[MUSIC] Hi, in this module we're going to be talking about Social Context and Individual Outcomes. Understanding how social context influences individual outcomes is a central concern in social science. By context, we mean everything in the environment, the world around us. That can include our community, our neighborhoods, our kinship networks, and our social networks. Context shapes our characteristics, our beliefs, our knowledge, and eventually our opportunities. It turns out however, to be very difficult to study context. The problem, which is a central one in social science, is that people choose their contexts. That is, they choose the neighborhoods in which they will live, or they may be constrained in their choice of neighborhood. They choose the people that make up their social networks. These sorts of problems are a central challenge to social science. And we'll be dealing with some of the approaches to dealing with these problems in later weeks. Now I'd like to elaborate a bit and illustrate how we think about the relationship between social context and individual outcomes. We know that as individuals, a variety of things shape these sorts of outcomes that we have in life. Shape our health, our education, our marriage chances, all of the things we care about. These things as individuals that influence these outcomes, include our knowledge, our beliefs, our characteristics and our opportunities. Now it's fairly straight forward to study the relationships of these with our outcomes, but the question really is, is how do these evolve? Where do these come from, where do our beliefs come from, where does knowledge come from? Where do our opportunities come from, and where do our characteristics come from? And that's where the interest in social context comes in. We're interested in how various features of context, feed in to shape all of the things that I just talked about, that shape our individual outcomes. At one level, there's our community, the community in which we live, especially when you think about a child growing up. The community in which they live could be a city, could be a large town, is an important determinant of how they grow up. It will shape what kinds of schools they have access to, will shape what kind of health care they receive while they're young. And it may shape their job opportunities as they get older. Within that larger community, we're also very interested in neighborhoods. That is, the people who live around us and with whom we interact on a nearly daily basis. Neighborhoods shape us in many different ways, at a basic level and one that's perhaps easiest to understand. We can think about the way that neighborhoods influence children as they grow up. A child growing up in a wealthy neighborhood may be exposed to many examples of people that are doing well, that have been relatively successful. That may shape that child's aspirations. A child growing up in a poor neighborhood, or a neighborhood that is not as safe, as they grow up, they may have a very different experience. They may not know about various kinds of opportunities available to them. They may not see other people that will serve as role models for them. This may shape their aspirations, or even reduce their aspirations. Now we're obviously very aware of the importance of our social networks. That is the people you might say outside of our neighbourhoods and our communities or perhaps part of our neighbourhoods. Who are part of our personal networks, with whom we share information, with whom we share opinions, with whom we share our beliefs. As we interact with these people, we learn from them, we change our own beliefs potentially, and these all shape these factors that I talked about that shape outcomes. And finally, we're probably all most aware of the importance of our interactions with our kin for shaping our knowledge and our beliefs, and our characteristics, and our opportunities. It's not just our parents, obviously our parents have a huge influence on the sorts of things that in turn shape our outcomes. But also our more distant relatives. We may have aunts or uncles that introduce us to job opportunities, or set us an example either because they're very successful, or perhaps unsuccessful. Similarly we may have cousins or even more distant relatives that offer various kinds of opportunities. We're specially interested in neighborhood and community influences. This is a very big area within social science right now. And we're specifically interested in how neighborhoods shape social and economic outcomes, and understanding again, how they influence these outcomes. And once again, the central problem is that, as I mentioned earlier, people either choose their neighborhoods, or they may be constrained in the sorts of opportunities that they have to move into particular neighborhoods, by their economic characteristics or other factors. So when we see an association between somebody's neighborhood and their outcomes, we don't always know if it's the neighborhood shaping the outcome, or some characteristics of the individual that shape both their choice of neighborhood and their outcomes. I'd like to come back to social networks and talk in a little bit more detail about them. As I mentioned, we're very interested in how the composition of our social networks affects our behavior and, or outcomes. We're especially interested in things like how our family and our kin affect our individual behavior and our outcomes. And then, more recently, we've started trying to think as social scientists, about the idea that there's a cycle in which, on the one hand, our networks shape our individual behavior and our outcomes. But our individual behavior and outcomes in turn, shape the experiences of the other people in our networks. If you think about that as part of a cycle, that can produce social change. Let me elaborate with an example. So if we think about our social network, which might be made up of our family, our kin, our classmates, co-workers, neighbors and so forth. We interact with them, they influence us, they share information with us. This changes are beliefs, this changes our behaviour, it may increase our knowledge. Now we may have been influenced by the people in our social network but in turn, we represent part of the social network of other people. And so our beliefs, our knowledge, our interactions that we have with the members of social network, shape their beliefs, their knowledge and their interactions. So think about an example where people are evaluating or forming their political opinions. People may shape their political opinions based on the interactions they have with their co-workers and their classmates as I just mentioned. So as a result of a conversation with some people in my social network, perhaps I change my political opinions. Perhaps I learn new information or develop a new way of thinking about a particular topic. But in turn, the next time I interact with somebody else in my social network, I in turn, may influence their beliefs, their knowledge. Again, if I am able to transmit my beliefs to that member of my social network, that may change their beliefs. And if you think about that process as it continues, as it propagates, that could generate social change. In the past that sort of process was very difficult to study. But in the coming decades as more data become available and better methods become available. We expect that these sorts of studies will become an important part of social science.
