SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE SELF

• SOCIOLOGY (SOCIETY) -

  • Study the ways groups of people interact
  • Focus on Group behavior and social relations
• ANTHROPOLOGY (CULTURE)

  • The study of humans and the ways they live.
  • Studies human behavior at the individual level
  • The study of humans, past and present.
• Individual can only be understood in the contextof his or her environment; elements are interdependent, reciprocally related
• The environment is phenomenologicallyexperienced (Alampay, 2018).
• Person-Process-Context-Time (PPCT)Model

  1. Proximal Process
  2. Idea of Person
• PROXIMAL PROCESS

  • Enduring forms of interaction in the immediate environment
• IDEA OF PERSON

  • Idea of Demand - personal characteristics: gender, age, race etc...

  • Idea of Resource - pertains to mental, emotional and material capability and even inadequacies.

  • Idea of Force - inherent differences in temperament, motivation, drive and persistence
• Subsystem of Bronfenbrenner Ecological System

  • Microsystem
  • Mesosystem
  • Exosystem
  • Macrosystem
  • Chronosystem
• Microsystem

  • The smallest and mostimmediate environment inwhich children live.

  • Comprises the daily home,school or daycare, peergroup and communityenvironment of thechildren.
• Mesosystem

  • Encompasses the interaction of the different microsystems which children find themselves in.

  • Involves linkages between home and school, between peer group and family, and between family and community.
• Exosystem

  • Pertains to the linkages that may existbetween two or more settings, one ofwhich may not contain thedeveloping children but affect themindirectly.
• Macrosystem

  • The largest and most distant collection of people and places to the children that still have significant influences on them.•

  Composed of the children’s cultural patterns and values, specifically their dominant beliefs and ideas, as well as political and economic systems
• Chronosystem

  • Adds the useful dimension of time,which demonstrates the influenceof both change and constancy inthe children’s environments.
• In the era of globalization, it is true to say that despite of improvinginternational relations among countries, it is observed that the self isliving in a self-compressing world.
• Dialogical Theory. The self is considered as the society of mind which functions as a dynamic multiplicity of embodied I-positions among which dialogical relationships can be established
• The use of internet has become revolutionary inthe process of globalization.
• Larson (2002) concluded in his review of related studies that the freedom of choice and empowerment provided by the internet in the lives of adolescents as their social mode of communications and digital connectivity.
• In collectivist cultures, in-groups are assumed to influence a broad range of behaviors, with individuals experiencing pressure to conform to in-group norms or leave the groups.
• Individualistic cultures in-groups are seen as providing only limited norms, with individuals readily able to enter and exit in-groups
• George Herbert Mead: Social Self Theory

  Explained that the Self has two divisions:

  • The “I” and the “ME”

  • The full development of the self is attained:

  • When the “I” encounters “ME
• THE “I”

  • Is the subjective element and the active side of the self.

  • It represents the spontaneous and unique traits of the individual.
• THE “ME”

  • Is the objective element of the self.

  • Represents the internalized attitudes and demands of other people.

  • And the individual’s awareness of those demands.
• Mead’s Assumptions:

  • The self is not present at birth.

  • It develops only with socialexperience.

  • In which language, gestures, andobjects are used to communicatemeaningfully.
• Charles Horton Cooley: Looking Glass Self

  • The people whom a person interacts with become a mirror in which he or she views himself or herself.

  • Social Interaction as a type of a mirror.
• ANTHROPOLOGY

  • In the context of the social formation of the self can be defined as how cultural, social, physical processes interplayed to shape our world experiences.

  • Has place primordial importance on the role of nature (genetics) andnurture (environment)
• Complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society(Tylor, n.d)
• Culture is not behavior itself but the shared understandings that guide behavior and are expressed in behavior (Peacock, 1986)
• Identity consistency of the self to behave in a certain pattern of behaving or dispositions.
• In social anthropology , the term, identity, was commonly used to refer as “ethnic identity” in its collective connotation.
• Identity in this sense does refer to the individuality, but collective similarity of the self with others.
• Self-representations Ewing (1990) The Illusion of Wholeness.

  • It is the culturally shaped concepts of self that one applies tooneself

  • It also the individual‘s mental representation of his own person(Spiro, 1993)
• People in India, would hardly deny that Indians have identities. In this understanding, then, Indians have an identity instead of a self.
• Egocentric view, the self is viewed as free and independent and unique from other people.
• Sociocentric view refers to the sameness of the individual person to other people.
• The Identity toolbox refers to the characteristics of personal identity that the individual chooses to form his social self.
• Family sense of belongingness is important in determining one‘s sense of personal identity.
• Formation of identity due to the influence of one‘s culture is religion.
• Another important element of ethnic identity is the name given to a person that will make him different in many aspects from other people.