Social Constructionism Theory in Family Theropy Pros and Cons
Social Constructionism Definition and Examples
By Charlotte Nickerson, published Oct 04, 2021
Social constructionism is a theory of noesis in folklore that examines how individuals develop their knowledge and understanding of the globe. There is no 1 precise definition of social constructionism, nor of the theories of the sociologists in the field.
Still, social constructionists share four beliefs and practices in mutual (Burr, 2015):
- A critical stance toward knowledge that is normally taken-for-granted: social constructionists believe that conventional knowledge is non necessarily based upon objective, unbiased observations of the earth.
Humans, according to Social Constructionism, put more emphasis on sure categories than others, even if these categories do not necessarily reflect real divisions.
Thus, information technology is the obligation of sociologists and psychologists to exist enlightened of the assumptions implicit in knowledge. What exists is what nosotros perceive to exist (Burr, 2015).
- Knowledge exists in a historical and cultural context: all ways of understanding are historically and culturally relative. What is idea of as natural, and the categories and concepts we use, are an effect of history and culture.
For example, historically, children took on many "adult," tasks (Aries, 1962), but the mid-20th century brought a renewed accent on child development and babyhood, and thus the role of children changed.
It should not be causeless that the ways of understanding that vest to one fourth dimension and cultural context are necessarily ameliorate than another (Burr 2015).
- Knowledge is sustained by social processes: noesis is constructed through interactions between people and the earth. Thus, an individual'southward perception of "truth" is a production of social processes and the interactions that an individual is engaging in rather than objective observation (Burr 2015).
- Noesis and social action go together: each understanding of the earth has a variety of "social constructions," that come with it.
Every bit stated past (Burr 2015), before the temperance movement, alcoholics were seen every bit entirely responsible for their behavior — significant that an appropriate response would be imprisonment.
Even so, subsequently Temperance, alcoholism shifted into a sickness, flaying responsibility away from its victims. The solution became medical and psychological treatment rather than imprisonment (Burr, 2015).
History
The get-go sociologist writing in the tradition of social constructionism was Mead (1930), in her book, Mind, Self, and Society. Mead created the concept of "symbolic interactionism," which argues that humans construct their own and each other's identities through their everyday encounters with each other. In other words, the self is created through social interaction.
Although there were intermediating theories such as ethnomethodology in the 1950s and 60s, Berger and Luckmann (1966) became the next pivotal writers of Social Constructionism in The Social Construction of Reality.
The Social Construction of Reality is widely considered to exist 1 of sociology's nigh seminal works.
Berger and Luckman'due south The Social Construction of Reality
Although first published as a rather esoteric book on the sociology of knowledge. The Social Construction of Reality soon came to define a field of "new sociologies'' (Vera, 2016). Best societa mutamento politica).
In brusque, The Social Construction of Reality argues that humans create and sustain all social phenomena through their social practices. People "externalize" their thoughts on the world, such as writing down or creating a story about an idea they have. As other people tell this story or read the book, this idea becomes an "object" of consciousness for the people the thought spreads to.
The idea, to these people, becomes an objective truth. And finally, in the last stage, the idea becomes "internalized" in the consciousness of the order, and futurity generations more or less accept the idea for granted every bit an objective truth, as the thought already exists in the world they were born into (Burr 2015).
Berger and Luckmann's work is essentially anti-essentialist. Essentialism is the belief that objects have a certain gear up of characteristics which brand them what they are. However, Berger and Luckmann argue that there is no "essence" to "objective" truths that brand them fact.
Facts are non given to a cultural surrounding or a social surround or even biological factors; rather, the world, according to Berger and Luckmann, is constructed through the social practices of people, and yet, people can however behave equally though the earth is pre-defined and fixed (Burr, 2015).
Gergen's Social Psychology as History
In the 1960s and 70s, social psychologists became increasingly concerned with how the field of social psychology promoted the views of dominant groups (Burr 2015).
At that place was a shift from focusing on objectivity and laboratory behavior to accounts of the lives of ordinary people (Harre & Secord, 1972). In "Social Psychology as History" (1973), Gergen argues that while the methods used in psychology itself are scientific, the theories of social behavior that originate from psychologists are actually reflections of contemporary history.
Unlike the natural sciences, Gergen argues, which are based on a set up of relatively unchanging principles, human interaction happens on a basis of a number of factors which shift speedily with fourth dimension (Gergen, 1973). Social theories depict what is perceived to exist, and prescribe what is seen as desirable.
For example, as social psychology arose in the 2d Globe War, with the goal of creating propaganda, questions of keeping up morale and encouraging uncommon behavior (such every bit eating an unpopular food) — "desirable" behaviors — shaped the field's basis (Burr, 2015).
Thus, social theories are symptoms of the social, political, and economic realms of the times in which they were devised; thus, sociologists tin can read social theories of beliefs every bit a history.
Social Constructionism and Postmodernism
Historically, sociology has searched for underlying structures that pb to homo behavior. Social constructionism evolved in the cultural and intellectual context of the mid-20th century, which was dominated past the Postmodernist movement.
Postmodernism is the rejection that there can exist an ultimate truth. To postmodernists, the world, as it is perceived by individuals, is a consequence of hidden structures.
The world cannot exist understood in terms of grand theories; rather, postmodernism emphasizes how means of life tin can differ betwixt the groups and situations of the people who live them (Burr 2015), Postmodernism has both informed and been informed by social constructionism; withal, these theories diverge.
Social constructionism provides a framework for understanding the constructed worlds that people inhabit — useful for understanding social behavior, while postmodernism does non provide such a framework (Flaskas, 1995).
Malcolm Spector and John I. Kitsuse's Social Constructionism
Traditionally, sociologists have idea of social issues as weather that cause some harm to a club. Nonetheless, iv years afterwards Gergen's Social Psychology as History, the sociologists Kituse and Malcolm extended the concept of social problems using Constructionism in a way considered radical by sociologists.
Spector (1977) argued in Amalgam Social Problems that sociologists had altogether failed to create a conception of social problems specific to sociology. That is to say, up to the publication of Constructing Social Problems, sociologists had difficulties describing what a social problem was. What seemingly created harm in one gild could exist considered normal, or even taken for granted, in other circumstances.
Spector defined social bug as, "the activities of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to some putative atmospheric condition," (Best, 2018).
In this definition, social conditions were not the stuff of social problems — rather, it was whether or not people considered atmospheric condition to be a problem that fabricated them problems. "what people are." ; but beyond this, Spector used this concept as a guide to sociological research and writing (Schneider 2018).
What is a social construct: Examples
Personality
Traditional psychology views personality in relation to behavior. Psychologists such as Cattell (1946) take attempted to quantify personality in terms of 16 factors. Someone can be, for instance, a neurotic introvert or a stable extrovert (Burr, 2015).
This view of personality is essentialist – it assumes in that location is a fundamental, objective ready of truths that make up one's mind personality. For example, a "shy" person, by nature, would be unsuited to a social gathering (Burr, 2015), and this nature of a shy person is related to a number of factors, such every bit i'south biology or the surroundings they were raised in.
However, social constructionism contends that the concept of personality itself is constructed. A personality is not a concrete thing — information technology cannot be removed from someone'due south torso. Rather, the concept of personality, according to social constructionism , is a theory of human behavior used to justify the beliefs and deportment of humans for which there is no other explanation.
Lutz (1982) supports the constructionist view of personality in his linguistic studies of the Samoan and Pintupi Aborigine peoples. In the languages of these peoples, emotional words do not depict internal states, simply a relationship to events and other people. For example, the Ifaluk word song describes "justifiable anger," which is not a feeling an individual has toward behavior, only a public feeling toward someone breaching what is socially acceptable.
Similarly, according to social constructionists, the very concept of personality exists non every bit a series of feelings and traits inherent to a person, simply as an expression of feelings and traits betwixt people. A person who has been decontextualized from the social surroundings — say, if someone lived on a deserted island — cannot be "shy" or "friendly" or "caring," as these terms all refer to the behaviors that individuals have toward others.
Shotter (1993) proposes that human beliefs, rather than originating in personality, comes from joint action. Humans interact with each other in a way unique to those individuals who are interacting, regardless of those individuals' internal intents. Every version of a person — every prepare of abstract traits that can exist used to describe them co-ordinate to some other — may be different, describing that individual in the context of that relationship.
According to social constructionism , people create, rather than discover themselves and other people through their interactions with them. Theories of personality, then, are an attempt to describe the many variations of self that event from individuals having interactions with other individuals (Burr, 2015).
Language
Constructionist views of language believe that languages exist to facilitate communication between people rather than creating representations of the nature of a concept and that meaning exists in the interactions between people and the world and between people and people (Bo, 2015).
Traditionally, linguistic communication is seen every bit an expression of a person'south internal country. The internal "personality" and nature of a person pre-dates and exists independently of the words used to draw it (Burr, 2015). Still, social constructionists debate that linguistic communication, in large part, roots individuals' constructions of themselves,
Humans use linguistic communication as a way of structuring their experiences of themselves and the world. This constructivist view of language originates in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Hoijer, 1954), which states that language determines idea and when a concept does non exist in a language, information technology cannot be expressed by the people who use that linguistic communication.
The concepts of personality, bulldoze and desires, and emotions toward others — such as love and hate — become available because of linguistic communication, and the structure that a person has of themselves and of the world could take differed, given that they understood the earth through a unlike language. The first notable structural linguist was Saussure, who argued that language is made of "signs," for example, "intelligence," "domestic dog," and "fine art" (Saussure 2011; Burr 2015).
These signs refer to concepts — what these words embody. However, Saussure asserts that the link betwixt the sign and the concept is arbitrary, and that the very differentiation betwixt concepts is capricious. To Saussure, there is no inherent trait of a "domestic dog" that makes it so meaningfully different from a "squealer" that it requires a different term.
Although these distinctions are capricious when assigned, they learn a fixed meaning, which explains why everyone who speaks the same linguistic communication is able to understand each other (Burr, 2015). Nevertheless, Saussure's theory of structural linguistics fails to accost several concerns, such as why the meanings of words can change over fourth dimension.
The "post-structuralist" social constructionist view of language contends that language is a "site of struggle, conflict, and potential personal and social change" (Burr, 2015). For case, the question, "does he accept sugar?" carried a different meaning when addressed to the parent of a young child than to the caregiver of a person with a disability.
In both contexts, however, the sentence implies that the caregiver or parent knows more reliably about the tastes of the person who's taking the carbohydrate than the person themself. This is offensive when asked to, for example, the married woman of a blind man, but not when asked to the parent of a immature child, every bit it implies that the person to whom the question is addressed has power over the subject of the sentence (Burr, 2015).
Knowledge and Power
The social constructionist view of power has been heavily shaped past the ideas of Foucault (Burr, 2015). In essence, Foucault argues that the power structures of a society decide what can and cannot be known at a specific betoken in history.
From the standpoint of Foucault, this means that certain means of knowing volition seem to be more "true" than others. For example, in mod western societies, people by and large run into the explanations of events given by natural sciences such as medicine or physics as more reliable ways of knowing than, say, religion or magic (Burr, 2015).
What people at a specific fourth dimension and in a specific context call cognition is one of many possible recounts of events that have been approved of by those in ability at that time (Foucault, 1976). This thinking around noesis and power has influenced, for case, feminist social constructionist notions of "romantic love."
People ``fall in honey" as a precursor to a sexual relationship where people accept responsibility for each other's well being and their family unit (Averill 1985). Notions of "romantic love," "marriage," and "family," are means of talking virtually the lives of individuals — ways of constructing, living out, and representing an identity in relation to others.
However, certain social constructivist feminists and Marxists contend that the notion of "romantic love" is really a reflection of the ability of the capitalist economy. According to these feminists, the thought that men and women ally because they dear each other and that women care for their husbands and families because they love them is a camouflage to a reality existing inside the power structures of capitalism, where women provide complimentary reproduction, household services, and care then that employees do not demand to do then for their workers (Burr, 2015).
The "soapbox" — the set of terms, metaphors, and so on that people use to describe and construct their experiences, every bit well equally the interactions people take betwixt each other — serves to obscure the power structures of society.
Fundamental Contrasts
Realism and Relativism
Social constructionism is substantially anti-realist and pro-relativist (Hammersley 1992). Knowledge is not a straight perception of reality. Because all knowledge excerpts in a historically and culturally relativistic context, the notion of a singular "truth," according to social constructionists, does non exist.
Considering sociology and social psychology has historically sought the "truth" behind human being beliefs, social constructionism offers markedly different implications for how sociologists should conduct sociology.
This has manifested in a shift toward emphasis on recounting the experiences of individuals rather than on creating "k theories' ' of homo behavior outset in the 1960s and 1970s.
The validity of social constructionism 's anti-realist pro-relativist stance is still heavily debated, notably in the form of the "Decease and Furniture" argument of Edwards and Potter (1995).
Stiff vs. Weak Social Constructionism
Some sociologists apply weak social constructionism to their research, while others apply strong social constructionism.
Weak social constructionism has the assumption that individuals construct individual understandings over a set of objective facts, while potent social constructionism holds that all cognition is synthetic by human lodge through social interactions (Amineh & Asl, 2015).
Weak Social constructionism relies on "brute facts" (which are facts that are so central that they are hard to explain, such as elementary particles) in addition to "institutional facts" — facts that take been constructed through social interaction (Smith, 2010).
About the Author
Charlotte Nickerson is a member of the Form of 2024 at Harvard University. Coming from a inquiry background in biology and archæology, Charlotte currently studies how digital and physical infinite shapes human beliefs, norms, and behaviors and how this can be used to create businesses with greater social bear on.
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How to reference this article:
Nickerson, C. (2021, Oct 04). Social constructionism definition and examples. Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/social-constructionism.html
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