How conflict, funtionalist, interactionalist perspective view poverty?

Question

pls help on this.. this is my assignment in social science. due this coming tuesday. pls pls pls help

Answer 1

It's been a while since I actually had to think about these perspectives in terms of their actual use. So I will try my best, hopefully you are able to fix mistakes with your gathered knowledge :)

Firstly, I want to identify each perspective, then I will try to say, in my opinion how each views poverty.

Functionalist perspective views society as a system. Basically, I remember the TA explaining this as different parts of society working together, and every part needs to be present or else society will fail - think of society as an organism. So, in a way, poverty is needed to balance society. We need to have poverty to be able to have rich people. If we have no poverty, there cannot be rich people. They view it as a necessary part of society, as bad as it is. Functionalist view peopel who suffer poverty as deserving because they lack the skills to make them reap the rewards of society.

Conflict perspective society is made up of groups with competing self-interests. Groups that compete with each other will have differences of power. Basically, conflict perspective would state that because conflict already exists in society, poverty will exist. Since there is wealthy people there has to be poor people because wealth and power are distrubuted unequally. The group that become dominant, usually wealthy people, will tend to make up the rules of how goods of society will be supplied, and because they want to make sure the dominants group interests are at the top, they will only serve the interest of the dominant group. For instance, wealthy people don't care much about the poor people, for all they know they deserve to be where they are at. They are only interested in looking out for the interest of other wealthy people to keep their lifestyle. So they view poverty as a part of society that is based on inequality. Conflict is needed for society to be able to view faults and try to fix them and close the gap of inequality.

Interactionist perspective basically say that society is possible because people interact with each other. We give meaning to things based on our encounters. The world is socially constructed, meaning we make the world have the meaning that most of society finds fitting. Basically, this perspective would be more interested in how a person was able to fall into poverty in the first place. So in this view, poor people exist because they were never able to make sense of their world. They might have not been able to see opportunity or were not around people who offered much in the way of a better life. Poverty exists because people who are in it saw other people struggle and thats all they know. They basically never tried for more options since they probably didn't have the network to expand and get recognized.

I hope this helps you! :) Good luck.