blog for Fri 9/16

This week, our class learned about the different advantages and disadvantages of using a survey vs. an ethnography in order to answer a sociological question. I think that based on Sudhir Venkatesh's results when he tried to answer his question about being black and poor, an ethnography will give more feedback. But my group was interested in people as a whole, and if we were to do an ethnography based off of observations at Stevenson High School, our results would probably differ a lot from observations at other high schools in poorer areas or of a different culture, because they would have different sociological imaginations. For some cultures, women have a much lower standing in their society because that's just how it has always been and has never changed, so they might have responded a lot differently to the questions, maybe seeing "sex without monogamy" as an okay thing, while our culture's social construction of reality is that both people need to be loyal in a relationship. However, because our results were mostly taken from Stevenson High School, they only told us about the students at Stevenson rather than society as a whole. Still, I found the results from our survey very interesting. We found that whether or not a person is male or female hardly influences the response to whether a person would wait until they have sex or whether they have or would involve him/herself in "sex without monogamy." It was also interesting to see that even though a person might decide to wait to have sex, never has said "I love you" to gain sexual relief, and never entered a relationship for sexual support, they a lot of times still considered having "sex without monogamy." It made me think that people don't really take relationships seriously if so many people are willing to have sex with another person while with being involved with someone else. I think that in this scenario, we probably would have been better off to simply talk to a variety of people because the questions may have confused some people, and since they were posted on facebook, there may have only been a certain group of people interested in taking the survey. It also would be better to have talked to people for the sake of having social mindfulness because they might feel really justified in their responses in a way I can't understand because Stevenson is so culturally diverse, and I don't know all of the beliefs of every culture in the school.