Sociology

Sociology Study Guide

3.4 Social Interaction Social interaction is the process of people reacting and responding to one another. Social interaction is constant as people go about their daily lives with those around them in the various environments they go through. Interactionist perspective contains many viewpoints that all striveto emphasis the interpretation and meaning of life. • Symbolic Interaction: George Herbert Mead was one of the first social scientists to study human interactions. He defined an act as a person’s total reaction to a situation, including the actual behavioralong with all associated feelings. As expressed earlier in the chapter, symbolic interaction uses a symbol that meaningfully represents something. Clothing, signs, and gestures are all valid symbols. Many more exist. The use of symbols relies on all parties being aware of the meaning behind the symbols. It’s easy in cross-cultural situations for each party to receive different messages from symbolic interaction. • Dramaturgy: Founded by Erving Goffman, the dramaturgical approach analyzes social interactions as if the participants are acting out a play or a scene in a play. It focuses on how people followthe ‘script’ and/or improvise. According to Goffman, people try to manage the impressions they make on others by creating scenes, called impression manageme t. He states that howa person thinks other view him or her is often different from how that person actually views him/her. • Ethnomethodology: This approach links dramaturgy to symbolic interaction in its approach. Ethnomethodology refers to how people use commonly understood rules of engagement to dictate howthey react in specific situations and thereby be understood by allinvolved. • Conversation analysis: Within conversations, there are at least three common characteristics that were first discoveredby Harvey Sachswho developed conversation analysis. o Turn-taking o Speaker transitions o Interruptions • Social psychology: Social psychology is concerned with how personality and behavior is influenced or altered by social contexts. This perspective draws from both sociology and psychology. It utilizes the symbolic interactions view of sociology and the emphasis on experimentation frompsychology. • Nonverbal communication: The exchange of information via nonlinguistic symbols includes many nonverbal communication methods. Humans communicate in this way frequently. Someone may react to how a person stands when speaking just as much as they do to what is being said. The forms of nonverbal communication encompass two types of body language: facial expressions (how the face moves or contorts to reveal emotions) and gestures (how the body moves to express attitudeor emotion). Nonverbal communication is also apparent when personal space is manipulated.

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