SOCIOLOGY

Sociology



Sociology

Introduction

Recent changes in the American family system threaten the contract intergenerational family. Change in the American family system raises some difficult personal and social questions. The process of socialization involves multiple disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, communication theory, psychology, social psychology, and sociology, with a common pool of intellectual ancestors (e.g., Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, George Herbert Mead). The academic concept of socialization as the relationship of the individual to society or collectives can be traced from its emergence in the late 1800s to current theory and research, including work on self-socialization, moving from a focus on stages tied to biological development to increased focus on the interaction of person and environment through language. Persons are socialized to identities based on their connection to and membership in particular social groups (Mortimer, 2003). Psychologists that developed behavioral theories backed these theories on experiments containing stimuli that are not easily relatable. In these experiments artificial environments are constructed to condition subjects to associating these normally unrelatable stimuli, such as food and electric shock. The psychologists then generalized their results to all sets of stimuli, no matter how easily the relationships between these stimuli are made. The limitation in this case is that such a generalization cannot scientifically follow such experiments. In short, this generalization by behavioral theories is flawed.

Behavioral theories also ignore the cognitive aspects of human psychology. Because behavioral theories explain everything in terms of the "outside" (behavior) and discard the "inside" (mental processes, genetic influences, emotions and so on), ideas like memory and though processes cannot enter the behavioral explanations of human actions. However, much research in psychometrics, the field of psychological measurement, has shown that these mental aspects predict much of human behavior. One example is how personality tests correlate to human decisions such as job and mate selection. In this respect, behavioral theories see humans as no different creatures than animals: mental processes are not important. Behavioral theories are useless in explaining mental problems. Because behavioral theories treat the human mind as a "black box," they have no place in explaining diseases that are associated with abnormal thought processes such as schizophrenia and pedophilia. It then follows that behavioral theories cannot assist those with mental diseases in their treatment processes (Maccoby, 2007).

Discussion

The family is the source of primary socialisation which helps to teach children the norms and values of their society and prepare them to become adult workers and take on different roles in society - this shows the interrelationship between the family system and the economic system. Functionalism places strong emphasis on the nuclear family being the ideal family type as it is inevitable and universal. Murdock believed that the nuclear family was the ideal family structure for fulfilling the four essential functions identified in his study.

Marxism views society as being based on conflict and inequality and believes that powerful groups determine the way society operates. Marxism views the family as a unit of consumption which is supporting the capitalist ...