Everyday individuals wake up and go about activities that are geared toward the accomplishment goals. The drive to achieve these goals is guided by a motivation that hopes for a certain outcome; ultimately the outcome hoped for goes beyond the completion of the task and strives either to attain some form of satisfaction or comfort or to remove some form of dissatisfaction or discomfort. On a basic level, waking up from a slumber that lasted several hours and feeding ourselves serves to sustain life and possibly alleviate the physical discomfort of hunger. Beyond a task needed for basic survival there continues to be a desire to achieve. This desire serves to attain a sense of self and a sense of belonging and ultimately involves interactions with others. This paper will evolve from a brief discussion about the symbolic interactionist perspective to a brief review of the interaction chain ritual theory. There have been many aspects of the human being that have been examined and many theories proposed to explain how we develop and why one person can be satisfied with a certain task and the other not. Symbolic interaction is one theory that strives to provide an explanation to our development. Simply put, this theory states that there is a link between the individual and social interactions. Through our interactions we develop a sense of self and knowledge about others and the world around us. Interactions give our lives meaning and this meaning guides our behavior
Symbolic interactionism is a theory is defined as, ”a theoretical perspective in which society is viewed as composed of symbols that people use to establish meaning,
Symbolic interaction is a theory that what people do and see affects the persons behaviors. Environment can also affect one’s behavior and can speed up or slow down the aging process. If an elderly person
Symbolic interactionism perspective is a theory that is used to study social life. To do this, this theory relies on studying and observing the interactions among people and how they form meanings to things from those interactions. Although, there is much more to this theory than that. Blumer, the man who invented the term symbolic interactionism, presented three premises which help to understand this theory. The first one is, people act a certain way towards things depending on their meaning for that thing. The second premise is that we get meanings from social interaction, so we are taught meanings or we witness them from others. Lastly, the third premise is that meanings are able to change because people have the mental capacity to
Symbolic Interactionism (1)- The theory of symbolic interactionism conveys how society is made up of symbols that create meaning, develop communication, and produce world views. At the North Hanover Mall all interactions and even moods were established because of simple symbols. The overall mood of the mall was almost the same form person to person, a look of boredom was on the faces of many whether young or old. The attitude seemed to appear in people shortly after they entered the mall, once they had observed other individual’s body language and expressions, they shifted theirs as if they were trying to fit in with the crowd. Contrastingly when an employee
Symbolic Interaction focuses on a micro view of society. It focuses on a small scale perspective of interaction between individuals. Imagine you`re with a friend instead of looking at large scale structures like education or law, since we are looking at the small scale symbolic interaction explains the individual in a society and their interactions with others and through that it can explain social order and change.
Symbolic interaction theory emerged in the early 1900s and is still one of the more frequently used theories in the family studies (Smith & Hamon, 2012). The theory assumes that people have different interpretations of situations due to their personal experiences (Smith & Hamon, 2012). By looking at the behaviors of individuals, symbolic interaction theory explains how multiple people have different reactions to the same situation (Smith & Hamon, 2012).
Symbolic interaction theory is symbols that give a meaning. Society is viewed as subjects and social status and that they are given symbols. Homeless people are approached through symbols. Symbols can be anything like for instance the way they act, the clothes they wear and the kind of food they eat.
The symbolic interaction theory relates how individuals correlate actions and items to symbols they create. This association takes place between humans and the society they live in. Individuals can have the same situation going on, but associate different meaning through symbols of how they view what is going on. It is important to note that individuals will act differently based on the meaning of the interaction for the people or things around them. There is also a huge component of the symbolic interaction theory that takes into consideration how individuals think they are perceived. “In symbolic interactionism, this is known as "reflected appraisals" or "the looking glass self," and refers to our ability to think about how other people will think about us” (Boundless, 2015). This will also govern the symbols that we associate with different groups of people that we will encounter.
a. Symbolic Interaction/pg. 23: a theoretical perspective in which society is viewed as composed of symbols that people use to establish meaning, develop their views of the world, and communicate with one another.
Symbolic interactionism focuses on the language and symbols that help us give meaning to the experiences in life. It also studies how people discuss the meaning of social life during interactions
The Symbolic Interaction theory refers to ways in which a family or society attaches meaning to verbal communication, non-verbal communication, people, and objects. We are taught from a young age communication using verbal language and accepted ways to express our needs. The theory represents perception of objects or actions (Macionis, 2007, p.17).
Symbolic interactionism helps explain both of our individual personalities and the ways the human society is linked together (p.27). It also helps us differentiate social order and change through a process. The teachings of symbolic interactionism comes mostly from George Herbert Mead But,George was not the only one that influenced the thoughts and ideas of symbolic interactionism. Symbolic interaction is theoretical perspective so it is still changing and evolving. It also has four kinds of understandings in the population and environment. One of the understandings is that symbolic interactionism is to understand why people engage or do not engage in social growth of the population . Symbolic Interactionism assumes that people from different social backgrounds, and different cultures may see different social issues within their social community. George Mead,Charles Cooley and Herbert Blumer shaped symbolic interactionism on the predictions of yourself causing you to behave a certain way so it becomes true.
Symbolic interactionist is a micro level of social analysis, it is concerned with individual experiences and the wider society. As well as not focusing on the core structures or support the general theory of society like the functionalist does.
The symbolic interactionism theory is the view of social behavior of individual that emphasizes linguistic and the gestural communication in a society and its subjective understanding of different matters, but especially the role of language in the formation of the child as a social being and social behavior in the society.
Symbolic interaction offers a dramaturgical perspective of how people identify and create their social self through social interaction. Many social theorist studies social interaction/ self as a function to our society. In addition, microsociology develop the idea of applying social interaction on a smaller sample size within the society. Therefore, there were an increase in the study of human interaction and the self. Mead develop his idea through symbolic interaction and social psychology of the human mind. Simmel develop his idea through the perspective of symbolic interaction of urban sociology. Both sociologist focus on the inter social aspect of the human life.