Labeling And Social Rejection example essay topic

Drinking Status, Labeling, and Social Rejection Drinking has been, for a long time, a very debatable topic. In the 1920's, drinking was seen as something so bad that it needed to be prohibited completely. Alcohol consumption is still often seen as distasteful, especially in large quantities. In this study by Keith M. Kilty and Thomas M. Meenaghan, researchers looked at the drinking status of fictional people along with other factors such as age and sex and asked participants to rate these people based on such attributes.

The article mentions several reasons that this study is less limited than other studies referring to labeling. Other studies have included only social distance and since this study included friendship acceptance and respect along with other characteristics of the personality such as religion and age, it explores a variety of different aspects of labeling and social rejection. In class, we talked about labeling in terms of IQ. We looked at the effects of labeling children as intelligent or slow and how these labels changed the way children approached their education. This study looks at labeling from a different perspective. Rather than looking at the effects on the person who has been labeled, this study looks at how a label can affect someone's perception of another person.

Using the social characteristics provided, the subjects draw conclusions about the fictional person according to respect, friendship acceptance, and social distance. We also talked briefly about substance abuse and how there is a difference between addiction and dependency. This might tie into the discrepancy between "problem drinker" and "alcoholic" in the study. Different groups gave these two categories different ratings which could be seen as a relationship between addiction and dependency and how the two different labels are perceived.

Three sample groups were recruited for the study. The first was a group of 101 males and 104 females with an average age of 44.5 years; this group was called the community group (C). The second was the practitioner group (P) with 73 males and 46 females with an average age of 27.1; they were all graduate students in the Graduate School of Social Work at Mary wood College. The third and final group consisted of inmates, all male, with an average age of 32.1; this was called the institutionalized client group (IC). All of the men in this group were recovering or recovered alcoholics. (Kilty and Meenaghan, 1977).

They were asked to rate a number of fictional people in three behavioral classes-respect, friendship acceptance, and social distance. Also, three other factors were added into the profile of the fictional stimuli. These factors were age, religion, and employment status. Another thing that is added in is the sex of the respondent. This is often a major determinant of the responses given. The methods employed by the researchers were fairly simple.

They built a description of a fictional person in terms of the previously stated personal characteristics and drinking statuses. All of the stimuli were male. There were three factors used in the study. Factor I has to do with the characteristic of respect. After the stimuli had been given, the experimenters would ask about things such as if the respondent of would ask the person for an opinion or if they would admire that person's character.

In factor II, friendship acceptance was measured through questions such as would they eat with the person or would they be partners with them in an athletic game. The third and final factor referred to social distance and inquired about things like working with the stimulus or accepting the person as close kin by marriage. All of these factors were used in determining how the subjects perceived the stimuli and if there was an aspect of labeling in their responses (Kilty and Meenaghan, 1977). There are several examples of different reactions by certain groups in response to certain combinations of stimuli but I am only going to cover a few as a brief summary. In terms of respect, the respondents tended to favor stimuli that were employed.

Nondrinkers always got the highest rating but there was a discrepancy between alcoholics and problem drinkers in the institutionalized client group and the other two groups. The IC group rated the alcoholics higher than the problem drinkers, which may be due to the fact that they are all alcoholics. This happens throughout the experiment across all the factors. There is also an interaction between race of respondent and drinking status.

The white subjects in the IC group preferred nondrinkers while the black subjects rated alcoholics before nondrinkers. In the area of friendship acceptance, the community group also rated the problem drinkers below the alcoholics. Religion also played a part in this section. In the C group, Protestant and Catholic stimuli were rated alcoholics higher than problem drinkers, but the opposite was true for Jewish stimuli. Finally, in terms of social distance, age and employment played a significant role in the ratings given by the participants in the IC groups, along with drinking status.

Drinking status was not a factor at all for the P group whereas it was the main determinant for the C group. Overall, the P group's responses differed most from those of the C and IC groups (Kilty and Meenaghan, 1977). Although this study is an interesting and perhaps even relevant study of labeling and the effects of factors other than social distance on the labeling process, there are several limitations to the study. The first and most important problem is the lack of diversity in the groups. In the first group (C), there was only one non-white respondent, and in the second group (P), there were only 10. The third group (IC), was more evenly distributed race wise but they were also all recovering alcoholics which may have also skewed the results.

There seems to be a lot of room for prejudices in this study which may have been why the responses turned out the way they did, rather than because of the labels associated with drinking status. Also, the fact that all of the stimuli described to the subjects were male left out what may have been a very interesting factor in determining the affects of gender on labeling. Most of these problems probably stem from the time in which the study was conducted (1973). In order to fix these problems, the participants would need to be in groups that have more racial and gender diversity. This would deal with a lot of the possible biases that are inherent in the study. It also might be interesting to include race or ethnicity as a description factor of the stimuli to see if that has an effect on the responses.

The religions may need to be broadened in order to account for the religious diversity in our country. Although I think that the study is relevant to the topic of labeling, it might be better served in a broader context. However, too much variables would make it too difficult to decide what is causing the responses. There is a thin line between too much and not enough in this situation. I think that this study gives interesting insight into what it might be like to be labeled as an alcoholic in our society and with an updated version, I think it could be very relevant to the study of alcoholism. Reference: All the information in this paper was drawn from the article by Kilty, Keith M. and Meenaghan, Thomas M. out of the Journal of Social Psychology, 1973.

The article is entitled Drinking Status, Labeling, and Social Rejection. I also pulled some of the information used from in class lectures.