Analysis Of The 1995 Chicago Heat Wave Essay

According to the sociologist Emile Durkheim, when a person has a very strong degree of social connectedness, he or she may identify with its values or causes to such an extent that

Emile Durkheim is seen as one of the fathers of sociology because of his work, his manifesto of sociology. Durkheim made a very strong and controversial claim in his book, “The Rules of Sociological Method”. He mentions that no act is inherently deviant in and of itself. Deviance is defined by society and will vary from one group to another. Obviously, then, the group in a given society that has a lot of power will have the major role in defining what acts are deviant. But for this to work most people must acknowledge that power. That is, they must recognize and feel that that power is legitimate, that the state or those in control have authority over them. This is an important distinction between force and coercion (i.e. raw power without recognition or consent of the people) and legitimate authority where people recognize and acknowledge the power over them. With this in mind, let’s look at the social construction of

28) to react to and explain the changes society as he had known it. He alluded to how the division of labor as a primary element in the undoing of society. Furthermore, he witnessed the erosion of a patriarchy, so to speak, and feared society to be barreling towards amorality. Without someone instilling good morals into society at large, those who were not strong enough to make decisions on their own would be left behind. It is without coincidence that simultaneously religion’s grip on the masses seemed to be waning. In his book Suicide: A sociological study, Durkheim specifically researches the period between 1841 and 1872. He notes the reason he chose this time period was due to the rich climate of upheaval. (Durkheim, 1951 [1897], p.46) Could this have led Durkheim to conclude that those who were in a more close-knit community, specifically a particular religious community, had a lower of a rate of suicide? Political unrest was pervasive in European society at the time. Many countries were revolting against their governments.

The 1995 Chicago Heat Wave was the worst weather-related disaster in the United States. Temperatures rose to dangerous high records which cost the lives of over 700 people. The conditions that contributed to such a high death toll were not just from the natural disaster, but lack of proper planning. Unfortunately the city of Chicago had no official weather disaster plan in place to handle the crisis. The failures of that day illustrate that officials, the media, and the community did not fulfill their ethical responsibility to save the lives that were lost. In his book Heat Wave Eric

It is the hottest year ever. I thought it would be a lot more cooler the one hundred degrees outside. This was very dangerous for kids and elderly that is outside. So we call this the heatwave of 1995 in Chicago ILL. This caused many many problems with the people and the animals this was the worst Chicago has ever seen.

The title of the books that I read for my project were The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story by Richard Preston and The Princess Bride by William Goldman. What could the similarities and differences in a non-fiction book and a fictional book? How were the authors’ point of views similar? Which point of view was the best? Which point of view was most believable? These are the questions that I hope to answer with the information contained in this paper.

Durkheim’s concept of social integration refers to social groups with well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals. These groups will differ in the degree to which individuals are part of the collective body, also to the extent to which the group is emphasized over the individual, and lastly the level to which the group is

The first sociologist to research into suicide was Ėmile Durkheim; he “wished to show that sociological factors were ‘capable of explaining much about such anti-social phenomena’” (Gingrich). Durkheim’s research allowed for him to understand how society connected to the rates of suicide and, more detailed, the importance of social integration on the rates of suicide across the country. He found a correlation between the rates of suicide and the seasons because the amount of social interactions increased as the seasons became longer and people were more likely to interact with the more accommodating temperatures (Gingrich). His views on suicide can all relate back to the degree to which society plays a role in one’s life due to the amount of interactions one has with society and the regulations that society imposes on the individual (Gingrich). Along with this view Durkheim also created four different reasons for committing suicide. The first type of suicide is egoistic suicide is when social integration in very limited, and people have the feeling of being normless. Next is altruistic suicide where societal pressures were too great and where suicide is forced upon a person, like the ritual suicides found in Japan that will be discussed later in this text. Anomic suicide is when there is a change in society, and the norms and

Our text explains that Durkheim’s sociological model gets to the center of the relationship between an individual and the community.

Durkheim did not feel satisfied with individualized explanations for suicide such as alcoholism or depression. He felt there needed to be a stronger explanation and sought to explain how suicide was truly brought about through social forces. He constructed a coordinate system that contained social integration (how well you are connected with society) on the y-axis, and social regulation (what you expect daily from the world) on the x-axis. You need to maintain a position somewhere near the middle of the two to have a low risk for suicide. This graph led him to four different types of suicide. Egoistic suicide occurs when an individual is not very connected to society. Altruistic suicide is the opposite, where an individual is too integrated.

This social integration had a key role in explaining the differential rates of suicide because Durkheim determined that without social integration society's suicide rates were higher because it would mean that these societies were bringing cohesion and the members of these societies were not being reached out or protected during times of

Following Durkheim’s rationale, I would predict that the suicide rate for Jewish women in the USA in 1990 is higher than that for Jewish women in France in 1890. Durkheim claims that suicide rate varies in inverse proportion to the degree of social integration, or the force of the collective values upon individuals. According to him, the greater the autonomy of each individual, the looser he is bound to the society, and the more likely it is for him to commit suicide because human activities have a social origin and hence a collective purpose, without which there is no meaning for human activities (214-215). Consequently, in a community where men are completely subsumed under an "identical body of doctrine" (159), where the collective social

Emile Durkheim believed in sociology, the social facts, and aspects in social life that make people. Durkheim would

(Fox,2012) he stated that Emile Durkheim believed that society is made up of social facts which are aspects of social life that shape our actions and they regulate human social action and act as constraints over individual behavior and action. Social facts are objective entities and Durkheim emphasized, but they also contain a significant subjective element which, combining within the individual’s consciousness, forms representations of the social world. Society and social facts are invisible, intangible separate power over us; society is greater than any individual. Durkheim also believes that society has a reality of its own, it is a structure that is external to us and we are often not aware that social facts shape our actions. There is more to society than simply the action and interest of its individual members. He saw social solidarity and he further stated that our strong moral connection with each other stops society descending into chaos as threatened by social change.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim was born on April 15, 1858 in Épinal, France. He was named principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology. He once followed a Jewish tradition, but later broke away and started to produced many secular works. His first big sociological work was "The Division of Labor in Society." This is how modern society is held together by a division of labor that makes individuals dependent upon one another. It also spoke on social and moral order within a society. In another work of his, 'Rules of Sociological Method' he spoke on the need for scientific approach in the study of sociology. This was a very big thought in this day of age. He set up the first European department of sociology, and became