Week 7 — Social Stratification & Class
Why this matters
A nursing student comparing two job offers and a family deciding whether an unpaid internship is affordable both meet this week's ideas.
In plain language
Every society ranks its people, and the ranking shapes who gets a good school, a safe street, and a second chance. This week names that ranking social stratification (the sorting of people into layers by money, education, and power). You will learn to tell income (the money that comes in, like a paycheck) from wealth (what a household owns minus what it owes, like a bank balance). You will see how the government draws a poverty line, how people move up or down the layers, and why sociologists still argue about whether the layers are fair. Then you will read the real 2024 income and poverty figures one careful step at a time.
- Already covered: Weeks 1 to 6 built the perspectives, the four data questions, culture, the self, groups, and deviance.
- This week: how a society ranks people into layers, income versus wealth, poverty measures, mobility, and why the layers exist.
- How they connect: Week 2's four questions now read the real 2024 income and poverty figures.
- Where we're going next: Week 8, Midterm Review & Exam, adds the level-of-analysis habit.
Focus
Is the ladder real, who is on which rung, and what separates a paycheck from a bank balance?
By the end of this module, you should be able to:
- [ ] tell income from wealth and a median from a mean
- [ ] explain why two poverty measures give two rates
- [ ] compare Marx with Weber and classify mobility
- [ ] read the 2024 Census figures four ways
To-do
Plan your week
- Read Chapter 7 (about 40 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
- Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
- Do the Sociology in Action Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
- Take the quiz.
This week's checkpoint: explain why the 2024 official poverty rate and the Supplemental Poverty Measure are 2.3 percentage points apart, not 2.3 percent.
You've got this
Take it in order, and ask your instructor early if you get stuck.
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