Perhaps most importantly, the sociological imagination makes it possible to distinguish between the concepts of "personal difficulties associated with the external environment" and "social problems caused by social structure". Such an approach is a crucial factor in the sociological imagination and a hallmark of all classical social science works.
Personal difficulties are determined by the nature of the individual and people direct relationship with others; they concern themselves and the limited areas of society with which he or she is personally familiar. Accordingly, the awareness and overcoming of these difficulties do not go beyond the competence of the individual as a carrier of a specific biography, as well as beyond the immediate sphere of his or her life activity, that is, the social environment that is determined by his or her personal experience and to some extent accessible to his or her conscious impact. Difficulties are a private matter: they arise when an individual feels that the values he or she holds are in danger.
Social problems usually relate to relationships that go beyond the immediate environment of the individual and his or her inner life. Such a way out is necessary at the level of the multitude of individual living environments, and then at the broader structure of social-historical community, which, as a whole, is composed of a diverse interweaving and interpenetration of individual living environments and social-historical macrostructure.
Social problems are called social problems, because when they occur, the values shared by different strata of society are under threat. It is often argued what these values actually represent and what exactly threatens them. Often a dispute is irrelevant only because, differing in nature from even the most common personal difficulties, social problems are difficult to define in terms of the immediate everyday environment of ordinary people. In fact, social problems are often linked to institutional crises, as well as to what Marxists call "contradictions" or "antagonisms".
Let us consider unemployment from this perspective. When in a city with a population of one hundred thousand people only one person does not have a job, it is his personal problem, for the solution of which it is necessary to pay attention to the character, abilities and immediate possibilities of a given person.
But when a nation of fifty million people with a working-age population of fifteen million is already a social problem, we cannot hope to solve it in the sphere of opportunities available to each unemployed person individually. The very structure of opportunities has been disrupted. In order to properly formulate the problem and determine the level of its possible solutions, we must take into account the economic and political institutions of society, and not only the personal situations and characteristics of individuals.
Let us consider war. During the war, personal problems are related to the fact that everyone decides how to survive or die heroically, or make money on it, or take a warm and safe place in the military administration or contribute to the end of the war. In short, according to their scale of values, people fit into a special configuration of individual habitats to survive the war or to give meaning to their death.
But solving the structural problems of war requires identifying its causes, studying how and what kind of people are promoted to command positions, what is its impact on economic, political, family and religious institutions, as well as studying international relations, in which there is a reign of disorganization and irresponsibility.
Let us consider the family. Marital status, a man and a woman may experience personal difficulties, but if for the first four years of life together for every 1,000 marriages on average there are 250 divorces, it is an indicator of the structural problem, the solution of which is rooted in the institutions of marriage, family and other social attitudes based on them.