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Sociology Poverty and Equality

In: Social Issues

Submitted By burnmetwice
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Poverty and Social Inequality
‘Inequality remains a significant part of life in contemporary Britain’
Some argue that Britain is the most unequal society in Western Europe, Research conducted by Sutton Trust from 2010 suggests that poverty affects children’s ability to do well in schools, the study indicates that just 45 per cent of children from poorest fifth of families were ready to read daily by the age of three compared to 78 per cent of children from richest fifth of families. This proves that British society is unequal; there are social groups that have access to better standards of living than others (Morning Star Online 2010)
In order for Inequality to take place, some people need to have more than others, creating boundaries in society that stop some people from getting equal status despite their work and effort.
There are several ways of measuring social class, subjective method simply is based on people’s perception of what social class they should be in. However it is quite vague as some people may be middle class and have a lot of money whereas other might have education, lifestyle and manners of the middle class but are poor. Where objective method takes things into account like occupation, unemployment, income, education and so on therefore it is more reliable way of measuring social class. In order to measure social class effectively, stratification is needed to enable evaluation of inequalities; best way to do it is consider morbidity and mortality factors as unemployment or income are not always accurate way of measuring it. Taking someone’s occupation into an account is might have problems too, as someone could have good profession and be unemployed and therefore struggling financially. The Registrar General is used by the government to objectively measure social class. It concentrates mainly on occupation (Stepehe Moore,Steve Chapman,Dave

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