Practice question · Sort into groups
Personal trouble or public issue? Sort each situation the way Mills would.
Groups: Personal trouble · Public issue
- Women hold 8% of executive seats economy-wide
- Half of all marriages in a country end in divorce
- Youth unemployment sits at 30% for a decade
- A couple divorces over money disputes
- One cashier is dismissed after repeated no-shows
Hints
- Ask whether the outcome repeats across many unrelated lives.
- A pattern that survives changes of personnel lives in the structure.
Show the answer
Personal trouble: One cashier is dismissed after repeated no-shows, A couple divorces over money disputes
Public issue: Youth unemployment sits at 30% for a decade, Half of all marriages in a country end in divorce, Women hold 8% of executive seats economy-wide
Why
The test is scale and pattern: when an outcome repeats across thousands of unrelated biographies, its causes live in the structure, not in the individuals.
Practise The Sociological Perspective
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Business I is free to start.
More questions on The Sociological Perspective
- Match each paradigm to its core image of society.
- A retail chain’s churn is 40% yearly. HR files each exit as "personal reasons." What would Durkheim say?
- Which are social facts in Durkheim’s sense?
- Suicide rates are strikingly stable year to year in a given society, despite each case being an individual…
- Mills said the sociological imagination connects personal troubles to public issues. What does that…
- According to the functionalist lens, even practices that look irrational usually persist because they perform…
- Complete Mills’ formula.
- Order the steps of a sociological analysis of high employee turnover.