A Family Is an Example of Which Type of Group Identified by Charles Horton Cooley

Learning Objectives

By the end of this department, you lot should be able to:

• Differentiate between primary and secondary groups.
• Recognize in-groups and out-groups as subtypes of primary and secondary groups
• Define reference groups

Most of united states of america feel comfy using the discussion "group" without giving it much thought. Often, we mean unlike things when using that give-and-take. We might say that a grouping of kids all saw the dog, and it could mean 250 students in a lecture hall or four siblings playing on a forepart backyard. In everyday use, it tin be a generic term, although it carries important clinical and scientific meanings. Moreover, the concept of a group is fundamental to much of how nosotros recall well-nigh society and human being interaction. So how can nosotros hone the significant more precisely for sociological purposes?

Defining a Group

The term group is an amorphous one and tin can refer to a wide diversity of gatherings, from merely 2 people (think near a "group projection" in school when you partner with another student), a club, a regular gathering of friends, or people who piece of work together or share a hobby. In short, the term refers to any collection of at least two people who interact with some frequency and who share a sense that their identity is somehow aligned with the group. Of course, every fourth dimension people are gathered, it is non necessarily a grouping. A rally is usually a one-time upshot, for instance, and belonging to a political political party doesn't imply interaction with others. People who happen to be in the aforementioned identify at the same time but who do non interact or share a sense of identity—such as a agglomeration of people standing in line at Starbucks—are considered an aggregate, or a crowd.

Another example of a nongroup is people who share similar characteristics but are non tied to one another in any style. These people are considered a category, and as an case all children built-in from approximately 1980–2000 are referred to as "Millennials." Why are Millennials a category and not a grouping? Because while some of them may share a sense of identity, they do not, equally a whole, interact frequently with each other.

Interestingly, people within an aggregate or category can become a group. During disasters, people in a neighborhood (an amass) who did not know each other might become friendly and depend on each other at the local shelter. After the disaster when people go dorsum to simply living near each other, the feeling of cohesiveness may concluding since they accept all shared an experience. They might remain a group, practicing emergency readiness, coordinating supplies for side by side time, or taking turns caring for neighbors who need actress help.

Similarly, at that place may exist many groups within a single category. Consider teachers, for example. Within this category, groups may exist like teachers' unions, teachers who passenger vehicle, or staff members who are involved with the PTA.

Types of Groups

Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) suggested that groups can broadly be divided into two categories: primary groups and secondary groups (Cooley 1909). According to Cooley, primary groups play the most critical role in our lives. The primary group is normally fairly pocket-size and is made up of individuals who mostly appoint face up-to-face in long-term emotional means. This grouping serves emotional needs: expressive functions rather than businesslike ones. The primary grouping is commonly made upwardly of meaning others, those individuals who have the well-nigh impact on our socialization. The best case of a main group is the family.

Secondary groups are often larger and impersonal. They may as well exist task-focused and time-limited. These groups serve an instrumental part rather than an expressive one, meaning that their part is more goal- or task-oriented than emotional. A classroom or office can be an example of a secondary group.

Neither primary nor secondary groups are bound by strict definitions or set limits. In fact, people tin move from one group to another. A group of coworkers, for example, can showtime every bit a secondary group, just as the employees work together over the years, they may find common interests and strong ties that transform them into a master grouping. As we volition discuss in the chapter on Media and Engineering science, fifty-fifty online networks of people with common interests tin can sometimes move from secondary to primary group status.

Sociology in the Real World

Best Friends She'due south Never Met

Author Allison Levy worked lonely. While she liked the freedom and flexibility of working from home, she sometimes missed having a community of coworkers, both for the practical purpose of brainstorming and socializing. Levy did what many practice in the Internet historic period: she found a group of other writers online through a spider web forum. Over fourth dimension, a grouping of approximately twenty writers, who all wrote for a similar audience, broke off from the larger group and started a private invitation-only forum. While writers in general stand for all genders, ages, and interests, this group ended up existence a drove of twenty- and thirty-something women who all wrote fiction for children and young adults.

At first, the writers' forum was clearly a secondary grouping united past the members' professions and piece of work situations. As Levy explained, "On the Internet, you tin be nowadays or absent every bit often as y'all want. No ane is expecting you to show upwardly." It was a useful identify to research data most publishers, recently-published books and authors, and industry trends. But as time passed, Levy establish it served a unlike purpose. Since the group shared other characteristics beyond their writing (such equally historic period and gender), their chat naturally turned to matters such as kid-rearing, crumbling parents, health, and exercise. Levy found it was a sympathetic place to talk about any number of subjects, not just writing. Farther, when people didn't post for several days, others expressed business organization, asking whether anyone had heard from the missing writers. Information technology reached a betoken where most members would tell the group if they were traveling or needed to exist offline for awhile.

The group continued to share. One member on the site who was going through a difficult family illness wrote, "I don't know where I'd be without you women. It is so groovy to have a place to vent that I know isn't hurting anyone." Others shared similar sentiments.

So is this a principal group? Nigh of these people accept never met each other. They alive in Hawaii, Australia, Minnesota, and beyond the world. They may never meet. Levy wrote recently to the group, saying, "Almost of my 'existent-life' friends and even my husband don't actually get the writing affair. I don't know what I'd exercise without you." Despite the distance and the lack of physical contact, the group clearly fills an expressive demand.

Figure 6.2 Engineering and construction students gather effectually a job site. How do your academic interests define your in- and out-groups? (Credit: USACEpublicaffairs/flickr)

In-Groups and Out-Groups

One of the ways that groups can be powerful is through inclusion, and its changed, exclusion. The feeling that we belong in an elite or select group is a heady one, while the feeling of not being allowed in, or of beingness in contest with a group, can exist motivating in a different style. Sociologist William Sumner (1840–1910) adult the concepts of in-group and out-group to explain this phenomenon (Sumner 1906). In short, an in-group is the group that an individual feels she belongs to, and she believes it to be an integral part of who she is. An out-group, conversely, is a grouping someone doesn't belong to; frequently nosotros may feel disdain or competition in relationship to an out-group. Sports teams, unions, and sororities are examples of in-groups and out-groups. Primary groups consist of both in-groups and out-groups, every bit practise secondary groups.

While group affiliations can be neutral or positive, the concept of in-groups and out-groups tin can likewise explain some negative human beliefs, such equally white supremacist movements. Past defining others as "not similar usa" and junior, in-groups can terminate up practicing ethnocentrism, racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism—manners of judging others negatively based on their civilisation, race, sex, historic period, or sexuality.

Oftentimes, in-groups can form within a secondary grouping. For instance, a workplace can have cliques of people, from senior executives who play golf game together, to engineers who write lawmaking together, to immature singles who socialize after hours. While these in-groups might show favoritism and affinity for other in-grouping members, the overall organization may be unable or unwilling to acknowledge it. Therefore, it pays to be wary of the politics of in-groups, since members may exclude others as a form of gaining status inside the group.

Large Picture

Bullying and Cyberbullying: How Applied science Has Inverse the Game

Nigh of us know that the old rhyme "sticks and stones may break my bones, simply words will never hurt me" is inaccurate. Words can hurt, and never is that more apparent than in instances of bullying. Bullying oft reaches extreme levels of cruelty in children and young adults. People at these stages of life are especially vulnerable to opinions of others and deeply invested in their peer groups. Today, cyberbullying is on the rise. Cyberbullying tin can involve sending threatening texts, harassing someone in a public forum (such every bit social media), hacking someone's account and pretending to be them, posting embarrassing images online, and so on. A report by the Cyberbullying Research Centre constitute that 28 percent of teens have been a victim of cyberbullying (Hinduja and Patchin, 2019). Severe bullying can atomic number 82 to suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts (John, 2018). Researchers noted that students who experienced in-person and online bullying were eleven times more likely to endeavor suicide (Hinduja, 2018). Whereas bullying face-to-face requires willingness to interact with your victim, cyberbullying allows bullies to harass others from the privacy of their homes without witnessing the damage firsthand. This course of bullying is specially dangerous because information technology'due south widely accessible and therefore easier to carry out. Cyberbullying can create a feeling of powerlessness and inescapability because victimization is not constrained to physical locations. Many victims report being harassed across multiple platforms or formats at the aforementioned time.

Cyberbullying starting time made international headlines in 2010 when a xv-year-old girl, Phoebe Prince, in Southward Hadley, Massachusetts, died by suicide after being relentlessly bullied by girls at her school. In the backwash of her death, the bullies were prosecuted and the state passed anti-bullying legislation. This marked a significant change in how bullying, including cyberbullying, is viewed in the United States. Now at that place are numerous resources for schools, families, and communities to provide instruction and prevention on this upshot. Social media platforms and their parent companies are besides taking steps (often under pressure from communities) to improve cyberbullying detection and reporting capabilities.

Co-ordinate to a report released in 2013 by the National Center for Educational Statistics, close to one in every 3 (27.8 percent) students report being bullied by their school peers. Seventeen percent of students reported being the victims of cyberbullying. Overall, LGBTQ youth are targeted at a higher rate than other youth, and members of minority populations overall are more likely to be cyberbullying victims (Hinjuda & Patchin, 2020). Finally, adults (particularly college students) are also frequent cyberbullying victims and perpetrators.

Reference Groups

Figure 6.3 Athletes are often viewed as a reference group for young people. (Credit: nonorganical/ flickr)

A reference group is a group that people compare themselves to—it provides a standard of measurement. In U.S. society, peer groups are common reference groups. Kids and adults pay attention to what their peers wear, what music they similar, what they do with their gratuitous time—and they compare themselves to what they run across. Most people have more 1 reference group, so a eye school boy might look not only at his classmates but also at his older brother's friends and see a dissimilar set of norms. And he might notice the behaviors of his favorite athletes for yet another point of reference.

Some other examples of reference groups can be ane's cultural center, workplace, family gathering, and even parents. Often, reference groups convey competing messages. For instance, on goggle box and in movies, young adults ofttimes accept wonderful apartments and cars and lively social lives despite non property a job. In music videos, young women might trip the light fantastic toe and sing in a sexually ambitious way that suggests experience beyond their years. At all ages, we employ reference groups to help guide our behavior and found our social norms. So how of import is it to environs yourself with positive reference groups? You may not recognize a reference grouping, just it even so influences the way you act. Identifying your reference groups can help y'all sympathize the source of the social identities you aspire to or want to distance yourself from.

Sociology in the Existent Earth

Higher: A World of In-Groups, Out-Groups, and Reference Groups

Figure 6.4 Which fraternity or sorority would you fit into, if any? Sorority recruitment mean solar day offers students an opportunity to learn about these different groups. (Credit: Texas A&Yard/flickr)

For a student inbound higher, the sociological study of groups takes on an firsthand and practical meaning. Afterward all, when we make it someplace new, most of the states glance around to run into how well we fit in or stand out in the ways nosotros want. This is a natural response to a reference grouping, and on a large campus, in that location tin exist many competing groups. Say y'all are a strong athlete who wants to play intramural sports, and your favorite musicians are a local punk band. You may find yourself engaged with two very dissimilar reference groups.

These reference groups can also become your in-groups or out-groups. For example, different groups on campus might solicit you to join. Are at that place fraternities and sororities at your school? If so, chances are they will endeavour to convince students—that is, students they deem worthy—to join them. And if you honey playing soccer and want to play on a campus team, but you're wearing shredded jeans, combat boots, and a local band T-shirt, you might accept a difficult time convincing the soccer team to requite you a hazard. While most campus groups refrain from insulting competing groups, in that location is a definite sense of an in-grouping versus an out-group. "Them?" a member might say. "They're all right, but their parties are nowhere near as cool equally ours." Or, "Only serious applied science geeks join that group." This immediate categorization into in-groups and out-groups means that students must choose carefully, since any group they associate with might define their friends for several years to come.

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Source: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/6-1-types-of-groups