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Unit 5: Socialization
Introduction
Socialisation is the lifelong process of
social interaction through which individuals acquire a self-identity and the physical, mental, and social skills needed for survival in society
It is the process of becoming a social
being, a process that continues throughout one’s life.
The process of “making our own” the
norms of the groups is known as internalization.
Failure of the socialization process can
lead to many problems in the personality of the individual in the community.
Over to you
Think of problems associated with
1 socially isolated children like in care homes where they live without the mother’s emotional attachment and care.
Importance of socialisation
It is essential for the survival and stability
of society when people conform to the norms of society
Human Nature and Human Nurture
People are not born human. We become
human through the process of social interaction.
Over to you
Relate the human nature versus human
nurture debate to the study of human behaviour
Sociologists study human nurture and not
human nature. Nevertheless, biological and hereditary influences also must be
2 considered if one seeks to understand human behaviour.
Preconditions for Socialization
1. The child must have an adequate
biological inheritance.
2. There must be an ongoing society
from which the child learns.
Types of Socialization
Because socialization begins at birth and
continues throughout the life cycle, it is a process that takes different forms, depending on the stage of life and the specific environmental and situational problem that may arise.
Describe the following types of
socialisation with relevant examples:
Primary Socialization
3 Secondary Socialization
Anticipatory Socialization
Resocialization
Occupational Socialization
Agents of Socialization
A number of agents of socialization
transformed you into a social being and equipped you for life in a social environment.
Describe the functions of the following
agents of socialisation:
The Family
Peer Groups
The school
The Mass Media
4 Religion
The Workplace
The Workplace
The socialization process usually follows 2
lines:
1. Formal socialization from supervisors
teaching us the policies, rules and regulations, and perhaps the technical skills needed to complete the assigned work.
2. Informal socialization from co-workers
teaches us the “unofficial rules” we must abide by in order to be fully accepted by our peers on the job.
5 The Self and Socialisation
The Looking Glass Self: Charles
Horton Cooley
A process by which we imaginatively
assume the stance of other people and view ourselves as we believe they see us.
Research suggests that the looking glass
self functions as a “magnifying glass” during self-perception, so that what people see in themselves while others are present has an extra powerful impact on their self-images.
Example: A nurse feeling that she is competent and organised depends to a larger extent on what she thinks other people perceive her.
This ability to “take over” the perspective
of another person, according to Cooley,
6 forms the basis on which the person models his or her behaviour.
The process of developing a self-identity
or self-concept has 3 stages:
1. The imagination of our appearance
to others
2. The imagination of their
judgement of that appearance
3. The development of feelings about
and responses to these judgements
Example ___________________________________________
It must be stressed that what this
approach concentrates on is that the self is the product of the individual’s imagination of what he or she thinks others see him or her. As a result, we can develop self-identities based on incorrect perceptions of how others see us.
7 Example _________________________________________
What we believe others think of us
frequently forms a more important basis for further action than is justified by what is really the case.
Nurses should therefore understand how
people, including patients, perceive reality, so that they show understanding for the social behaviour of other people/patients.
Patient: ‘Seeing what this nurse is doing,
I think she doesn’t like me so I will not answer any question that she asks me about my condition’.
8 Generalized Other: George Herbert Mead
Continued Cooley’s exploration of
interactionist theory of looking – glass self.
Mead (1931/1964) contended that we
gain a sense of selfhood by acting towards ourselves in much the same fashion that we act towards others.
In our imagination we take the position of
another person and look back on ourselves from this standpoint.
In so doing we “take the role of the other
towards ourselves”
We mentally assume a dual perspective:
We are simultaneously the subject (“1”) doing the viewing and the object (“me”) being viewed.
Example: Think of what happens if you as a student nurse during your clinical practice in a
9 hospital want to put a question to a lecturer supervisor and you say to yourself: “If I ask her a question, she will think that I am dull. I must therefore rather keep quiet.”
In this example, you have looked at
yourself as a student nurse through the eyes of the lecturer supervisor. By doing this you have in your imagination assumed her role and have seen yourself as the object, the “me”. It is the “I” as the subject that has decided that it would be unwise to ask the question and therefore rather keep quite.
Importance of language in socialisation of
the self
We judge how other people will respond
to us through language that allows us to carry on an internal conversation
We talk and reply to ourselves in much
the same manner that we carry on a conversation with others.
10 Sociologist Ralph Turner (1968) clarified and extended Mead’s ideas on the self. Turner pointed out that when speaking and acting, we typically adopt a state of preparedness for certain types of responses from the other person.
Dramaturgical approach He describes social life as a stage or a drama. All human beings are both actors and members of the audience, and the parts are the roles people play in the course of their lives.
12 According to him, the self is a product of the ongoing performances that characterise a person’s everyday interaction with others, and of how these performances are interpreted by others.
Example A nurse may try to appear busier than he or she is if a supervisor happens to be watching.
In accordance with this he uses terms
“front stage” and “backstage”
Example
Through most of the day a nurse will be
“front stage” where they will and must play their assigned and expected roles of clinical competence and caring for patients . At their home, with a good friend, they are “back stage”, there they can literally be “themself” and do anything that they cannot do while at work. Even the nurses’ tea room at the hospital could from time to time be
13 “backstage”.
Over to you
Think of what nurses talk about
concerning their patients when they are by themselves resting in the nurses room during breaktime
However, problems could also be
encountered with regard to impression management. Once an individual has made a certain impression on others, he or she is expected to maintain that impression or behaviour. If mistakes are made, other people could form the wrong impression about such a person.
Outsiders could sometimes accidentally
see a person’s “backstage” and consequently make the wrong assumption about such a person.
14 Three aspects are used to create favourable impressions:
A Social Place Appearance Attitudes
Socialization in the hospital social
system: becoming a nurse and patient
Nurses and patients share the same
environment and social system in the hospital
The labelling of one individual as ‘nurse’
and another as ‘patient’ tends to create stereotypical ideas as to what is or should be the appropriate behaviour for the role.
This can be dysfunctional for patient care.
Nurse: if perceived by the patient to be a
charismatic angel of mercy
15 Patient: if perceived by the nurse to be an unquestioning, subordinate and dependent individual.
Sharing the socialization processes
Nurses and patients share similar
socialization processes in the hospital.
They both undergo a process of role-
stripping with divests them of the symbols associated with their previous social roles of for example, adolescent girl.
Both are divested of their personal
identities by a labelling process. The adolescent girl is given the title of ‘nurse’ and the sick individual labelled ‘patient’
-The wearing of a uniform, e.g. at a
mental hospital
Social distance
16 Both nurse and patient inevitably experience a social distance in the social system
Nurses and patients even though they are
geographically near to each other in the hospital, are individuals in different and distinct social groups which are distinctly separate social entities;
A social group of patients and a social
group of nurses separated by social distance. Social distance also exists between nurse students and trained nurses who also form distinct social groups in the hospital.
Dehumanization
The terms patient and nurse are ‘labels’
which can have a dehumanization effect if they lead to the perception of a patient and nurse as a stereotype and not as someone who is a unique individual.
17 The stereotype is the greatest barrier to allowing the nurse to perceive and respond to the human being in the patient, as well as acting as a barrier to making others to respond to the human being who is a nurse.
Patient socialisation
Becoming a patient entail behaving
differently from how one would behave in other settings.
New patients learn the new role of
patients within a particular ward.
Some patients leave behind their adult
independence. If they exert their usual degree of independence in certain circumstances, they may receive a reprimand from the staff.
The role of patient, like other roles in life,
has to be learnt. This is achieved by talking with other patients and observing how they behave, as well as being
18 explicitly taught and controlled in certain ways by hospital staff. In other words, new patients are socialized into their role as patient.
On entry to the hospital some patients
refuse to accept that their roles have changed. They may avoid talking with other patients, regarding themselves as different, and they may respond to hospital staff in a manner different from that of other patients.
However, after they have been socialised
in their patient role, new patients may start to spend some time talking, take meals with other patients, and so on rather than spending time alone in the ward.
While engaging in this behaviour,
however, they may attempt to withdraw from patient role in other ways.
19 Patients become socialised in the patient role and, in extreme circumstances some patients become ‘institutionalised’. Psychiatric patients, for example, go through the process of institutionalisation. When patients become institutionalised, they learn to conform to rules and routines of the institution, and they lose their ‘old’ self and gain a new institutionalised identity.
This presents a problem when attempts
are made to rehabilitate long-stay patients from hospitals for the mentally handicapped or mentally ill.
They must unlearn their patient role and
associated behaviours and become socialised into a more adaptive socially appropriate role in the community.
