Trends and Tendencies
by
Charles Lamson
Some patterns are visible only over time. We can see them when we watch how the world changes. A change that is sustained over time - for example, the continuous increase in the human population is a trend. To say that most new jobs created in the United States since the mid-1980s have been service rather than industrial jobs is to cite another trend. part of being sociologically mindful is paying attention to such changes, and wondering where they might lead.
As with other kinds of patterns,there can be trends within trends.. For example, since 1800, the U.S. population has never declined or remained the same; it has always grown. That is the overall pattern. There have been times, however, when it has grown faster than others - for instance, in each decade following a war. We could thus say that there is a pattern within a pattern: overall growth, with periods of more rapid growth right after wars. Again, to make sense of the whole, It is important to look for patterns within patterns.
Tendencies are patterns of probability. For example, chances are that people born into working-class families will end up in working class jobs themselves. Of course, this is only a tendency. Some children from working-class, or poor families, will become doctors, lawyers, and professors. It is even possible that children of parents who are professionals, will become factory workers, truck drivers, or trash collectors. Even so, the usual pattern - the strongest tendency - is for people to end up in about the same social class as their parents.
To see tendencies, we must watch closely over time to see what happens and how often. For example, smokers develop lung cancer in about eleven times the rate for non-smokers. Men get about 45-70 percent greater payoff in terms of earnings from their education than women do, depending n the degree attained. These kinds of tendencies (like the tendency for women to outlive men), can be found by looking at group differences.
Trends and tendencies can remain invisible if we do not look at what happens in enough cases over a long enough period of time. Suppose you were the first person from a working-class family to go to college; and suppose that most of your friends in college are from similar backgrounds. It might thus seem wrong to say that children from working class families tend to stay in the working class - after all, You and your friends are proof that class mobility is possible. Yes, but beating the odds does not mean that there are no odds.
To see the real tendencies, we would have to look at representative samples of children from working class families, over a long period of time, to see what kinds of jobs they ended up in. Only by looking at the big picture would the true tendency become apparent. Being sociologically mindful, we would want to avoid the mistake of overgeneralizing from personal experience, and to wait until we had information about many cases before saying what the pattern really is.
The point of trying to see trends and tendencies is to get a better sense of how the world works - although, again, observing a trend or tendency, is not the same as explaining it. Doing that requires study of who is doing what to whom, where, and how and why. Seeing the trend or tendency is a step toward figuring these things out. Once we have identified the trend or tendency, we can begin trying to discern the human actions that produce it. If we are not aware of the trend or tendency, we might not realize that there is any action for which to look.
By identifying trends and tendencies we can also get an idea of where we are going. What if corporations continue to "downsize," and put people out of work. What if our inner cities continue to decay? What if the earth's population continues to grow at its current rate? What if more and more people feel they have no control over their lives? Where will these trends lead? What new problems would arise?
Sociological mindfulness does not answer these questions, though it does help us see why they are important to ask, and it may help us get to better answers. Being sociologically mindful, we will see connections. We will see the social world being made by human action, and we will see how people's behavior is shaped by context. If we are mindful in these ways, we can arrive at a fuller understanding of the patterns in which we are caught up, and that we might like to change.
*SOURCE: THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE, 2ND EDITION, 2001, MICHAEL SCHWALBE, PGS. 107-109*
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