Product Code Database
In Microsociology, interactionism is a theoretical perspective that sees social behavior as an Interactivity product of the individual and the situation.Baumeister, R. F., and J. M.Twenge. 2001. "Personality and Social Behavior." Pp. 11276–81 in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil Smelser and Paul Baltes. . In other words, it derives social processes (such as Social conflict, cooperation, identity formation) from social interaction, Interactionism – The Free Dictionary whereby Subjectivity held meanings are integral to explaining or understanding social behavior." Interactionism | Topics." ScienceDirect. Retrieved 2021 March 12.
This perspective studies the ways in which individuals shape, and are shaped by, society through their interactions. Interactionism thus argues that the individual is an active and Consciousness piece of the social-context Systems theory, rather than merely a passive object in their environment.Millová, Katarína, and Marek Blatný. 2015. "Personality Development: Systems Theories" Pp. 879–83 in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.). . It believes interactions to be guided by meanings that are attached to the self, to others with whom each individual interacts, and to situations of interaction; all of which are altered in interaction themselves. In this sense, interactionism may stand in contrast to studies of socialization, insofar as interactionism conceives individuals to influence groups at least as much as groups influence individuals.Hodapp, Robert M. 1999. "Indirect Effects of Genetic Mental Retardation Disorders: Theoretical and Methodological Issues." International Review of Research in Mental Retardation 22:27–50.
George Herbert Mead, as an advocate of pragmatism and the subjectivity of social reality, is considered a leader in the development of interactionism. Herbert Blumer expanded on Mead's work and coined the term symbolic interactionism.
Through this perspective (under modern techniques), one may observe human behavior by three parts: trait, situation, and interaction (between trait and situation). 'Trait' refers to the extent to which personality directly affects behaviour, independent of the situation (and therefore consistently across different situations); 'situation' takes into account the extent to which all different people will provide basically the same response to a given situation; and 'interaction' involves the ways in which the same situation affects individual people differently.
The social interaction is a face-to-face process consisting of actions, reactions, and mutual adaptation between two or more individuals, with the goal of Communication with others. (It also includes animal interaction such as mating.) The interaction includes all language (including body language) and mannerisms. If the interaction is in danger of ending before one intends it to, it can be conserved by conforming to the others' expectations, by ignoring certain incidents or by solving apparent problems.
Erving Goffman underlined the importance of control in the interaction: one must attempt to control the others' behaviour during the interaction, in order to attain the information one is seeking and to control the perception of one's own image. Important concepts in the field of interactionism include the "social role" and Goffman's "presentation of self."
In extreme cases, interactionists would deny social class to be an issue, arguing that people from one class cannot be generalized to all think in one way. Instead, these interactionists believe everyone has different attitudes, values, culture, and beliefs. Therefore, it is the duty of the sociologist to carry out the study within society; they set out to gather qualitative data.
Interactionist methods generally reject the absolute need to provide statistics. Statistics allows Causality to be shown, as well as isolating variables so that relationships and trends can be distinguished over time. Instead, interactionists want to "go deep" to explain society, however this draws criticisms, including:
Despite these criticisms, interactionist methods do allow flexibility. The fact that there is no hypothesis means that the sociologist is not rooted in an attempt to prove dogma or theory. Instead, researchers react to what they discover, not assuming anything about society. (This is not entirely true: there can be hypotheses for many studies using interactionist methods. The researcher may then be inclined to observe certain events happening while ignoring the bigger picture. This will still bias the results, if such studies are not well conducted. This is arguably why some theorists have turned to this method. It also shows how human behaviour is affected and altered through interactions i.e. socialization.)
|
|
