Answer to Question #308141 in Sociology for TLITLI

Question

compare and contrast two theoretical approaches to social problems to poverty as a social problem.

Answer 1

Cultural and structural

Poverty is explained by cultural theories based on the characteristics of the impoverished. According to these views, the poor's valuational, attitudinal, and behavioral habits prohibit them from becoming socially mobile. Structural theories, on the other hand, explain poverty in terms of the poor's living conditions: unemployment, underemployment, inadequate education, and bad health. For structural theorists, the particular qualities of the poor that are crucial to cultural theorists' explanations are responses or adaptations to the hostility of the structural conditions that the poor encounter. Structural theorists accept cultural theorists' categorization of the poor; they only give it a different interpretation.