Social Inequality In Sociological Research

All societies have ways by which people are classified by others, this is known as differentiation. The main types of differentiation include; gender, age, ethnicity, social class and disability. Societies also tend to have stratas or layers of people with different social importance, wealth and status; this is known as stratification (Punch et al, 2013). The result of stratification and differentiation is that people have different life chances in the course of their lives. Any society that has stratification will have some form of inequality. Social inequalities are established from power, status, wealth and income which are unequally distributed in society (Browne, 2011).

For sociologists, inequality outlines socially produced differences …show more content…
Poverty is essentially an aspect of social class inequality, families with children, lone parents, disabled individuals, some ethnic minorities and people who do not work. Absolute poverty is poverty defined as lacking the minimum requirements necessary to maintain human health and life for example, food, water and shelter. In addition, relative poverty is poverty defined in relation to a generally accepted standard of living in a specific society at a particular time. The cycle of deprivation shows that if an individual is born poor, that person will have bad nourishment which will lead to ill health, absence from school, resulting in a few qualifications and therefore, ending in a low paid job or even unemployed (O’Donnell, 2001). In Britain in 1996, 26 percent of the population were living in poverty, in comparison to twenty-two percent of the population living in poverty in 2009. Women are more likely to experience poverty than men this is known as the feminisation of poverty. In 2008, twenty-one per cent of all women lived in low-income households compared to nineteen per cent of men, with twenty-nine per cent of single women in low-income households compared to twenty-four per cent of single men. Women face a higher risk of poverty than men because women are more likely to be in low-paid and part-time work. In 2009, around two-thirds of low-paid workers were women. The feminisation of poverty is due to women being either in low paid jobs or a lone parent with the responsibility of their children, resulting in fewer possibilities for employment and the dependence of benefits (Browne, 2011). Marxists see that poverty is an inevitable outcome of capitalism due to the uneven distribution of wealth and income which is a main consequence of capitalism. They believe that poverty is as a result of paying the lowest wages to people in order to make big