Social Observation

Social Interaction in Public Spaces In this final paper, I am focused on people’s interaction in public restaurants, and how I could find connections to our class concept. Similarly to my second paper, I decided to do participant observation again because it works better for me. Purposely, I opted to observe to restaurants that are different in many aspects, especially in the people that often go to these restaurants. I did my observation in the Epic Café and Athens on the 4th Avenue. The environment in both restaurants is very different, and it seems that the Athens is mostly visited by people from the middle or higher classes. Thus, you will be reading a lot about social interaction, class and a little bit of race, so I want to make sure …show more content…
I can strongly affirm that there is presence of inequality in the Athens restaurant due to the fact that they would only provide good customer service if you physically demonstrate that you belong to a middle or higher class. Thus, the people inside this restaurant have the same idea in their mind, which make the only interact with people from their family or people that share the same social status, making me automatically link it to the concept of reciprocity. I believe that this links to reciprocity because in the Athens restaurant is very notable the exchange between costumers and workers. Costumers provide high profits to the restaurant and in exchange they give them good services, but they closely judge people by the physical appearance to find out which economic class they belong to, and provide good or poor customer service. In contrast, the Epic café shows a different reality because they break a lot of stereotypes commons in most of restaurants. This idea that I mentioned before about reciprocity in the Athens restaurant based on the economic class, is not an issue in the Epic café because it seems that they have a different motto. I believe that the key to this situation is in the idea that many people have about who should interact to whom. Most of the societies have the idea that rich people should only interact with rich people, white people only with people form the same race, and so on. I noticed that this strongly affect the social mobility of the people who gets judged or mistreated for being in a lower social class because they will not have the chance to interact with them , and maybe share some experiences, knowledge, and learn strategies to be successful. Moreover, the social interactions in these restaurants even make think of