This reflection examines the concept of social status and role through the author's own experience. Drawing on the distinction between ascribed and achieved statuses, the essay identifies five primary statuses that define the author's identity, analyzes the roles and expectations attached to each, and explores the conflicts that arise both within individual statuses and between competing statuses. The paper demonstrates how gender, family obligations, education, relationships, and friendships intersect to shape personal identity and behavior, while critically examining society's influence on status fulfillment.
It is very important for one to have a set of statuses and the values and roles that follow along with each of them. Statuses and roles give us a clear picture of who someone is and what is expected of them. I have five main statuses that determine who I am as a person. Within my five statuses, I have roles that go along with each of them. Some of my statuses are ascribed, while others are achieved. An ascribed status is a social position that one was given at birth, and an achieved status is a social position that one has to work for. My five statuses start with being a female, which ties into my second status of being a daughter. My third status is being a wife. Being a college student would be my fourth status, and being a friend would be my fifth status. I have ordered these statuses from most importance to me to least importance.
My first status is being a female. This is a primarily ascribed status because I was given this social position at birth. The roles I play with this status include being independent, educated, respectful, loving, and nurturing. I feel that as a society we tend to label women as the caring, emotional type, so we automatically assume that they are going to take on that role. In addition, I feel that I will gain more roles throughout my lifetime for being a female. One day I had to take on the role of being a wife, which I recently did, and later on, I may become a mother. I consider this to be my master status. A master status is the most important status that a person can occupy. I set this as my master status because I believe that it determines who I am as a person. For instance, I would not be a daughter or a wife if I were not a female. In addition, being a female allows me to get away with different things that I would not be able to get away with if I were male.
However, I feel that I have faced many conflicts with being a female. First, society places many pressures on young girls. They tell them what to wear, how to act, and what being beautiful is. Growing up, I liked to dress in jeans and t-shirts and was considered to be a "tomboy." According to most societies, that is not how a young girl should dress. Next, I preferred to play with "boy toys," such as hot wheels cars, Legos, and action figures, with a rare appearance with a doll here and there. I recall in many of my younger school years being told to act more like a proper young lady. This role was a conflict because I wanted to act how I wanted and did not see why it was wrong. I was being forced to conform to what society felt I should do and act like.
A third conflict I have experienced with being a female is the assumption that I am physically and emotionally weak. People assume that just because I am a female that I cannot do certain things. For example, I get asked if I need help carrying things because they look too heavy for me. In addition, people think that being female means I am going to get offended by certain comments or jokes. For example, if someone is telling a joke and I ask them to repeat it, they say, "I don't want to upset you since you're a girl." I feel that I am going to constantly deal with various conflicts for being a female.
My second status is being a daughter to my mother. This also is an ascribed status because I had no control over this. The roles that go with this status include making my family proud, being there physically and emotionally, and being successful. I have faced several conflicts with this role. When I was a teenager, my mother and father got divorced. At this age, I was still finding myself and was very unstable. It also did not help that family life was not great at that time. This caused a lot of stress on me because my parents put me in the middle of fights and made me pick who I wanted to live with. Both were not the best choices, but I chose the one that I thought might be the easiest to deal with.
A second conflict that I have faced with this role is education. In my family, it is expected that one do well in school or be punished. Growing up, I struggled with problems in math, which I still do to this day. I was usually placed in classrooms that gave extra attention to children who needed more help, but this made me feel segregated from other kids and made me feel stupid. However, I still feel that I am going to face problems because I know I still have a ways to go until I am done with school.
A status conflict I have found is between my master status and being a daughter. As a female, I am expected to be there for my family. My family believes that I have to work myself to the bone and I strive to please them as well as my husband. This is difficult for me because I juggle so many things and it is hard for me to focus because I have so much going on, as well as having ADHD. With this being said, I feel like I struggle to do well to please everyone, regardless of how high or low their expectations are.
My third status is being a wife. This is an achieved role because I had to meet and woo my husband to get him to begin dating me and work my way to making our relationship go further. Roles in this status include being there for my husband and giving him love and support that he needs. There have been a few conflicts that I have experienced with this role. One conflict was getting my husband to move up in the steps of a relationship. Past relationships made him wary of women, which caused me to fret when he did not want to progress at the same speeds I did. My other statuses also sometimes affected this. In the past, I had many bad relationships as well as a few things I really cannot and do not want to talk about. From this, I felt the need to move at speeds to my liking to feel security. Though now that I have achieved the roles I want, I feel the conflict has been balanced.
My fourth status is being a student in college. This is an achieved status because I had to work for this position. I started going to school at the age of five, like most regular children as required. I struggled in school throughout pretty much every grade I passed through. I finally started to do a bit better when I got to high school. But as stated above, during this time I faced the conflict of my parents' divorce, which greatly impacted me in many negative ways. From all that, I had to work twice as hard in my last two years of high school to make up for the slacking I did in the first two years due to depression and bad habits. The roles that go with this status are going to class, doing my homework, studying, and doing my best. In addition, being a daughter and a friend became conflicts in the roles of being a student. There are many times where other roles caused me to slack in my roles as a student. The divorce was the biggest conflict, but at that age, like most teens, I was caught up in having relationships. This was a difficult time for me because I made bad choices and made lesser things way more important than they should have been.
The fifth status that I hold is being a friend, which is an achieved status. The roles that go with this status include being there for my friends in good times or bad, accepting them, helping them, and being honest with each other. The conflicts that I have had with this status is that being there for my friends was sometimes stressful and painful. There have been plenty of times I have been there for friends, but there have also been times that I could not be there for them. Sometimes other obligations came up that made it impossible for me to be of help when they were in need. All I could offer them was some texts and maybe a phone call if I was lucky. In addition, my other statuses get in the way of me being a friend, such as being a student and a wife.
"How social norms shape status and role fulfillment"
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