Personal and Social Identity Flashcards
What are the agents of socialisation?
Family, peers, media, beliefs, school, culture, location.
What are the most common agents of socialisation? (hint: there are five)
Family, peers, school, media and location
What is ethnocentricity?
Ethnocentricity means that you only judge things by your own cultural values, and beliefs in your culture’s inherent superiority.
Class
A system where societies are organised into hierarchical levels based on power, privilege and wealth.
Ethnicity
An individuals’s identification with, or sense of belonging to, an ethnic group. This is based on perceived common origins that people share, such as a specific ancestry and culture, that mark them as different from others.
Kinship
Established relationships between individuals and groups on the basis of socially recognised biological relationships or marital links.
Life course
A culturally defined sequence of age categories through which people are usually expected to pass as they progress from birth to death.
Life stages
The successive stages of life from childhood to ‘adolescence’, adult life and old age that collectively define people by being of a particular age group.
Responsibility
The ability or authority to act or make decisions on one’s own, without supervision. This is associated with being accountable for decisions that are made.
Rights
The social, civil and political rights accorded to individuals. These include human rights- the fundamental rights that individuals should have as humans, such as the right to life, equality before the law, education and freedom of belief.
Roles
The social expectations that attached to a particular social position and the analysis of those expectations. This may include the rights and obligations associated with the position
Self-concept
Composed of the various identities, attitudes, beliefs and values that an individual holds about himself or herself and by which the individual defines himself or herself as a specific objective identity: the ‘self’.
Social construct
A socially created aspect of social life. Social constructions argue that society is actively and creatively produced by human beings rather than being merely given or taken for granted.
Socialisation
The process by which individuals learn to become functioning members of society by internalising the roles, norms and values of that society. Socialisation occurs as a result of the individual’s interaction with the agents of socialisation, through which he or she learns to perform social roles.
Status
The form of social stratification in which social positions are ranked and organised by legal, political and cultural criteria into status groups which confer positive and negative privileges. Status groups can be competitive as they seek to preserve privileges by excluding rivals.
