Social Interactionist Approach Research Articles

Professional training in industrial maintenance: A social interactionist approach

The present article discusses whether higher engineering and technology courses in Brazil prepare students for professional practice in the maintenance segment, froman educational theoretical framework point of view. To achieve this, the theme significance was researched in Scopus and ScienceDirect bases. The work proposal is based on the concepts of teaching and learning by Vygotsky, confronting the methods used by professors’ engineers, which multiply what they learned in higher education courses. In the planned research, we intend to understand the paradigms and skills of the maintainer considering the action research methods, through the ILS tool—Index of Learning Styles by Felder and Solomon. To analyze the students’ learning profile regarding their preferences for receiving information, we discuss the scenarios generated, expecting to design a teaching and learning process centered on students, an assumption based on Vygotsky's cognitive theory, in which an individual's learning process is related to their interaction in the social environment that they are. As a result, the proposed teaching practices made it possible to increase personal interest in learning, and we observed that there was less difference between the students’ learning styles and also noticed the same profile in the four dimensions, both morning and evening scenarios. Students consider themselves active, sensory, visual, and global.

A Social Interactionist Approach to the Victim-Offender Overlap

A social interactionist perspective suggests that violent offenders are frequently victims of violence because of the way they behave, and the way third parties behave during verbal disputes that lead to escalation. We examine to what extent violent offenders are more likely to be victimized because they tend to engage in provocative actions, are less likely to engage in remedial actions, and more likely to be intoxicated, and because third-parties have a greater tendency to encourage aggressive behaviors during disputes involving offenders. Analyses are based on an original situational-level survey of male inmates and men in the community about characteristics of their verbal and violent interpersonal disputes. We examined the extent to which various dispute-related behaviors and third-party actions mediated the relationship between offending and two study outcomes: whether the dispute became violent and whether the antagonist was victimized. Using two measures of violent offender status, we find that violent actors are more likely to engage in verbal aggression during disputes, are less likely to engage in remedial actions, and are more likely to be intoxicated. Third parties are more likely to be present during the disputes of offenders and they tend to encourage escalation. Combined, these situational processes mediate a substantial portion of the relationship between offending and violent victimization. The findings indicate the victim-offender overlap is partly due to the behaviors of offenders and third parties during disputes that significantly increase the risk of conflict escalation.

Penitential Themes in 14th-Century Sienese Petitions for Amnesty: How Can They Contribute to the Debate on the ‘Voices’ of Medieval Court Records?

In the last twenty years historians have focused their attention on the relationship between the practice of confession, in both sacramental and judicial contexts, and discourses of identity and selfhood produced by the confessing subject and their listeners. A detailed analysis of the influence of sources in which penitent attitudes were promoted (sermons and hagiographies) on the production of judicial confessions could therefore enrich the debate on the ‘voices’ that can be identified when reading medieval court records. In this article, two collections of Sienese petitions created on the occasion of general amnesties promoted by the commune in 1321 and 1329 are used to investigate this issue. Making use of a social interactionist approach, the article analyses examples of petitions in which penitential themes feature prominently. It argues that the idea of confession, or of penance, as practices through which a subject creates an identity, that of sinner, that individuals however immediately set aside in favour of a new, sublimated, sense of selfhood is an effective strategy interiorised by some Sienese petitioners. This complicates the landscape of ‘voices’ and concepts of selfhood identified so far by scholars analysing medieval court records. It also challenges the dualism often proposed by historians of late medieval Italian judicial systems between models of justice based either on vendetta or on an ideology of public order, by suggesting that there were other prominent ideologies that contributed to the development of deviance disavowal strategies and to central concepts of jurisprudence such as those of justice and mercy.

Cognition in a Social Context: A Social-Interactionist Approach to Emergent Phenomena

The formation of collective memories, emotions, and beliefs is a fundamental characteristic of human communities. These emergent outcomes are thought to be the result of a dynamical system of communicative interactions among individuals. But despite recent psychological research on collective phenomena, no programmatic framework to explore the processes involved in their formation exists. Here, we propose a social-interactionist approach that bridges cognitive and social psychology to illuminate how microlevel cognitive phenomena give rise to large-scale social outcomes. It involves first establishing the boundary conditions of cognitive phenomena, then investigating how cognition is influenced by the social context in which it is manifested, and finally studying how dyadic-level influences propagate in social networks. This approach has the potential to (a) illuminate the large-scale consequences of well-established cognitive phenomena, (b) lead to interdisciplinary dialogues between psychology and the other social sciences, and (c) be more relevant for public policy than existing approaches.

Watchdogs, Advocates and Adversaries: Journalists’ Relational Role Conceptions in Asylum Reporting

Journalistic role conceptions are usually understood as internalised professional conventions about the tasks reporters pursue in society. This study insists that more attention be put on the relational and context-dependent nature of journalistic role conceptions. Adopting a social-interactionist approach to journalistic roles, the study examines how Finnish journalists conceived of their professional roles when covering asylum issues during the so-called “refugee crisis” of 2015–2016. Based on an analysis of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 24 journalists, we highlight how considerations of the political context and interactions with three key reference groups—officials, asylum seekers and anti-immigrant publics—shaped the journalists’ conceptions of their tasks and duties. The article contributes to the study of journalistic role conceptions by illustrating how the conceptualisation of journalistic roles in relation to reference groups takes place in practice. It also sheds light on the tensions involved in journalistic balancing and negotiation between various available role conceptions, especially in the shifting societal and political contexts of a Europe marked by multiculturalism and the simultaneous rise of anti-immigrant movements.

Decentring Emotion Regulation: From Emotion Regulation to Relational Emotion

This article takes a critical approach to emotion regulation suggesting that the concept needs supplementing with a relational position on the generation and restraint of emotion. I chart the relational approach to emotion, challenging the “two-step” model of emotion regulation. From this, a more interdisciplinary approach to emotion is developed using concepts from social science to show the limits of instrumental, individualistic, and cognitivist orientations in the psychology of emotion regulation, centred on appraisal theory. Using a social interactionist approach I develop an ontological position in which social relations form the fundamental contexts in which emotions are generated, toned, and restrained, so that regulation is decentred and seen as just one moment or aspect in the relational patterning of emotion.

Mnemonic convergence in social networks: The emergent properties of cognition at a collective level

The development of shared memories, beliefs, and norms is a fundamental characteristic of human communities. These emergent outcomes are thought to occur owing to a dynamic system of information sharing and memory updating, which fundamentally depends on communication. Here we report results on the formation of collective memories in laboratory-created communities. We manipulated conversational network structure in a series of real-time, computer-mediated interactions in fourteen 10-member communities. The results show that mnemonic convergence, measured as the degree of overlap among community members' memories, is influenced by both individual-level information-processing phenomena and by the conversational social network structure created during conversational recall. By studying laboratory-created social networks, we show how large-scale social phenomena (i.e., collective memory) can emerge out of microlevel local dynamics (i.e., mnemonic reinforcement and suppression effects). The social-interactionist approach proposed herein points to optimal strategies for spreading information in social networks and provides a framework for measuring and forging collective memories in communities of individuals.

A aprendizagem coletiva de língua portuguesa para surdos através das interações em língua de sinais

Este artigo analisa as interações em língua de sinais (LS), entre alunos surdos do ensino fundamental, nas aulas de Língua Portuguesa. Ele foi inspirado no trabalho de Donato (1994), que buscou identificar a presença da prática do andaimento nas interações entre pares em sala de aula de língua francesa como segunda língua. Em nossa pesquisa, analisamos através do sociointeracionismo (VYGOTSKY, 1988; WOOD, BRUNNER e ROSS, 1976) as interações entre os alunos surdos durante o desenvolvimento de uma unidade didática que os incentivava a escrever uma carta de reclamação, em Língua Portuguesa, sobre a sua escola. É possível perceber como as estratégias de andaimento possibilitaram a construção coletiva de aprendizagem para a realização da tarefa proposta.

The constraints of antiretroviral uptake in rural areas: the case of Thamaga and surrounding villages, Botswana

This article examines the constraints of antiretroviral (ARV) uptake in the villages of Thamaga, Kumakwane, Mankgodi and Gakgatla which are in the Kweneng District of Botswana. The social interactionist approach and theories of health behaviour provided the theoretical basis of the study. Data were obtained by using interviewer-administered questionnaires which were applied to a sample of 145 respondents and 61 people living with HIV/AIDS in the four villages. The results of the study showed that people aged 30–39 years represented the highest proportion of the persons on ARV treatment in the villages. Some of the people living with HIV believed that ARV therapy could better their lives during the initial stages of introduction, but with time, they lost hope and gave up the treatment. Culturally, parents and children in the villages do not discuss sexual matters at home and it was found in the study that there was little communication between parents and children on AIDS and ARV issues. Some churches in the area discouraged the use of ARV. There were also traditional doctors who made their patients mix traditional herbs treatment with ARV treatment. Distance, travel costs, cultural beliefs, stigma and discrimination among others were found to be important socio-economic factors inhibiting ARV uptake. Even though there were constraints on ARV uptake in the villages, efforts were being made by Government and non-governmental organizations to overcome them. The Ministry of Health provided information and education to the public using its strategy known as Information, Education and Communication. Nurses, doctors and chiefs taught people at kgotlas (traditional courts) in the villages about the dangers of the epidemic. Free HIV testing, ARVs and condoms were provided to the villagers. The outlook for ARV uptake looks generally promising for the future. However, if HIV/AIDS is to be contained, sexual behaviour of people in the villages needs to change.

The negotiation of quality standards: a social interactionist approach to fruit and vegetable distribution in Argentina.

This article addresses food quality standards. It suggests that writing on standards creates a flat view of the subject, failing to grasp the richness of the multiple self-organizing practices that shape quality within functioning markets. The article documents the social dimension of quality and the 'quality strategies' developed by fresh-food wholesalers, greengrocers and producers in the Buenos Aires Wholesale Central Market, Argentina. These strategies assemble the fresh- food market and construct a representation of quality as an aspect of trade in plac- es where food exchanges are conducted. Using a social interactionist approach, we propose that attention needs to be given to the settings in which food quality standards are negotiated and used by different actors. In so doing we suggest that studies that focus on the diffusion of 'global' quality standards should not omit consideration of differential responses to these standards, even if the conditions appear relatively homogeneous.

INTERACTION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF MIND.A. J. Wootton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. x + 220. $54.95 cloth.

Using a conversation analytical, social interactionist approach to cognition, Wootton examines the requests made by his daughter between 18 and 36 months of age in interaction with her parents. He analyzes in detail “distressing events” or seemingly irrational temper tantrums to develop a theory of cognitive development based on the sequentiality of conversational interaction. By correlating her use of imperatives and, later, of more polite forms of requests, Wootton is able to show how the child identifies and draws on expectations of shared understanding, established through local interactional sequences of conversation, to develop her sense of cognitive relevance and moral rectitude. The intensity of the child's distress at seeing her expectations flouted leads Wootton to claim that the nature of these understandings is local, public, and moral: The child's cultural awareness is fashioned and critically conditioned precisely by those forms of sequential and interactional organization she begins to come to grips with at about the age of 2.

The mental health experiences of gay men: a research study exploring gay men's health needs.

As part of a qualitative study exploring the health needs of gay men, undertaken in the Lothian area of Scotland (Robertson & Hutcheson 1995), the mental health needs of gay men were elicited through focus groups and individual interviews. A grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss 1967) was used to analyse the responses from a sample of 37 gay men. This research followed a social interactionist approach and examined from the respondents' stance the effects of being perceived as deviant and the subsequent impact on self-identity and self-esteem. The findings were that there is a reluctance amongst gay men to disclose their sexuality in health care settings which results in mental health needs remaining unrecognized by health professionals. The research also showed that the respondents faced profound social difficulties when coming to terms with their sexuality, a process that can occur throughout their life time. Those who were married faced the strain of living two lives and cited alcohol misuse and depression amongst the effects of this stressful lifestyle.

A Social Interactionist Approach to Violence: Cross-cultural Applications

A “social interactionist approach” is applied to incidents of interpersonal violence in a variety of cultures. Violence, like other forms of coercion, is viewed as goal-oriented behavior, designed to produce compliance, restore retributive justice, and to assert and protect social identities. The approach emphasizes the role of grievances and social control, the escalation of coercive interactions when identities are attacked, and the role of third parties. It is suggested that the incentives for violence and other forms of coercion are similar in all cultures.

Reexamining the acquisition of sex roles: A social interactionist approach

Recent empirical information has challenged existing theories of early sex-role acquisition and stimulated theoretical interest in this process. A social interactionist theory of early sex-role development is outlined, which incorporates the insights of existing theories while moving beyond their limitations. This theory stresses the influence of sex labels on social interactions, social interactional experience on the acquisition of gender identity, and the active participation of the child in his or her own sex-role development. The differences and similarities between the social interactionist and other theories of sex-role development are noted. The necessity for observational studies of naturally occurring interactions and theoretical responsiveness to the findings of such studies is also noted.

Cross-cultural exchange: How students can frustrate the aims of study abroad programmes

Readily accepting that study abroad programmes may have as many differing forms and aims as there are participating institutions, and that by no means all programmes include academic content in their goals, I would nevertheless maintain: 1. that a sociological perspective is as necessary as the hitherto predominantly psychological approach in obtaining a balanced assessment of study abroad programmes; 2. that a social interactionist approach, including in its evaluation the effect of the exchange programme on the host institution — students, staff and administrators alike, may yield very different results from the psychological approach — and may perhaps question the criteria of psychological assessment; 3. that in relatively short-term programmes with emphasis on academic as well as cultural goals, visiting students can bring about changes in the host institution and its course provision because of the mismatch between the organisation of degree programmes on each side of the Atlantic; 4. that the effectiveness of such study abroad programmes is, consequently, heavily dependent on good communications and detailed planning and agreement between the senior administrative staff of participating institutions, and on the clear formulation of the aims and objects of the programmes prior to their taking place; and 5. that although improved planning may reduce the problems of administering an exchange programme, preoccupation with certification requirements on the part of students may still result in their rejection of the alternative experiences which the study abroad programmes exist to provide.