My Social Portrait: My Sociological Portrait Of My Family

Introduction
As I sketched my sociological portrait, I found myself looking at the multiple statuses I hold in society and how each came about. I am not only a father to a young adult, but a son, a brother, a friend to many, a neighbor, a student once again and a blue-collar worker. Each of these statuses developed during various times in my life and required me to take on, at times, numerous roles. These statuses have defined who I have become and the impacts I have on society. My sociological portrait will be based on the social institution of family. My family has been the most influential in molding who I have become.
Identity and Social Institution
My parents came from working-class families that where the “traditional family.” Both of

These reference groups helped shape us by providing us the means of how to behave in group settings in the proper way, communication among people from all social classes, and gave us the ability to identify other social norms. My friends and their families taught me soft skills that I had not been exposed to within my family. “Soft skills are the character traits and difficult to teach interpersonal skills that characterize a person’s relations with other people. Soft skills have more to do with who we are than what we know. As such, soft skills encompass the character traits that decide how well one interacts with others, and are usually a definite part of one 's personality (www.investopedia.com).” “Soft skills are things like knowing how to dress, act and present oneself or the ability to work well with other people”. (Manza Pg. 417) In part, I learned proper table etiquette and dressing appropriately for different situations from some of my friends and their families. The benefits of these soft skills became invaluable later and into adulthood by helping me in the real world. I learned what to say and when to say it in conversational circumstances, a skill that I might have been otherwise unprepared for had I not been given this guidance when I was young. This allowed me to carry on conversations and interact with people of greater importance than myself later in