5.3 What Is a Social Issue?
A social issue is any condition or behavior that has negative consequences for large numbers of people and that is generally recognized as a condition or behavior that needs to be addressed.
Multiple factors contribute to the complexity of social issues. A social issue emerges when a social change group successfully calls attention to a condition or behavior that it considers serious, like the protest in figure 5.3. Typically the solution to the problem needs to be systemic in nature; in other words, it cannot be solved by any one individual. This definition has both an objective component and a subjective component.
Objectivity and Social Issues
The objective component of a social issue is this: for any condition or behavior to be considered a social issue, it must have negative consequences for large numbers of people. How do we know if a social issue has negative consequences? Reasonable people can disagree on whether such consequences exist and, if so, on their extent and seriousness. However, ordinarily a body of data accumulates—based on work by academic researchers, government agencies, and other sources—that strongly points to extensive and severe consequences. The reasons for these consequences are sometimes debated.
Let us look at two examples of trends that could be considered social problems: climate change and (activation warning) sexual assault or violence. Climate change, to simplify a complex scientific concept, refers to changes in the earth’s climate due to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Although the overwhelming majority of climate scientists say that climate change is severe and accurate, the percentage of Americans who agree with scientists is lower. In a 2011 poll, 64 percent said they “think that global warming is happening” (Leiserowitz et al., 2011). While most Americans in 2020 believed that climate change is a social problem, there is still a discrepancy between the scientific community’s and the public’s views (Tyson & Kennedy, 2020).
Social identity and location influence viewpoints. Gallup polls have found that people in the West and Northeast, as well as younger adults, are more likely to believe that climate change is at least partially caused by human behavior and needs to be addressed (Reinhardt, 2018; McCarthy, 2019). Part of the issue is that the facts become subjective. How is this possible?
The social problem of sexual assault is, unfortunately, extremely common, especially among women. Sexual assault is defined as nonconsensual sexual touch according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (n.d.). However, sexual violence is experienced in different ways by different genders. SSH “is a volunteer-run nonprofit organization dedicated to documenting and ending gender-based street harassment worldwide through public education and community mobilization.”
When looking at numbers alone, you can see that this is an issue that has a significant impact on a lar