Political scientists split social problems into valence issues and position issues
Some social problems unite almost everyone: child abuse is condemned across many societies, making it what scholars call a valence issue. Others, labelled position issues, divide the public into camps holding strong views that rarely budge. Recognising which kind a problem is helps explain why some get solved and others stall.
A social issue is a problem affecting many people, usually caused by forces beyond any individual's control. That separates it from a personal issue, which someone handles within a small circle of family and friends. Losing a job is personal; an unemployment rate hitting millions is social. Social issues are also distinguished from economic ones, although some, like immigration, have both sides, and others, such as war, fit neither category.
In the United States the phrase carries an extra meaning: a nationally prominent controversy that splits voters sharply and drives partisan campaigning and voting. In that sense it names a subject for debate rather than an ill to be cured. Thomas Paine, in Rights of Man and Common Sense, argued that such problems arise when people fail to grant others the same rights they claim for themselves.
A classic example was the social question of the early Industrial Revolution, when spreading poverty alongside growing population and wealth stoked tension between the richest and poorest. Poverty remains a live concern even in wealthy nations: in Germany, one child in six was poor in 2007, compared with one in seventy-five in 1965. Other recurring problems include age discrimination, which keeps experienced older workers out of senior roles, unequal funding between public schools, and widespread illness, which the World Health Organization works to contain.
Inequality underlies many of these. Treatment shaped by gender, disability, race or age produces lasting harm, as slavery in the United States showed. Movements have pushed back, among them the women's rights movement from around the 1920s and the African-American civil rights movement from around the 1950s. People tackle such problems by voting, volunteering, donating, founding nonprofits and organising their communities.
Source: Social issue
