As you’re studying for the midterm (or any exam, for that matter), know what resources you have easily available to use. For instance, there are web pages in the lecture material that explicitly take what we’ve discussed in class and ask whether it represents a social problem (media, climate change). There are long and short versions of the social problems questions–and you don’t need hyperlinks to follow the logic. 

Here I’ll use climate change as an example of how to maybe turn this into a narrative that ‘sticks’ climate change to the social problems framework. There are causes of climate change (top of this page). Most of it has to do with how our atmosphere, thanks to the greenhouse effect (which also keeps us alive, by the way), holds heat near the Earth’s surface. And it just so happens that some carbon-based compounds, when they are burned or decomposed, are released into the atmosphere, and hold heat for long periods of time (e.g., CO2 for a century, methane for 25 years or so). You’ll see links to the greenhouse gas descriptions from this link (the same as above). These gases are by-products of using fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas), and get released way more often in industrialized societies. The period of industrialization, beginning around 1800 or so, has produced phenomenal wealth and high material living standards for many–that’s the beneficial part–but when they are transformed into usable forms (like oil is into gasoline), that’s when they end up in the atmosphere. Lots of processes driven by human, not natural activity, do this in the industrialized world. 

The societies where people benefit from two centuries of industrialization aren’t the same societies that often pay the price (now we’re getting into consequences). Ice sheets melt, causing sea level rise, which can immediate affect people living on coastlines or islands, storms become more frequent and less predictable, causing flooding or damage from high winds (tornadoes, hurricanes, cyclones …), drier conditions and warmer temperatures (and less snowpack) can extend wildfire seasons. Winter 2026 has seen some very cold weather well into the mid- and lower-latitudes, which can affect places that grow some of the US’ food (like citrus crops), where freezing temperatures were rare in times of stable climate. Lots of potentially harmful causes, affecting Americans but also people around the world–climate change doesn’t respect a country’s borders or regions of the world. 

And yet some groups benefit from this dynamic. The industrialized world has run on fossil fuels. It’s a hard habit to break, because almost everything produced needs them to some extent, and the companies that extract, produce and ship them are quite profitable. But then most consumers benefit, too, don’t they, from cheap access to goods produced with the help of fossil fuels? And that fuels the production of greenhouse gases. Even news outlets are involved here, because in the US so much of news media is funded by commercial advertising. And advertising is rarely about consuming less. Think about those news filtering pressures here, especially advertising as a filter. Is it in their short-term interests to have us thinking about what’s happening to the climate? Think structure and agency here–they have owners, shareholders, editors, who profit from providing ‘bait’ to an audience and selling that audience to advertisers.

News happens to play a key role in how problems are framed for consumption by the public (middle of this page–look for the ‘Key questions, issues’ heading). Advertisers can play a role in framing by filtering–if an oil company spends millions on ads, is that news organization going to make them look like they’re destroying the Earth’s stable climate?? Other groups, front groups funded by corporations that keep their identities in the background, can fund programming, run commercials, bring ‘experts’ onto the news trying to inject doubt into the science of warming and climate change, etc. And in general, commercials present all the cool things that are related to having the right stuff–they insulate consumers from the effects of climate change, often felt elsewhere, often in non-industrialized countries that aren’t causing the problem so much as paying the price.

And what news consumer wants to feel bad or guilty about their consumption??

What should or could be done?? Science has shown us, there are literally hundreds of ways we can switch from fossil fuels to renewable fuels (fossil fuels are considered ‘non-renewable’–they aren’t produced in any human time frame, but rather long stretches of geologic time), reduce consumption, use public transportation systems instead of personal vehicles, reuse, recycle materials, etc.

But who doesn’t like the independence of having  a car and relatively cheap gasoline? It’s a tough sell, especially for a politician trying to get elected (is there some insight into structure and agency in that dilemma?). So in other words, we know what can slow climate change (it’s too late to stop but we could stretch it out centuries), but societies may lack the knowledge or political will to make the changes needed. Hence, the problem benefits from a knowledge of the basic biology and chemistry behind climate change, but it’s human societies’ inability to make changes that makes it a social problem. Will they figure this out and try to manage a transition to less fossil fuel-intensive societies? Or will we only make changes when confronted with catastrophe? One thing seems certain: relying on individuals to make changes will be less successful (because some just won’t see the reason or the benefit) than structural changes, which are less likely to be popular, and would require governments to help the groups harmed by the transition, such as the trucking industry, or areas dependent on coal mining or oil or gas drilling, or all of the various businesses that depend on the internal combustion engine.

Hopefully this gives you a sense of how to use storytelling, or a narrative, in this case of social problems (causes, consequences, who benefits, how framed, what to do), to get some of these concepts to ‘stick’ instead of having to just memorize them and stick them in some massive file cabinet in our brains.