Inequality in Contemporary American Society
Professor Timothy Shortell
www.shortell.org/courseserve

Community Profile

The community profile combines archival data, from the U.S. Census and other sources, with narrative data from a field study of a neighborhood. The goal of the profile is to apply the sociological imagination to the patterns that can be observed in the neighborhood. The first part of the profile is descriptive. Using demographic data and observation, you will attempt to depict the patterns of social life in your neighborhood. In the second part of the profile, this portrait of the neighborhood is placed in a sociological context. The important dimensions of social stratification -- race, class, and gender -- are used to construct an explanation of the observed patterns. This is the movement of the sociological imagination: to connect the features of daily life with the impersonal social forces that structure the way people live.

The Revised Essay

The revised version of the essay will add some theoretical material to the empirical data. In order to make a sociological argument about your neighborhood, look for sources from the online chapters and readings, as well as online sources of sociological theory, to find quotations that lend support to your interpretation.

Your revised essay should include at least three quotations from theoretical sources that support your interpretation of inequality in your neighborhood. You must provide a citation in the text for each quotation; use the author(s), date of publication, and page number in braces -- e.g., {} -- following the quotation. In the bibliography, you must provide a full refernce to the work, including author, year, title and publication or URL.

For example, if you quote from the online chapters:

"The first thing we notice about power..." {Shortell 2003 np}.

Because this is a web source, there are no page numbers, so I use "np" to indicate that the source is not paginated. In the bibliography is the full reference:

Shortell, Timothy. 2003. "Power, Inequality & the State," Inequality in Contemporary American Society. www.shortell.org/courses/cs3/power.html

Note that the reference includes the title of the essay and the publication, and provides the full URL to the page (and not just www.shortell.org).

Make sure that you use the curly braces instead of parentheses for citations, so that the essay submission processor can find them. If you neglect to do this, you may be asked to resubmit your essay. More importantly, if your citations are incorrect and do not match your references, you will earn no more than 10 points (67%) on the revised version, so take the time to make sure everything is in order.

The edited version of the community profile should be between 1200 and 1300 words. Take heed of the comments I provided on your draft; I will be grading the final versions, in part, on how well you addressed the suggested revisions.

Submit your final edited version with the essay submission form.