Analysis Of Social Conflicts: The Concept Of Role Conflict
In life, people are expected to manage their responsibilities effectively. Sometimes, a person’s different social roles and expectations can begin to clash, leading to difficulty in daily life. The basic concept of role conflict presents itself when roles from different social statuses collide and begin to compete for a person’s time or mental energy. As a result, this can become a significant issue when someone has multiple important roles that require a lot of attention.
Understandably, a concept often confused with role conflict is role strain. The differing factor, however, is that role strain is incompatibility coming from responsibilities pertaining to a specific status, while role conflict is the struggle of responsibilities between a person’s many different statuses. For example, a doctor takes a late shift to help cover for one of her coworkers. After her shift, she comes home to find that her babysitter couldn’t control her kids and as a result, the house is a mess. The doctor cleans up the house, tucks her kids into bed, and then falls asleep far too late. The next day, she goes to work and is too tired to get anything done. Her multiple roles and their specific requirements asked for more time and energy than the doctor was capable of giving, which caused her to lose efficiency.
Just as the doctor struggles with her multiple responsibilities, I have to juggle multiple roles and priorities. Firstly, I am a student; however, I am also an intern at a local business and a son that needs to help take care of his family. On the weekends, I divide my time between these priorities, in order to keep up with my different roles. Occasionally, if one of these responsibilities is allowed too much time or mental energy, it can negatively affect my efficiency in my other roles. For instance, a few weekends ago, I had multiple papers that were due on Sunday. I spent most of my day on Saturday finalizing these essays so I could turn them in the next day. These tasks ended up requiring the majority of my mental energy and caused me to be distracted and inefficient when I went to work as an intern later that day. In this way, two of my priorities were struggling against one another to receive the time and attention they required. For this reason, the sociological concept of role conflict stuck out to me. I experience role conflict in my daily life as do countless others. I know that, as time goes on, the list of my responsibilities will continue to grow, causing role conflict to become more prevalent in my life. With this in mind, I strive to control my status-specific responsibilities organizing and structuring my time outside of school. In this way, I may obtain harmony between each of my roles and responsibilities.
