but popular media often report surveys without any guidance on how to interpret and evaluate the results. He also mentioned how a little mistake can cause a survey to be fault; answers to survey questions always depend on the form in which a question is asked. Nowadays people are making surveys by phone or internet, picking the phone numbers from a directory book but not everybody has a phone or an e-mail address so I ask myself how are they going to make a conclusion if they didn’t interview the whole population? I guess they will just make up the survey without having everyone’s opinion. In chapter two from the book I also learned a lot of methods of collecting data and in sociology the most common used method is survey. And is very related to the article “Sense and Nonsense about Surveys”, the book gives a clear example on page (41) where it says that researchers also need to pay attention to the way the questions in a survey are worded because even small variations on wording can influence results significantly. Surveys might have problems such as different definitions, lack of clarity, loaded language etc. many surveys are true on example is the pew research center who comes up with the polling numbers about elections. Surveys are like opinions and everybody has a different point of view.

Who am I?

I was born in one of the largest Caribbean Countries, The Dominican Republic. I grew up there. I came to America in 2007 leaving my beautiful country, culture, and the most important thing my mother. I arrived to America and my first impression was “where am I?” I found everything weird but at the same time I was amazed by all the different things I was seeing. I live at the Bronx with my parents, my mother finally came and I am so glad I have my family together because my parents are the only true friends I have, they are my strength, they are the ones who motivates me to do good in school and be a better person in society. If I was asked to describe my personality with one word I would say sensitive.

As an immigrant I came to America with a lot of goals to accomplish, right now my main goal is to get the credits I need to transfer to another college to go into the medical field to become a pediatrician, get marry to a good man and have children. Coming to the Bronx definitely changed my life because in the place where I grew up people are very "conservative" and they like to judge you a lot without knowing who you really are, according to the old people in the neighborhood I used to live “just by someone’s appearance they can describe your personality. During my childhood I used to agree with their opinions and thought these people were right.

When I was becoming a teenager I started to ask myself questions like why are these people in my neighborhood being so ignorant?, and my interest  to find out about the “judges” background got bigger. And there are so many stories most of them no even compare to what they called moral so I said to myself...why are these people judging others if they used to live (la Vida loca).life is a learning process and in the road you may fall down and get back up or you can just keep falling and stay on the ground because at the end of the day is your life, your choices, your mistakes or your success. My point is that coming to America helped me develop my sociological imagination in so many ways before I was that girl believing that people who live freely no matter what others think, were people with no values and all that stuff but now I have more knowledge to understand that we all have different points of view, we don’t know other people’s backgrounds to judge them, nobody is perfect we were born to make mistakes and learn from them. In the United States we have so many different cultures and people do what ever they want because this is a free country and people are raised in many different ways. We weren't born to please everybody either way they talk about you.