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A social group exhibits some degree of social cohesion and is more than a simple collection or aggregate of individuals, such as people waiting at a bus stop, or people waiting in a line. Characteristics shared by members of a group may include interests, values, representations, ethnic or social background, and kinship ties.
More simply, as explained by Thompson and Hickey (2005), such groups are ones "that people refer to when evaluating their [own] qualities, circumstances, attitudes, values and behaviors." [9] Reference groups are used in order to evaluate and determine the nature of a given individual or other group's characteristics and sociological attributes.
Social institution – Any persistent structure or mechanism of social order governing the behaviour of a set of individuals within a given community. The term "institution" is commonly applied to customs and behavior patterns important to a society, as well as to particular formal organizations of government and public services.
As a group gets larger, adding another person has less effect on its characteristics. A consideration at least in smaller groups, though, is whether the number of members is even or odd. Doing things together is easy if all those involved agree on what to do, or if majority opinion is able to override objections without repelling the objectors.
The idea refers to the process of creating knowledge about the characteristics of an individual or group of individuals based on the self as a reference point. [5] Building off Leon Festinger ’s theory of social comparisons, researchers became interested in how attitudes about groups or individuals were created in the absence of information ...
The term "society" often refers to a large group of people in an ordered community, in a country or several similar countries, or the 'state of being with other people', e.g. "they lived in medieval society." [1] The term dates back to at least 1513 and comes from the 12th-century French societe (modern French société) meaning 'company'. [2]
Group behavior can be broken down into 3 levels of analysis: the individual level (micro), the group level (meso) and the organizational or societal level (macro). Micro-Level: Individual Level Refers to the personal qualities and characteristics of individual group members, as well as their actions.
The history of group dynamics (or group processes) [2] has a consistent, underlying premise: "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." A social group is an entity that has qualities which cannot be understood just by studying the individuals that make up the group.