what is social context essay

Frontiers for Young Minds

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How Does Social Context Influence Our Brain and Behavior?

When we interact with others, the context in which our actions take place plays a major role in our behavior. This means that our understanding of objects, words, emotions, and social cues may differ depending on where we encounter them. Here, we explain how context affects daily mental processes, ranging from how people see things to how they behave with others. Then, we present the social context network model. This model explains how people process contextual cues when they interact, through the activity of the frontal, temporal, and insular brain regions. Next, we show that when those brain areas are affected by some diseases, patients find it hard to process contextual cues. Finally, we describe new ways to explore social behavior through brain recordings in daily situations.

Introduction

Everything you do is influenced by the situation in which you do it. The situation that surrounds an action is called its context. In fact, analyzing context is crucial for social interaction and even, in some cases, for survival. Imagine you see a man in fear: your reaction depends on his facial expression (e.g., raised eyebrows, wide-open eyes) and also on the context of the situation. The context can be external (is there something frightening around?) or internal (am I calm or am I also scared?). Such contextual cues are crucial to your understanding of any situation.

Context shapes all processes in your brain, from visual perception to social interactions [ 1 ]. Your mind is never isolated from the world around you. The specific meaning of an object, word, emotion, or social event depends on context ( Figure 1 ). Context may be evident or subtle, real or imagined, conscious or unconscious. Simple optical illusions demonstrate the importance of context ( Figures 1A,B ). In the Ebbinghaus illusion ( Figure 1A ), rings of circles surround two central circles. The central circles are the same size, but one appears to be smaller than the other. This is so because the surrounding circles provide a context. This context affects your perception of the size of the central circles. Quite interesting, right? Likewise, in the Cafe Wall Illusion ( Figure 1B ), context affects your perception of the lines’ orientation. The lines are parallel, but you see them as convergent or divergent. You can try focusing on the middle line of the figure and check it with a ruler. Contextual cues also help you recognize objects in a scene [ 2 ]. For instance, it can be easier to recognize letters when they are in the context of a word. Thus, you can see the same array of lines as either an H or an A ( Figure 1C ). Certainly, you did not read that phrase as “TAE CHT”, correct? Lastly, contextual cues are also important for social interaction. For instance, visual scenes, voices, bodies, other faces, and words shape how you perceive emotions in a face [ 3 ]. If you see Figure 1D in isolation, the woman may look furious. But look again, this time at Figure 1E . Here you see an ecstatic Serena Williams after she secured the top tennis ranking. This shows that recognizing emotions depends on additional information that is not present in the face itself.

• Figure 1 - Contextual affects how you see things.
• A,B. The visual context affects how you see shapes. C. Context also plays an important role in object recognition. Context-related objects are easier to recognize. “THE CAT” is a good example of contextual effects in letter recognition (reproduced with permission from Chun [ 2 ]). D,E. Context also affects how you recognize an emotion [by Hanson K. Joseph (Own work), CC BY-SA 4.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 ), via Wikimedia Commons].

Contextual cues also help you make sense of other situations. What is appropriate in one place may not be appropriate in another. Making jokes is OK when studying with your friends, but not OK during the actual exam. Also, context affects how you feel when you see something happening to another person. Picture someone being beaten on the street. If the person being beaten is your best friend, would you react in the same way as if he were a stranger? The reason why you probably answered “no” is that your empathy may be influenced by context. Context will determine whether you jump in to help or run away in fear. In sum, social situations are shaped by contextual factors that affect how you feel and act.

Contextual cues are important for interpreting social situations. Yet, they have been largely ignored in the world of science. To fill this gap, our group proposed the social context network model [ 1 ]. This model describes a brain network that integrates contextual information during social processes. This brain network combines the activity of several different areas of the brain, namely frontal, temporal, and insular brain areas ( Figure 2 ). It is true that many other brain areas are involved in processing contextual information. For instance, the context of an object that you can see affects processes in the vision areas of your brain [ 4 ]. However, the network proposed by our model includes the main areas involved in social context processing. Even contextual visual recognition involves activity of temporal and frontal regions included in our model [ 5 ].

• Figure 2 - The parts of the brain that work together, in the social context network model.
• This model proposes that social contextual cues are processed by a network of specific brain regions. This network is made up of frontal (light blue), temporal (orange), and insular (green) brain regions and the connections between these regions.

How Does Your Brain Process Contextual Cues in Social Scenarios?

To interpret context in social settings, your brain relies on a network of brain regions, including the frontal, temporal, and insular regions. Figure 2 shows the frontal regions in light blue. These regions help you update contextual information when you focus on something (say, the traffic light as you are walking down the street). That information helps you anticipate what might happen next, based on your previous experiences. If there is a change in what you are seeing (as you keep walking down the street, a mean-looking Doberman appears), the frontal regions will activate and update predictions (“this may be dangerous!”). These predictions will be influenced by the context (“oh, the dog is on a leash”) and your previous experience (“yeah, but once I was attacked by a dog and it was very bad!”). If a person’s frontal regions are damaged, he/she will find it difficult to recognize the influence of context. Thus, the Doberman may not be perceived as a threat, even if this person has been attacked by other dogs before! The main role of the frontal regions is to predict the meaning of actions by analyzing the contextual events that surround the actions.

Figure 2 shows the insular regions, also called the insula, in green. The insula combines signals from within and outside your body. The insula receives signals about what is going on in your guts, heart, and lungs. It also supports your ability to experience emotions. Even the butterflies you sometimes feel in your stomach depend on brain activity! This information is combined with contextual cues from outside your body. So, when you see that the Doberman breaks loose from its owner, you can perceive that your heart begins to beat faster (an internal body signal). Then, your brain combines the external contextual cues (“the Doberman is loose!”) with your body signals, leading you to feel fear. Patients with damage to their insular regions are not so good at tracking their inner body signals and combining them with their emotions. The insula is critical for giving emotional value to an event.

Lastly, Figure 2 shows the temporal regions marked with orange. The temporal regions associate the object or person you are focusing on with the context. Memory plays a major role here. For instance, when the Doberman breaks loose, you look at his owner and realize that it is the kind man you met last week at the pet shop. Also, the temporal regions link contextual information with information from the frontal and insular regions. This system supports your knowledge that Dobermans can attack people, prompting you to seek protection.

To summarize, combining what you experience with the social context relies on a brain network that includes the frontal, insular, and temporal regions. Thanks to this network, we can interpret all sorts of social events. The frontal areas adjust and update what you think, feel, and do depending on present and past happenings. These areas also predict possible events in your surroundings. The insula combines signals from within and outside your body to produce a specific feeling. The temporal regions associate objects and persons with the current situation. So, all the parts of the social context network model work together to combine contextual information when you are in social settings.

When Context Cannot be Processed

Our model helps to explain findings from patients with brain damage. These patients have difficulties processing contextual cues. For instance, people with autism find it hard to make eye contact and interact with others. They may show repetitive behaviors (e.g., constantly lining up toy cars) or excessive interest in a topic. They may also behave inappropriately and have trouble adjusting to school, home, or work. People with autism may fail to recognize emotions in others’ faces. Their empathy may also be reduced. One of our studies [ 6 ] showed that these problems are linked to a decreased ability to process contextual information. Persons with autism and healthy subjects performed tasks involving different social skills. Autistic people did poorly in tasks that relied on contextual cues—for instance, detecting a person’s emotion based on his gestures or voice tone. But, autistic people did well in tasks that didn’t require analyzing context, for example tasks that could be completed by following very general rules (for example, “never touch a stranger on the street”). Thus, the social problems that we often see in autistic people might result from difficulty in processing contextual cues.

Another disease that may result from problems processing contextual information is called behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia . Patients with this disease exhibit changes in personality and in the way they interact with others, after about age 60. They may do improper things in public. Like people with autism, they may not show empathy or may not recognize emotions easily. Also, they find it hard to deal with the details of context needed to understand social events. All these changes may reflect general problems processing social context information. These problems may be caused by damage to the brain network described above.

Our model can also explain patients with damage to the frontal lobes or those who have conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder [ 7 ]. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by atypical social cognition and inability to distinguish between real and imagined world (as in the case of hallucinations). Similar but milder problems appear in patients with bipolar disorder, which is another psychiatric condition mainly characterized by oscillating periods of depression and periods of elevated mood (called hypomania or mania).

In sum, the problems with social behavior seen in many diseases are probably linked to poor context processing after damage to certain brain areas, as proposed by our model ( Figure 2 ). Future research should explore how correct this model is, adding more data about the processes and regions it describes.

New Techniques to Assess Social Behavior and Contextual Processing

The results mentioned above are important for scientists and doctors. However, they have a great limitation. They do not reflect how people behave in daily life! Most of the research findings came from tasks in a laboratory, in which a person responded to pictures or videos. These tasks do not really represent how we act every day in our lives. Social life is much more complicated than sitting at a desk and pressing buttons when you see images on a computer, right? Research based on such tasks doesn’t reflect real social situations. In daily life, people interact in contexts that constantly change.

Fortunately, new methods allow scientists to assess real-life interactions. Hyperscanning is one of these methods. Hyperscanning allows measurement of the brain activity of two or more people while they perform activities together. For example, each subject can lie inside a separate scanner (a large tube containing powerful magnets). This scanner can detect changes in blood flow in the brain while the two people interact. This approach is used, for example, to study the brains of a mother and her child while they are looking at each other’s faces ( Figure 3A ).

• Figure 3 - New techniques to study processing of contextual cues.
• A. A mother and her infant look at each others’ facial expression while their brain activity is recorded (reproduced with permission from Masayuki et al. [ 8 ]). B. Hyperscanning of people interacting with each other during a game of Jenga (reproduced with permission from Liu et al. [ 9 ]). C. A new method of studying brain activity, called mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI) (reproduced with permission from Makeig et al. [ 10 ]). D. Virtual reality simulations of a virtual train at the station and a virtual train carriage (reproduced with permission from Freeman et al. [ 11 ]).

Hyperscanning can also be done using electroencephalogram equipment. Electroencephalography measures the electrical activity of the brain. Special sensors called electrodes are attached to the head. They are hooked by wires to a computer which records the brain’s electrical activity. Figure 3B shows an example of the use of electroencephalogram hyperscanning. This method has been used to measure the brain activity in two individuals while they are playing Jenga. Future research should apply this technique to study the processing of social contextual cues.

One limitation of hyperscanning is that it typically requires participants to remain still. However, real-life interactions involve many bodily actions. Fortunately, a new method called mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI, Figure 3C ) allows the measurement of brain activity and bodily actions while people interact in natural settings.

Another interesting approach is to use virtual reality . This technique involves fake situations. However, it puts people in different situations that require social interaction. This is closer to real life than the tasks used in most laboratories. As an example, consider Figure 3D . This shows a virtual reality experiment in which participants traveled through an underground tube station in London. Our understanding of the way context impacts social behavior could be expanded in future virtual reality studies.

In sum, future research should use new methods for measuring real-life interactions. This type of research could be very important for doctors to understand what happens to the processing of social context cues in various brain injuries or diseases. These realistic tasks are more sensitive than most of the laboratory tasks that are usually used for the assessment of patients with brain disorders.

Empathy : ↑ The ability to feel what another person is feeling, that is, to “place yourself in that person’s shoes.”

Autism : ↑ A general term for a group of complex disorders of brain development. These disorders are characterized by repetitive behaviors, as well as different levels of difficulty with social interaction and both verbal and non-verbal communications.

Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia : ↑ A brain disease characterized by progressive changes in personality and loss of empathy. Patients experience difficulty in regulating their behavior, and this often results in socially inappropriate actions. Patients typically start to show symptoms around age 60.

Hyperscanning : ↑ A novel technique to measure brain activity simultaneously from two people.

Virtual Reality : ↑ Computer technologies that use software to generate realistic images, sounds, and other sensations that replicate a real environment. This technique uses specialized display screens or projectors to simulate the user’s physical presence in this environment, enabling him or her to interact with the virtual space and any objects depicted there.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by grants from CONICYT/FONDECYT Regular (1170010), FONDAP 15150012, and the INECO Foundation.

[1] ↑ Ibanez, A., and Manes, F. 2012. Contextual social cognition and the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia. Neurology 78(17):1354–62. doi:10.1212/WNL.0b013e3182518375

[2] ↑ Chun, M. M. 2000. Contextual cueing of visual attention. Trends Cogn. Sci. 4(5):170–8. doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01476-5

[3] ↑ Barrett, L. F., Mesquita, B., and Gendron, M. 2011. Context in emotion perception. Curr. Direct Psychol. Sci. 20(5):286–90. doi:10.1177/0963721411422522

[4] ↑ Beck, D. M., and Kastner, S. 2005. Stimulus context modulates competition in human extrastriate cortex. Nat. Neurosci. 8(8):1110–6. doi:10.1038/nn1501

[5] ↑ Bar, M. 2004. Visual objects in context. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 5(8):617–29. doi:10.1038/nrn1476

[6] ↑ Baez, S., and Ibanez, A. 2014. The effects of context processing on social cognition impairments in adults with Asperger’s syndrome. Front. Neurosci. 8:270. doi:10.3389/fnins.2014.00270

[7] ↑ Baez, S, Garcia, A. M., and Ibanez, A. 2016. The Social Context Network Model in psychiatric and neurological diseases. Curr. Top. Behav. Neurosci. 30:379–96. doi:10.1007/7854_2016_443

[8] ↑ Masayuki, H., Takashi, I., Mitsuru, K., Tomoya, K., Hirotoshi, H., Yuko, Y., and Minoru, A. 2014. Hyperscanning MEG for understanding mother-child cerebral interactions. Front Hum Neurosci 8:118. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00118

[9] ↑ Liu, N., Mok, C., Witt, E. E., Pradhan, A. H., Chen, J. E., and Reiss, A. L. 2016. NIRS-based hyperscanning reveals inter-brain neural synchronization during cooperative Jenga game with face-to-face communication. Front Hum Neurosci 10:82. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00082

[10] ↑ Makeig, S., Gramann, K., Jung, T.-P., Sejnowski, T. J., and Poizner, H. 2009. Linking brain, mind and behavior: The promise of mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI). Int J Psychophys 73:985–1000

[11] ↑ Evans, N., Lister, R., Antley, A., Dunn, G., and Slater, M. 2014. Height, social comparison, and paranoia: An immersive virtual reality experimental study. Psych Res 218(3):348–52. doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2013.12.014

Social Context

‘Social Context’ refers to the immediate physical and social setting in which people live or in which something happens or develops. This includes the culture that the individual was educated or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom they interact. Social context influences and, to some extent, determines thought, feeling, and action. It ranges from a brief interaction with a stranger to broad societal and cultural forces.

Understanding Social Context

To grasp the concept of social context, we must delve into its components and the influence it exerts on individuals and societies.

Social context can be broken down into various elements, including cultural norms, social structures (like family or community), and the specific situation in which an individual finds themselves.

Influence on Behavior and Perceptions

Social context significantly impacts individual behavior, perceptions, and interactions. It can shape an individual’s values, beliefs, and expectations.

The Role in Different Fields

Social context plays a pivotal role across various disciplines, from psychology to sociology and beyond.

In Psychology

In psychology, social context is used to understand individual behavior in social situations and the influences of societal norms and structures.

In Sociology

Sociologists study social context to comprehend societal patterns, trends, and structures, helping them understand social phenomena and changes over time.

Understanding the social context offers valuable insights into various aspects of life and society.

Enhances Communication

By understanding the social context of a situation, we can communicate more effectively, considering cultural norms, values, and expectations.

Guides Policy and Decision-Making

Social context is crucial in informing policy-making, ensuring that decisions consider societal norms, values, and structures.

To further illuminate the concept, let’s consider some examples of social context.

Example 1: Educational Settings

The social context of a classroom— including its cultural norms, student-teacher dynamics, and broader school environment— can influence students’ learning and engagement.

Example 2: Online Communities

Online communities, like those on social media platforms, have their unique social contexts that impact user behavior, interactions, and content creation.

Recognizing and Analyzing Social Context

Being able to recognize and analyze social context is a valuable skill. Here are some tips to help.

Be Observant

Pay attention to the physical and social environment, the individuals involved, and the cultural and societal norms at play.

Keep an Open Mind

Maintain an open mind and be sensitive to cultural differences, acknowledging that social context can differ greatly between societies and groups.

In essence, social context is a crucial factor that shapes our behaviors, interactions, perceptions, and the world around us. By understanding and considering social context, we can communicate more effectively, make informed decisions, and appreciate the complexity and diversity of human societies.

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The importance of Context in Literature

June 2, 2016

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Literature is probably one of your hardest VCE subjects. If it’s not, then go you! (please tell me your secrets).

However, if you’re anything like me, then you probably look a bit like this when you begin considering the overall meaning of a text, the author’s views and values, and how any three passages in the text create the meaning.

When I became awash with confusion, like our old pal Ryan Renolds, the first thing I did (after eating a whole block of chocolate), was ensure I understood the context of the text. Without a clear understanding of the context of your text, you cannot fully comprehend the views and values of the author, nor the overall meaning of a text (it’s also part of the criteria for literary perspectives)!

So if you want to be feeling like this after you write a piece for literature:

Consider the following:

AUTHOR’S CONTEXT VS. READER’S CONTEXT 

Austen was hunched over her small writing desk in the village of Chawton during England’s Georgian era as she wrote  Persuasion.  You are more likely reading it in a cozy bed, listening to Taylor Swift and half considering what you’re going to watch on Netflix later. Remember, your current social and cultural context can have a great influence on how you read a text, so it’s always important to imagine the author’s own context – whether this be very similar, or very different from the context of their text. It’s as easy as a Google search!

For a more in-depth look into how authorial intent and context is important in VCE English, read Context and Authorial Intention in VCE English .

SOCIAL CONTEXT

The social context of a text is the way in which the features of the society it is set in impact on its meaning. There are two aspects to social context: the kind of society in which the characters live, and the one in which the author’s text was produced.

Charlotte Brontë’s  Jane Eyre  was set in the same social context she herself lived in. It was one in which women were seen as the lesser sex, there was a great divide between the wealthy and lower class, and strict class boundaries were enforced. All of these societal features are key in determining Brontë’s views on the importance of social inclusion, and her championing of the strength of women. Or just listen to Phoebe:

HISTORICAL CONTEXTS

The historical context of a text is entangled with its social context, as underlying norms and convention are historically specific. The historical context is important to note especially when large changes have occurred between the time the work was produced, and our current day, so it is not assessed by our own concerns alone.

Aeschylus’ Agamemnon was first performed in 458BC, in Ancient Greece, a time vastly different from our own. Therefore, it is important to be aware of how the play was delivered, at the festival of Dionysus as part of a trilogy. Also have an understanding of the myths surrounding the Trojan War as well as those surrounding Agamemnon, Cassandra and Clytemnestra.

CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Culture refers to a particular ‘way of life’, involving religion, race and nationality, as well as things like food, dress code and manners. Furthermore, culture can relate to art, music, writing and literature itself. Cultural context, which is similarly linked with social, historical and ideological context, is especially important to note if the author is attempting to make a comment on an aspect of culture, or the clash of two cultures.

Cross cultural contact between an Indigenous tribe in Western Australia, and the British colonizers of this land, is explored by Kim Scott in his novel  That Deadman Dance.  He reveals aspects of culture largely unknown to current members of Australian society, as well as explores whether assimilation can be seen as a harmonious sign of friendship, or an intrusive loss of culture. The evolution, damage and protection of culture is an important context in this novel, and has a large bearing on the overall meaning of the text, as well as Scott’s views and values.

IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS

Ideology refers to the systems of beliefs and ideas that underpin our attitudes and behavior. Such ideology may be valued by society as a whole, or be the basis of conflict. Ideology is a context that is in many ways ‘invisible’. This is because our own is largely internalized and normalized, we act accordingly to our assumptions and social norms.

Many texts explore ideological context, either challenging or championing it. In his play  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  Edward Albee challenged perceptions at the time of the family unit, portraying a couple that symbolizes the immense dissatisfaction caused by idealistic portrayals of marriage, and the fallacies of the American Dream. He illuminates how George and Martha escape from meaningless by creating fantasies and illusions, but how these eventually lead to the breakdown of their mental health.

So next time you’re struggling to get started on a literature piece, remember to think deeply about the different aspects of your text’s context!

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Ever since literary perspectives have been introduced into the VCE Literature study design in 2017, there’s been a hell of a lot of confusion surrounding what they actually are, and what students are supposed to do with them. Due to the incredibly subjective nature of English, and especially Literature, as a subject, there is no single correct answer as to how to go about it. However, I hope to shed some light for you on how to go about this elusive component of VCE Literature.

So, what are they?

Firstly, what actually are perspectives? Well, they can be compared to a lens which you use to colour or filter your analysis of the text. You use the ideas and schools of thought that are specific to each perspective to shape, influence and guide your writing. There are a whole bunch of these perspectives, including psychoanalytical, Marxist, feminist and postcolonial. For your SAC during the year, you are going to need to use two different perspectives in your essay, whilst you will only use one in the end of year exam. Personally, while studying Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘North and South’, I used Marxist and feminist in my SAC and narrowed it down to Marxist for the exam.

How do I begin?

The best place to start, after having read the text of course, is to read up on what other people have to say about the book. Perspectives are closely intertwined with literary criticisms; that is, other people’s analysis and interpretation of the texts. For Literature, this needs to go into a bit more depth than someone telling you whether or not they liked the text. Some people like to include excerpts of other critics’ writing in their perspectives essays. Whilst this is not wrong, it isn’t the only way to go about it either. My class simply used these critics as a way of finding inspiration for our own ideas.

I was fortunate enough to be given a whole bunch of scholarly readings and critiques of ‘North and South’ by my teacher; however, if you aren’t as lucky, scholar.google.com and the State Library of Victoria’s online database are both amazing sources for such information. You can simply search up the title of your text, and maybe the author’s name to narrow down results, and you’re provided with scores of articles. I’d recommend reading as many of these as possible, and maybe even jotting down some key points or ideas that stand out to you as important or useful as you go along.

How do I choose which perspective to use?

With all those different perspectives out there, it can become difficult to narrow all the options down to two, and then one. Whilst some texts definitely lend themselves to certain perspectives more than others, the idea is that you can use whichever perspective you want for whichever text if you try hard enough. Sure, it may be hard to find evidence to support them all, but it is expected that, as a Literature student, you are able to read deep enough into the texts that you could find what you need to write on any of them.

My advice is to choose the perspective that initially jumps out at you. When you read the text for the first, second and even third time, there will be certain plot points and themes that present themselves to you. By analysing these, you’ll be able to see what connects them, and most likely be able to relate them to a particular perspective.

How do I write a perspectives essay? As I mentioned earlier, there is no stock standard formula that all perspectives essays must follow. But there are a few basic guidelines that can help you get the ball rolling.

Perspectives essays have the same basic structure as a normal English essay, but differ in the sense that they are more focused on a particular school of thought.  

Be sure to build up an inventory of useful words or phrases unique to your chosen perspective that will help clue the examiner in to what approach you’re taking. For example, when I was exploring a Marxist perspective, I would include phrases like “bourgeoisie”, “interclass relations” and “social hierarchy”. That being said, there is no need to explicitly state, “From a Marxist perspective…” in your essay. By including those subtle, little expressions unique to your chosen perspective, you should be able to signpost to the examiner what your perspective is without making your essay seem basic. As you spend more time exploring your chosen perspective, you will become more familiar and comfortable with a range of these specific expressions.

Help! I can’t decide which perspective to choose! What do I do?

If you find yourself, like I did, stuck when choosing which perspective you want to use, there are a couple of different things to can do to try and get yourself out of this funk.

To start off, Literature is an extremely collaborative subject. It naturally opens itself to a discussion between you and your classmates. In fact, this is a great way to build more ideas and strengthen the ones you already have for all parts of the Literature study design, not only this one. I’d recommend you have a chat with the other people in your class and talk through all your options and the evidence that you could use to support them. I find that by talking in this way, my jumbled ideas tend to become a bit clearer in my head, and I’m often exposed to new ideas as well.

Secondly, your Literature teacher is, of course, another port of call. You literally pay them to teach you Literature and make sure you walk into your SAC and exam as prepared as possible, so why wouldn’t you take full advantage of their expertise? Explain to them your problem and your thoughts up until this point, and I’m sure they’ll be able to, if not provide you with, point you in the right direction towards finding some clarification.

Lastly, you need to remember that you are ultimately the one who needs to make the decision. As cheesy and cliché as it sounds, just listen to what your gut tells you. Your first thoughts are usually the best ones, so just go with your instinct and see where it tells you to go!

The idea of critical lenses in literary perspective essays can often be tough to fully grasp. Is sticking to just one ok? Are there enough examples in the text to support a purely feminist viewpoint? Or a Marxist one? What about post-colonialism? Sometimes it’s difficult to find a clear through line, especially when the concepts you’re attempting to discuss are so complex.

Luckily when it comes to Shakespearean texts, Twelfth Night in particular, a lot of people throughout history have already studied these ideas and critical lenses, and there are many more resources out there for you to utilize than you might think.

Thus, we are faced with the extremely helpful nature of published critical readings. These critical essays are pieces often published by university professors or scholars which offer an in-depth analysis and examination of a given text. While much of the language is complicated and a bit overwrought at times, the content within the essays can give you helpful ideas and can help you gather a repertoire of vocabulary and evidence for your own literary perspectives essay. In fact, if you type in “Twelfth Night critical readings” into your google search tab, there will be pages of valuable content at your disposal.

Literary perspectives

For instance, the critical essay Rethinking Sexuality and Class in Twelfth Night by Nancy Lindhiem, gives insight into both the Marxist and the queer lens.

Here is an extract from Lindhiem’s reading in which she discusses the idea of “androgyny” and sexuality (noted specifically in the bolded words):

“While Viola is barely male except in attire, the dual aspect of Sebastian’s androgyny is carefully explored. The Elizabethan audience’s first, external, impression – he looks like his sister! – is reinforced ‘internally’ in his conversation with Antonio. His exquisite sensitivity to the quality of his friend’s feelings and the obligation it lays upon him might well be seen as a woman’s trait. ”

After reading Lindhiem’s discussion of the “androgynous” twins within the play and how this displays a disparity between gender identity, this student then decided to expand on in a similar idea in a part of their paragraph below (queer lens). In the first part of the sentence, the student outlines the idea of androgyny (shown in bold) specific to the character of Viola. Later on, the student also explores the idea of different behaviours contributing to certain gender traits much like Lindhiem’s notation of it in the above paragraph (shown in bold in the last sentence), however concludes on a broader outline of sexuality as a whole, rather than focussing on just female traits.

Viola’s mediatory role between Olivia and Orsino’s households, coupled with her androgynous performance as a woman playing a man (adding further confusion to the Elizabethan stage convention of a male actors playing women on stage) evokes a form of genderbending and identity perplexity that pervades the play’s dramatic trajectory and opens up what is possible, if not overtly permissible, on a spectrum of sexuality.

Another way of making use of these critical readings is to draw from some of their sophisticated vocabulary. The following is an example of how a student was able to adjust and expand her vocabulary specific to their chosen lens by reading critical essays.

After studying a couple of feminist and queer critical essays to Twelfth Night , the student highlighted some repetitive language and terms used within the essays, and was able to use them within their own essay.

Casey Charles’ Theatre Journal exert Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night uses the phrasing

“ the phenomenon of love itself operates as a mechanism that destabilizes gender binarism and its concomitant hierarchies”.

The student went on to use the term gender binarism in one of her essay’s sentences:

In all, Twelfth Night delineates the true fluidity within gender binarisms as well as the way in which societal structures are enforced and reiterated…

Alternatively, the critical essay Gender Ambiguity and Desire in Twelfth Night by Maria Del Rosario Arias Doblas makes use of the terms “homoerotic” and “heterosexual” throughout its text - “homoeroticism residing in theatrical transvestitism… and homosexual allusions and so on pervade the play to create the “most highly intricate misunderstandings”’ - thus outlining the type of high-level language specific to a queer reading of the play that the student was able to implement in their own work:

In fact, Shakespeare oscillates between reinforcing patriarchal ideology and heterosexual language, and the deconstruction of such romantic ideals, simultaneously closeting and disclosing the queer possibilities typical to conservative societies that use violence to repress homosociality and police the safe expression of homosexual exploration within heterosexual norms.

As you can see, the student’s language is now specified to the type of lens they are using in their literary perspectives essay, and is also of a high register.

External or Contextual references

Another benefit of going through critical readings is the external or contextual references they make. An example of this is in Rethinking Sexuality and Class in Twelfth Night by Nancy Lindhiem, where the author makes reference to Narcissus, a character from Metamorphoses – a Latin narrative poem from 8 AD:

“For all the likelihood that both Olivia and Sebastian are seduced by a visual perception, we probably feel that Olivia succumbs mainly to Cesario’s way with words.9 Several critics have commented on the allusion to Ovid’s Echo in Cesario’s ‘babbling gossip of the air’ (1.5.277)”

Noticing this reference as a motif in many other critical readings too, this student decided to insert it into their own essay here:

These central relationships therefore reapply the idea of self-reflexivity while blurring the structured boundaries of identity stability, central to the Narcissus myth of which Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphosis forms a part ; “a very echo to the seat/ where love is throned” invokes a doubling motif, as well as the troubling foundation of representation over reality.

See how the student was able to discuss it in their own way? Referencing external texts in your literary perspectives essay can prove very useful if done once or twice, as it demonstrates that you are able to apply the values within the chosen text to wider elements of society and culture.

Getting started

One of the most efficient ways of going through these sorts of essays (which are often quite elaborate and at times difficult to understand fully) is to print them out, grab a highlighter and pen and skim through as much as possible. Highlight words, terms or phrases which spark your intrigue, or ones you feel you may be able to manipulate as evidence to support your own essay.

Overall, reading as many of these expert-written critical essays as possible can be extremely beneficial in developing a greater understanding of the critical lenses, the ideals and context of the Elizabethan theatre, and the way both dialogue and staging can be used as evidence in your own essays.

The more you know about the play, the more you’ll be able to write about it. So, get reading!

Links to the readings:

Rethinking Sexuality and Class in Twelfth Night, Nancy Lindheim

Gender Ambiguity and Desire in Twelfth Night, Maria Del Rosario Arias Doblas ‍

Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night, Casey Charles

“Once upon a time…”

The fairy tale of Cinderella is a well-known, well-loved and well-ingrained story that was always told to me as a bedtime story. Who could forget the mean-spirited stepsisters who punished and ruined Cinderella’s life to no end? According to the dark Brothers Grimm version, the stepsisters mutilated their feet by cutting off their heels and toes to fit into the infamous shoe, and their eyes were pecked away by birds until they were blinded! It’s definitely one way to send a message to children… don’t be bullies or you’ll be punished. Which is exactly what the Brothers Grimm’s views and values were. Their construction of their fairy tale to send a message of what they viewed as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is simplistically shown through the writers’ choice in determining the characters’ fate. The evil stepsisters are punished, while Cinderella receives happiness and riches because she remained kind and pure. A clear and very simple example of how texts reflect the beliefs, world views and ethics of the author, which is essentially the author’s views and values!

What are the views and values of a text?

Writers use literature to criticise or endorse social conditions, expressing their own opinions and viewpoints of the world they live in. It is important to remember that each piece of literature is a deliberate construction. Every decision a writer makes reflects their views and values about their culture, morality, politics, gender, class, history or religion. This is implicit within the style and content of the text, rather than in overt statements. This means that the writer’s views and values are always open to interpretation, and possibly even controversial. This is what you (as an astute literature student) must do – interpret the relationship between your text and the ideas it explores and examines, endorses or challenges in the writer’s society.

How do I start?

Consider the following tips:

• What does the writer question and critique with their own society? What does this say about the writer’s own views and the values that uphold?
• For example,  “Jane Austen in Persuasion recognises the binding social conventions of the 19th century as superficial, where they value wealth and status of the utmost priority. She satirises such frivolous values through the microcosmic analysis of the Elliot family.”
• The writer’s affirming or critical treatment of individual characters can be a significant clue to what values they approve or disapprove of. What fate do the characters have? Who does the writer punish or reward by the end of the text?
• Which characters challenge and critique the social conventions of the day?
• Look at the writer’s use of language:
• Characterisation
• Plot structure
• Description
• In other words …what are the possible meanings generated by the writer’s choices?
• Recognition and use of metalanguage for literary techniques is crucial because you are responding to a work of literature. Within literature ideas, views and values and issues do not exist in a vacuum. They arise out of the writer’s style and create  meaning .
• How do the writer’s choices make meaning?
• How are the writer’s choices intended to affect the reader’s perception of social values?
• Weave views and values throughout your close analysis essays, rather than superficially adding a few lines at the conclusion of the essay to indicate the writer’s concerns.
• Using the writer’s name frequently will also assist in creating a mindset of analysing the writer’s commentary on society.

Below are some examples from an examiner report of successful and  insightful  responses reflecting the views and values of the writer:

(Another tip is to go through examiner’s reports and take note of high quality responses, even if they are not the text you’re studying)

When contrasted with the stark, blunt tone of Caesar throughout the play ‘You may see, Lepidus, and henceforth know...’ the richness of Shakespeare’s poetry with regard to his ‘couple so famous’  denotes how the playwright himself ultimately values the heroic age  to which his protagonists belong over the machinations of the rising imperial Rome.

It is the word ‘natural’ here through which Mansfield crafts a sharp irony that invites us to rate Edna’s obsession with her own performance.... It is this satiric impulse that also leaps to the fore through the image of Edna, ‘clasping the black book in her fingers as though it were a missal’...the  poignant economy of Mansfield’s characteristic style explores her views on the fragility of the human condition .   

‘In Cold Blood’ provides a challenging exploration of the value placed on human life. The seemingly pointless murders undermine every concept of morality that reigns in Middle America, the ‘Bible Belt’, as well as the wider community.  Capote insinuates his personal abhorrence of the death penalty and the disregard of mental illness in the justice system .

Why are views and values important in literature, and especially for close analysis?

Every year, the examiner reports emphasise how the best close analysis responses were ones that “showed how the text endorsed and reflected the views and values of the writer and were able to weave an understanding of these through the essay” (2013 VCAA Lit examiner report). By analysing HOW the text critiques, challenges or endorses the accepted values of the society in the text, you are demonstrating an understanding of the social and cultural context of the text, thus acknowledging the multifaceted layers that exist within literature. You are identifying the writer’s commentary of humanity through your own interpretation. Bring some insight into your essays!

Updated for the new 2023-2027 Study Design!

AoS 1: Adaptations and Transformations

Aos 2: developing interpretations.

• AoS 1: Creative Responses to Texts

AoS 2: Close Analysis

This is your ultimate guide to everything you need to know to get started with VCE Literature. We will be covering all the sections within Units 3 and 4, and have included resources that will help improve your skills and make you stand out from the rest of your cohort!

Scope of Study

Here's what the VCAA study design states...

'The study of VCE Literature fosters students’ enjoyment and appreciation of the artistic and aesthetic merits of stories and storytelling, and enables students to participate more fully in the cultural conversations that take place around them. By reading and exploring a diverse range of established and emerging literary works, students become increasingly empowered to discuss texts. As both readers and writers, students extend their creativity and high-order thinking to express and develop their critical and creative voices.'

'Throughout this study, students deepen their awareness of the historical, social and cultural influences that shape texts and their understanding of themselves as readers. Students expand their frameworks for exploring literature by considering literary forms and features, engaging with language, and refining their insight into authorial choices. Students immerse themselves in challenging fiction and non-fiction texts , discovering and experimenting with a variety of interpretations in order to develop their own responses.'

...but don't worry if the above is vague, we'll take you through exactly what you need to know for Year 12 Literature! Let's get into it! ‍ ‍

In Unit 3, students consider how meaning is created through form, and how different interpretations may be developed out of a singular text. First, students understand how writers adapt and transform texts, and how their interpretation of the text impacts this transformation into a different form. Secondly, students use another text to develop their own interpretations of a text with regard to its context , and views and values . Unit 3 School-Assessed Coursework is worth 25 per cent of your total study score!

This task is designed for you to critically analyse and actively engage with the text, understanding its nuances inside and out in order to decipher its meaning. Be individual in comparing and contrasting the two texts – avoid the obvious similarities/differences everyone in your class will also notice. It is the insightful analysis of the subtleties of how meaning is altered that will help you stand out!

Here are some important aspects to consider and questions to ask yourself while tackling this SAC:

• Identify the unique conventions in the construction of the original text
• Now do Step 1 with the adapted/transformed text
• How do the two text forms differ ? How are they the same ? The most crucial step is what meaning can be derived from the similarities and differences? How does the meaning change? ‍
• Note additions and omissions (and even silences) ‍
• Historical context and setting ‍
• How does the change in form impact you as the reader/viewer ?
• Incorporate pertinent quotations from both forms of text to substantiate and support your ideas and key points.

Most importantly, share your original interpretation of what meaning and significance you can extract from the text, and how you believe it changes once the form alters.

Also ask yourself these questions:

• ‍ What makes the text in its original form interesting or unique?

Is that quality captured in its adaptation/transformation?

‍ For more detailed explanations on these 7 aspects, you might want to check out Adaptations and Transformations Lit SAC: A How To Guide.

Developing interpretations is an AoS that focuses on investigating the meaning and messages in texts, as evidenced by the text itself, it’s author and their context . As per the study design:

'Students first develop their own interpretations of a set text, analysing how ideas, views and values are presented in a text, and the ways these are endorsed, challenged and/or marginalised through literary forms, features and language. These student interpretations should consider the historical, social and cultural context in which a text is written and set. Students also consider their own views and values as readers.'

Following this, you investigate a supplementary reading which will offer another interpretation of the text, which may enrich or challenge your interpretation by agreeing or disagreeing with your interpretation. Using this supplementary reading, you reconsider your initial interpretation and apply your new understanding of the text to key moments. 

The SAC for Developing Interpretations is a little bit weird. It’s worth 50% of unit 3 (or 25% of your total study score), but is split into two parts:

• Part A: An initial interpretation of the text’s views and values within its historical, social and cultural context.
• Part B: A written response that compares/interweaves and analyses an initial interpretation with a subsequent interpretation, using a key moment from the text.

Your teacher might do the two parts together, or separately. In any case, Part B will include the use of a passage from the set text that you must engage with. How does the passage help you to interpret the text, and how does that interpretation agree or disagree with the interpretation presented in the supplementary reading? 

The most difficult part of the SAC for this AoS is balancing your interpretation, the textual evidence, and the alternative interpretation of the supplementary reading. It is vital that if you are doing Literature this year, that you know your 3.2 text like the back of your hand, and that you practice writing loads and loads. It is also worth trying to make your interpretation incredibly specific, so that you can go in-depth into one idea, rather than simply skimming over 3 or 4 big ideas. 

For more on Developing Interpretations, you might want to check out VCE Literature Study Design (2023-2027): A Guide to Developing Interpretations which explains in detail what the new AoS is about and what you need to do.

And, if you're studying Alias Grace you'll find our Developing Interpretations SAC Guide on interpreting Alias Grace especially helpful.

‍ Unit 4: Interpreting Texts

Aos 1: creative response & reflective commentary.

The most important part of this task is that you must have a highly convincing connection between the original text and your creative response .

There must be a tangible relationship present, through an in-depth understanding of the original text’s features. These features include characterisation (what motivates these characters), setting, context, narrative structure, tone and writing/film style.

You can establish this relationship by: ‍

• Adopting or resisting the same genre as the original text
• Adopting or resisting the author’s writing/language style
• Adopting or resisting the text’s point of view
• Adopting or resisting the original setting, narrative structure or tone
• Writing through a peripheral character’s perspective
• Developing a prologue, epilogue or another chapter/scene
• Rewriting a key event/scene from another character’s point of view: Does this highlight how important narrative perspective is?
• Recontextualising the original text

For detailed explanations on how to establish these relationships, read "Creative Response To Text" Ideas .

The VCAA Literature Study Design also determines that students must submit a ‘close analysis of a key passage’. This aspect of the assessment counts for 20 of the 60 marks available for the Create Response outcome. The study design elaborates that students must produce:

‘A close analysis of a key passage from the original text, which includes reflections on connections between the creative response and the original text.’

In short, VCAA wants you to not only analyse the original text and use it as the basis for your Creative Response, they want you to be able to closely analyse a section of the original text, and link it to and reflect upon your creative response. This is different from previous years and the same task in English, the Reflective Commentary. You must use the skills of close analysis in this task. To include these things, look to the key knowledge and skills outlined in the study design. 

Key Knowledge:

• Understanding of the point of view, context and form of the original text
• The ways the literary form, features and language convey the ideas of the original text
• Techniques used to create, recreate or adapt a text and how they represent particular views and values

Key Skills:

• Discuss elements of construction, context, point of view and form particular to the text, and apply understanding of these in a creative response
• Analyse closely the literary form, features and language of a text
• Reflect on how language choices and literary features from the original text are used in their adaptation

As you write, ensure you are discussing how the author uses point of view, context, form, elements of construction and stylistic features in their text. It is imperative that you describe how you have similarly used such device in your creative response. Ensure that you also discuss how you are involving the ideas and themes of the text in your creative piece, and how you are discussing them further, or exploring them in greater depth. Obviously only talk about those that are relevant to your creative response!

To read a sample Reflective Commentary, check out Elly's blog post on how to Score 10/10 On The Reflective Commentary ‍

From the VCAA study design:

'In this area of study students focus on a detailed scrutiny of the language, style, concerns and construction of texts. Students attend closely to textual details to examine the ways specific passages in a text contribute to their overall understanding of the whole text. Students consider literary forms, features and language, and the views and values of the text. They write expressively to develop a close analysis, using detailed references to the text.'

In plain words, your teacher (and eventually examiner in the end of year exam) will give you 3 passages from your text. You'll be asked to read each of these passages, identify key ideas or themes present in each of the passages, and write an essay in response.

Writing the Introduction

Introductions are an excellent way to showcase your ability to provide an insight into your personal “reading” of the text, interpret the passages and allow you an avenue through which to begin your discussion of the material.

When constructing introductions, it is important to note that the VCAA Literature Exam Criteria is as follows: ‍

• Understanding of the text demonstrated in a relevant and plausible interpretation
• Ability to write expressively and coherently to present an interpretation
• Understanding of how views and values may be suggested in the text
• Analysis of how key passages and/or moments in the text contribute to an interpretation
• Analysis of the features of a text and how they contribute to an interpretation
• Analysis and close reading of textual details to support a coherent and detailed interpretation of the text
• Considering these points, your introduction should feature these 2 elements: your personal reading of the text and your interpretation of the passages.
• In terms of structure, try to begin with a sentence or two explaining your personal reading of the text. The key to doing so in a manner befitting Close Analysis however, is to utilise quotes from the passages to supplement your assertion.

Head over to Jarrod's blog to read a sample introduction: VCE Literature Close Analysis: Introduction ‍ ‍

Extra Resources

Views and Values

VCE Literature Essay Approaches - Not a Language Analysis

What is Authorial Intent in VCE English and Why Is It Important?

The Importance of Context in Literature ‍

Study Techniques: How To Approach a Text That You Hate

Why Genre Matters in VCE Literature: An Analysis of Dracula

Developing Interpretations SAC Guide: Interpreting Alias Grace

How Genre Works

We’re not supposed to judge a book based on its cover, but for some reason, we just can’t help it. Sure, we may not be able to tell if we’re going to enjoy the book, nor can we tell what exactly it’s about, but we can tell the tone, set our expectations, and most importantly, guess at the genre. Look at these three book covers and note how they perfectly show their genres - Sci-Fi, Horror and Life Drama, respectively. 

Genre is a way of categorising media. We split books, film and music into genres in order to better talk about them and because humans have a strange desire to sort and categorise things. Within whatever medium, genres display certain structures, characters and tropes that audiences expect from that genre . Audiences like to be able to tell the genre of a text because it’s comfortable. If I go to see a superhero movie I expect wacky costumes, cliche dialogue and a final battle scene that the heroes win - were these expectations not to be met, I would likely be a little bit peeved off. 

But why should you care about genre in VCE Literature? It’s not on the study design?  

Well, not explicitly. In each AoS of the study design, you must engage with ‘the ways the literary forms, features and language of texts affect the making of meaning’ , and/or ‘the ideas of a text and the ways in which they are presented’ . Genres are a feature of texts and are one of the ways that a text will present its ideas. Horror is the most notable example of a genre that uses its tropes to send a message - It Follows is a horror where the monster stands in for sexually transmitted disease, Carrie uses horror to show the horrors of high school, Frankenstein is a criticism of those who would ‘play god’. In the Literature study design, the horror genre is represented by Bram Stoker’s 1897 masterpiece, Dracula.  

For an overview of the Literature study design, check out The Ultimate Guide to VCE Literature . 

Dracula + The Gothic

I invite you to think hard about the horror films you’ve seen and to try to place Dracula into our modern view of horror. It’s hard to put Stoker’s vampire on the same stage as the Babadook , Annabelle or even the ‘70s slasher craze. This gives us an incredible opportunity to consider how audiences engaged and continue to engage with genres. In order to analyse genre, it is essential to recognise what the audience’s expectations were of a genre, and how the author has utilised those expectations for their own ends. Let’s consider Dracula in context .

‍ Dracula is a horror novel. But, we usually don’t think about those uptight Victorians reading texts that were designed expressly to scare. The Victorian era was actually one of the golden ages of horror literature though. But, it is distinctly different from our modern understandings of horror as defined by trailblazers like Stephen King. So, why is it different? It is here we must consider the sub-genre. If you have read anything about Dracula , you’ll note that it is referred to as a ‘gothic horror’ . The gothic genre of literature encapsulates some of the 19th century and certainly the Victorian period’s (1837-1901) best literature. Dracula of course belongs to this group, but it blows up around 1818 with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein . Edgar Allen Poe, with his short stories and poetry, is widely lauded as the ‘Father of American Gothic’, with ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ published in 1839. Note the dates here. Stoker published Dracula in 1897, a good 79 years after Frankenstein began haunting readers. Which means he had an established and large genre to work with. So, how did Stoker use the gothic in Dracula?

Tropes of the Gothic

1) the gothic monster.

The vampire myth used by Stoker is turned into the quintessential gothic monster. Dracula existed in the Victorian mind alongside Frankestein’s monster, Mr. Hyde, and Poe’s mixture of humans made monstrous and surreal monsters like that in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’. The defining feature of the gothic monster is its role in the story as a representation of something wrong with society, whether it’s increasingly amoral medicinal science, human greed or perverted desire. 

2) The Creepy Castle

The creepy castle doesn’t have to be a castle. It can be a mansion, a university or the graveyards of London. The important thing is that the setting of the gothic novel should always be - by default - terrifying and evoke a sense of danger. You can never get comfortable in Dracula’s castle, nor in Seward’s asylum, and neither can the characters. 

3) Damsel/s in Distress

For sure an outdated trope, but a constant in the gothic. It’s a quick and simple way to show that the innocence of young women is threatened by a malignant force. In Dracula , look to Mina, Lucy and Mrs. Westenra. But what happens when the damsel saves herself?

4) Omens, Portents, Visions

Visions in dreams? Random wild animals escaping from ships? Ships docking with a completely dead crew? Random changes in the weather? You might be dealing with a gothic villain, or going mad. In either case, Renfield, Dracula, Mina and Jonothan all deal with portents and visions. 

And This Is Important Because…

Stoker has followed the predominant tropes of the gothic horror genre. Why is this important for our analysis of Dracula ? The ways in which authors use genre and other stylistic elements like form, voice or plot relate directly to their intentions. If we investigate the particular aspects of Stoker’s use of the gothic, we may better understand the views and values that he is promoting. For instance, let’s take Dracula as the gothic monster. Since the gothic monster is always a way to reflect society back onto itself, how is Stoker doing that? A feminist analysis might take Dracula as a reflection of sexual deviancy, which then ties into his constant threat towards women. A post-colonial analysis might question the foreignness of Dracula, and view him as a part of the intrusiveness of foreigners in English society. Either way, you’re touching on a view or value presented by Stoker, and tying it to an aspect of the gothic genre in a way that conveniently also touches on characterisation. 

Let’s complicate things a little more. The ‘Damsel in Distress’ trope is clearly evident in Dracula , but what view or value is Stoker commenting on by its inclusion? The simplest answer is that, by showing that women cannot save themselves, Stoker is saying that women are inherently weak and need to be saved by men. But this answer isn’t sufficient for a number of reasons. Firstly, what are the women weak to? Is it a physical mismatch between the women and Dracula, keeping in mind that Dracula is also stronger than the novel’s men? Or is it a symbolic weakness to some aspect of Dracula’s character, be it sexuality or magic? Secondly, and more importantly, are all the women victimised by Dracula the same? Well, obviously not. 

It could very well be argued that Stoker is subverting the ‘Damsel in Distress’ trope by actually giving us a woman who is able to be her own saviour (which is actually becoming a trope in itself nowadays!). The dichotomy between Lucy and Mina is a crucial aspect of the text, and the way that Mina’s character doesn’t quite fit into the ‘Damsel in Distress’ archetype is a major interpretative dilemma. By considering the genre tropes, Lucy is clearly a ‘Damsel in Distress’ who cannot save herself and is unduly victimised by Dracula. It can be argued that her implicit promiscuousness is punished through her murder, but in whatever case, she is distressed and must be saved. Mina, however, has an entirely different view of her distresses. Not only does Mina take on a caring role towards Jonothan - in which Jonothan becomes a ‘Master in Distress’ - she actively supports the attempts to save her and kill Dracula. By compiling the journals, letters and newspaper clippings into the epistolary that we the audience are reading, and using herself as a window into Dracula’s mind through their psychic connection, Mina proves to be a means by which to save herself from her distress. So, the question of what Stoker actually thinks about women is still quite open: Lucy is seemingly punished for her character flaws, which indicates a misogynist view of women’s sexuality, but Mina is praised for her use of masculine qualities like leadership and stoicism. Is Stoker saying women should be more masculine? Less masculine and more traditionally feminine? This entire discussion revolves around how and why the ‘Damsel in Distress’ trope is being followed or subverted. 

Using Genre in VCE

Whilst a genre-based analysis (or a structural analysis) can be a fantastic way to open up discussion and leads to important questions about views and values , the way I have presented it may appear to be another useless and long-winded thing you have to try to shove into an essay when you already have to balance so much in Literature! Fear not, because there are a couple of really easy ways to fit genre into essays without taking up loads of space.

Option one is to use a genre trope as the basis of a paragraph. If your essay contention is that…

‍ ‘Stoker presents the dangers of foreign immigration to England at the height of its colonial empire’

…then you can easily write a paragraph discussing that…

‍ ‘Stoker employs the gothic trope of a supernatural monster in Dracula, using this vampire as a stand-in for foreigners in England’.

This paragraph would discuss Dracula’s characterisation, and the settings of Transylvania and London, whilst investigating Stoker’s views on England’s colonialism and race. In a Developing Interpretations or Close Analysis essay, you’ve just touched on several key criteria, including the author’s views and values , your own credible interpretation of the text and how the text presents its messaging (through characterisation and setting). You can do all these things without mentioning genre, but by explicitly using the language of genre analysis you are likely separating yourself from the student next to you - who had a similar idea but described it in a less interesting way. This is the utility of understanding genre, it gives you the words and concepts necessary to improve your writing and interpretation. The ‘Gothic monster’ is an easy way to describe an otherwise GIANT concept.

Another way is to add it to other analyses in passing. Instead of saying “ Dracula presents Lucy and Mina as foils to demonstrate the ways in which modern women’s promiscuity is ultimately harmful”, you can say “the presentation of Lucy and Mina as two ‘damsels in distress’ in dichotomy with each other demonstrates the differing ways in which Victorian women could doom or save themselves” . The latter sentence has not significantly changed the content of the first, still referring to the women’s opposition to each other, but by phrasing it with ‘damsels in distress’ I leave open the possibility of discussing not just Lucy’s promiscuity, but also Mina’s conservative womanhood. 

Finally, you need not even mention genre or its tropes in the essay, just use it as a thinking tool. If you go back through the previous section of this blog, you’ll see just how many questions I am asking about the tropes and ideas I am discussing. By using the trope as a jumping-off point for a series of questions, I can develop a nuanced understanding of multiple views and values and the ways in which they interconnect. Take a trope like the ‘creepy castle’ and ask:

“Why would Stoker put Dracula manor in the text?”

“Because it sets up the ‘otherness’ of Dracula.”

“Why do we need to know that Dracula is the other?” 

“Because he represents a supernatural foreignness that we need to be scared of.”

“Okay, but why is it right at the start, why is it from Jonothan’s perspective?” 

All of these questions offer ways of breaking down the text and they will naturally lead to questions about structure, characterisation and views and values. In doing this, you can start to come up with ways to turn those questions, or the order of those questions into an essay structure. Moreso, this type of questioning is what your teacher, tutors and top-tier Literature students are doing. It is a constant process of asking, answering, reconsidering, reasking and synthesising. And genre is an easy way to start the process. 

Updated 23/09/2020.

‍ One of the most prominent questions I receive from students  is this: “do I need to write an introduction?”. This is usually followed with “how do I write an introduction?”.

Firstly, yes,  I believe all students should be writing introductions  as they are an excellent way to showcase your ability to provide an insight into your personal “reading” of the text, interpret the passages and allow you an avenue through which to begin your discussion of the material. In this guide, I will be explaining two of the key elements to be utilised to create a strong introduction.

When constructing introductions, it is important to note that the VCAA Literature Exam Criteria is as follows:

• understanding of the text demonstrated in a relevant and plausible interpretation
• ability to write expressively and coherently to present an interpretation
• understanding of how views and values may be suggested in the text
• analysis of how key passages and/or moments in the text contribute to an interpretation
• analysis of the features of a text and how they contribute to an interpretation
• analysis and close reading of textual details to support a coherent and detailed interpretation of the text

What you need to include in your Close Analysis introduction

Considering these points, your introduction should feature these 2 elements:  your personal reading  of the text and  your interpretation  of the passages.

Your personal reading  is simply your perception of the text. Though the key facets of the text such as the plot and the characters are generally viewed by the majority in a similar fashion, each student will have their own opinions of the text. This can range from resonating with particular scenes or placing a greater emphasis on a certain concept or relationship.

Your interpretation of the passages  is the way in which you view the excerpts given to you. Akin to your personal reading, the core aspects of the passages will likely be viewed similarly by most students, however your point of difference will come from how you perceive  the passages suggest views and values  and  how features and moments contribute to an interpretation  (factors coming from the criteria).

In terms of structure, try to begin with a sentence or two explaining  your personal reading of the text.  The key to doing so in a manner befitting Close Analysis however, is to utilise  quotes from the passages  to supplement your assertion.

Here is a sample written about George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion”:

George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” contrasts the absence of morality in the titled upper class of 19th century England who dehumanise common citizens as “pebbles on the beach” and the under privileged but morally conscious lower class, “intimidated” by the socio-economic chasm, but living with “middle class morality”.

This  highlights my personal reading  of Pygmalion as a whole, supported by quotes from the passages I was provided.

To build on this, proceed by writing a sentence or two that demonstrates  your interpretation of the passages  and how they discuss views and values and create meaning.

Though Shaw implies that one can ascend the ranks through Doolittle’s “lecturing them blue in the face” and Eliza’s gradual self-actualisation, ultimately Shaw quashes any prospect of one permanently invading the upper class by deploying the repetitive “I will” catchphrase throughout Eliza’s ventures. The indefatigable delivery ironically conveys the notion that in spite of Eliza’s effort, she “won’t” achieve.

In these sentences I have commented briefly on the events within the passages and utilised them to exemplify how they are utilised to delve into views and values and create meaning in the overall context of the text. These factors encompass  my interpretation of the passages .

Introductions which contain these two key features will score well as they  directly target numerous parts of the assessment criteria . This allows students to explicitly outline their overall reading of the text in a style which will efficiently show off your writing skills. Here's the introduction altogether:

Sample A+ Introduction

George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” contrasts the absence of morality in the titled upper class of 19th century England who dehumanise common citizens as “pebbles on the beach” and the under privileged but morally conscious lower class, “intimidated” by the socio-economic chasm, but living with “middle class morality”. Though Shaw implies that one can ascend the ranks through Doolittle’s “lecturing them blue in the face” and Eliza’s gradual self-actualisation, ultimately Shaw quashes any prospect of one permanently invading the upper class by deploying the repetitive “I will” catchphrase throughout Eliza’s ventures. The indefatigable delivery ironically conveys the notion that in spite of Eliza’s effort, she “won’t” achieve.

To the Lit kids out there, you already know that VCE Literature is a whole different ball game – You’re part of a small cohort, competing against some of the best English students in the state and spots in the 40+ range are fairly limited. So how can you ensure that it’s your essay catches the assessor’s eye? Here are some tips which will hopefully give you an edge.  

• Constantly refer back to the language of the passages

Embed quotes from the passages into both your introduction and conclusion and of course, throughout the essay. Don’t leave any room for doubt that you are writing on the passages right in front of you rather than regurgitating a memorized essay. A good essay evokes the language of the passages so well that the examiner should barely need to refer back to the passages.

Here’s part of a sample conclusion to illustrate what I mean:

  In comparison to Caesar, who sees lands, the “’stablishment of Egypt,” as the epitome of all triumphs, the lovers see such gains, “realms and islands,” as “plates dropp’d from his pocket.” It is dispensable and transient like cheap coins, mere “dungy earth” and “kingdoms of clay.” This grand world of heroic virtue is set in the past tense, where the lover once “bestrid the ocean,” once “crested the world,” but it is the world which will arguably endure in our hearts.

So, you can see that analysis of the language does not stop even in the conclusion and yet it still ties into the overall interpretation of the text that I have presented throughout the essay.

• If appropriate, include quotes from the author of the text

A good way to incorporate views and values of the author in your writing is to quote things they have said themselves. This may work better for some texts than others but if you find a particularly poetic quote that ties in well with the interpretation you are presenting, then make sure to slip it in. It shows that you know your stuff and is an impressive way to show off your knowledge of the author’s views and values.

Here’s a sample from an introduction on Adrienne Rich poetry which includes a quote from her essay, “When We Dead Awaken.”

Adrienne Rich’s poetry is the process of discovering a “new psychic geography” (When We Dead Awaken) with a language that is “refuse[d], ben[t] and torque[d]” not to subjugate but as an instrument for “connection rather than apartheid.”

• Memorise quotes throughout the text

Yes, there are passages right in front of you, but don’t fall into the trap of not memorizing significant quotes from the text as a whole. Dropping a relevant quote in from another section of the text demonstrates that you understand the text as a whole.

The originality of your ideas and the quality of your writing come first and foremost, but these are little ways in which you can add a little extra something to your essay.

1. Don't focus just on ideas and avoid language engagement.

Language engagement is every bit as important as ideas. Sometimes, when you get stuck in philosophical musings, you might find yourself in a place where you're spouting on and on about solipsism or the intrinsic desire for independence in the 19th century Norwegian working class. Literature essays are all about finding balance, and here, that balance means language engagement. Whether you are writing about literary criticism or a passage analysis, you have to be able to support your interpretations with textual evidence.

Often, this requires some creative thinking. You can have a lot of fun with it and the examiners like you to pick up on small details and connect it to a grander scope.

Here's an example from Jane Eyre.

“my eyes seemed as if they had beheld the fount of fruition, and borrowed beams from the lustrous ripple.”

“I was not surprised...to feel...the breathing of a fresh and fragrant breeze...The rooks cawed, and blither birds sang; but nothing was so merry or so musical as my own rejoicing heart.”

In this passage, Jane is rejoicing over her marriage proposal, but readers are led to understand that this may be a false, idealistic dream of hers. Note the patterns of alliteration – the fricative 'f' shifting to the plosive 'b' in “fount of fruition” and “borrowed beams” then again from “fresh and fragrant breeze” to “blither birds”. What could it possibly mean?

Fricatives tend to indicate freedom, whereas plosives tend to indicate an abruptness – a harsh change. Perhaps, Jane's wild, free joy is immediately followed by plosive alliteration so as to illustrate how her happiness is cut short and her dream is a false one – she will attempt to achieve freedom through this romance, but she will be abruptly and unceremoniously prevented from attaining it.

Regardless, in any passage, there are always things to talk about and little language quirks to exploit to figure out an interpretation. Start from these little details, and build out and out until you tackle your big ideas. All of these ideas should be rooted in language.

2. Don't prioritise complicated language over ideas.

Often, when you think that expressive, complicated writing takes priority over ideas in Literature, you tend to end up with flowery material that becomes more convoluted than it is effective. If you are one of those people (I know it's hard) but kill your darlings. Focus on coming up with original ideas, and express them clearly. Cut out redundancies. Be expressive in a way that is natural and in a way where you know that first and foremost, your language is accurate. Don't go around using metaphors purely for the sake of sounding intellectual when you can express something equally eloquently and beautifully with simpler, fluent text.

Remember: this is not to say that you shouldn't be expressive in Literature. In fact, writing style and the ability to write well is a fundamental component to doing well in this subject. It is just vital that you strike the right balance. This is a good lesson to learn sooner rather than later - and you'll be steering into prime territory for the exam.

3. Don't treat Literature like an English essay. Be free!

Good Literature essays generally tend to be more lively and expressive than English essays. Why? Because Literature just doesn't operate under the same criteria, and it shouldn't be treated as such. 

Don't feel like putting in an introduction/conclusion? No need! Don't feel like sticking to a TEEL structure? No problem!

Your focus is creating writing that moves along at a natural, expressive pace, moving through textual evidence to broader ideas. You don't have a structure. You don't have a paragraph quota. You have free reign over a lot of how you write your Literature essays – so find out what works for you.

4. Come up with original interpretations and don't stick with popular readings.

Literature is one of very few subjects in the entirety of VCE that rewards original thinking. You don't need to go with the crowd consensus on how to read your text: as long as you have the evidence to support your reading! The examiners will reward complex, creative, and unique ideas. Every passage analysis you write should be approached with a fresh perspective – base your interpretation around the text in front of you, and not a dogmatic set of ideas that you bring with you.

5. Let the text before you provide you with the ideas, don't force your ideas into the text.

By reading literary criticism and expanding the scope of your ideas, you can apply original readings to each set of passages you have. Your essays stand out when they cover new, uncharted territory.

Literature is all about balance. If you can find it in you to balance language engagement, interpretation, and writing style, I'd say you have yourself a pretty good essay.

Remember not to fall into any of the common traps of the subject, and you'll have put yourself on solid footing to become a true literati.

Good Literature essays generally tend to be more lively and expressive than English essays. Why? Because Literature just doesn't operate under the same criteria, and it shouldn't be treated as such.

Imagine a friend tells you eerie accounts of her witnessing a ghostly presence in her home. You scoff and condescendingly humour her. But as her stories begin to manifest itself in her gaunt appearance, you alarmingly notice how she truly believes in the apparitions she recounts. You begin to doubt her sanity, you begin to doubt the certainty with which you dismissed her supernatural visions and now, you begin to doubt yourself. THE SUSPENSE BUILDS.

But let’s say this friend filmed the ghostly apparitions and showed them to you. Sure – the evidence of this ghost is frighteningly scary. But the suspense that was built in the doubt, uncertainty and ambiguity of your friend’s tale is now lost. The ghosts caught in film acts as another eyewitness and another medium to validate your friend’s narrative. Your friend is no longer the only person who sees these ghosts, shattering all doubt within you of the ghost’s existence. THE SUSPENSE – is gone.

Notice how the form and genre of the spoken word in the first example was meaningful in its the effect on the reader? But when the form changed to a film, the meaningful suspense and ambiguity that was unique and crucial in the original text,  changed , and was no longer as pronounced. Yes – the film itself may be terrifying. But the very doubt and suspense around not knowing if your friend was a lunatic for seeing ghosts or if she was telling the truth all contributes to the meaning derived from the form of the ‘text’ in an unreliable first person narrative. This is the crux of adaptations and transformations, and what you need to identify and analyse –  how the meaning is changed/altered when the form of the text is changed .

Here are 7 lucky tips for how to tackle the SAC:

• Identify the unique  conventions  in the construction of the original text – characterisation, genre, tone, style, structure, point of view/narration (or any devices employed in constructing the text e.g. cinematic devices in a film such as camera angles, framing, lighting, costumes, interior/exterior settings, sound)
• Now do step 1 with the adapted/transformed text
• How do the two text forms  differ ? How are they the  same ? However, be sure you do not simply compare and contrast. The most crucial step is what  meaning  can be derived from the similarities and differences?  How does the meaning change?
• Note  additions and omissions  (and even silences) – do they change how readers/viewers perceive the narrative and alter your opinions and perceptions of the text?
• Historical context and setting  – what significance does the context have on the narrative? Has the adaptation/transformation been re-contextualised? Does that alter the meaning of the original text?
• How does the change in form  impact you as the reader/viewer ? Analyse your own reactions and feelings towards each text form. Do you sympathise with a character more in the original text? How are we positioned to feel this way? Why do you lack the same level of sympathy for the adapted/transformed text?
• Incorporate pertinent  quotations  from both forms of text to substantiate and support your ideas and key points.

Final questions to ponder

Most importantly is to share your  original  interpretation of what meaning and significance you can extract from the text, and how  you believe  it changes once the form alters.

What makes the text in its original form interesting or unique?

As always with Literature, this task is designed for you to critically analyse and actively engage with the text, understanding its nuances inside and out in order to decipher its meaning. Be individual in comparing and contrasting the two texts – avoid the obvious similarities/differences everyone in your class will also notice. It is the insightful analysis of the  subtleties  of how  meaning is altered  that will help you stand out!

With the Literary Perspectives essay can come mild confusion regarding its structure, extent (as well as form) of analysis and differentiability from your standard English text response - which is why I’m here to tell you that this confusion, while inevitable, is easily overcome! A text like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is rife with complexities in both its narrative features and literary devices, all prime for discussion in your own essay. ‍

Consider the following prompt: “ Discuss the proposition that ‘ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ is a condemnation of 1950’s American society.”

Don’t let this prompt’s simple exterior fool you. What it leaves room for - and what the assessor will ultimately be looking for - is the development of your own complex ideas. It is this metamorphosis from the simple to complex that, when evident in your own writing, allows your essay to truly shine. This is obviously applicable to English as well, but where a clear fork in the road lies is in the act of grouping those complex ideas under the umbrella of a specific critical lens (or multiple!).  

For instance, this specific prompt is great in how a diverse range of literary perspectives can be applied to it due to its main subject being 1950s American society. These can include: feminist, psychoanalytical, queer, New Historicist, Marxist, and I’m sure many others!

When faced with a number of critical lenses you can choose from, it’s important to keep in mind the fact that focusing your essay on mainly two or three lenses will ensure it’s more streamlined and therefore easier to both write and read. I know incorporating more lenses as a means of adding variety within your essay is quite tempting, but this is sure to both hinder the depth of your analysis/discussion - which is where marks are ultimately rewarded - and run the risk of disrupting any form of cohesion in your writing. The lenses you choose will ultimately be dependent on the extent of their applicability to the prompt and how comfortable you are with using them (i.e don’t use a Marxist lens if you don’t know how to extensively discuss social classes). The combination of lenses you choose, coupled with your own interpretation, help to inform the development of your unique perspective of the text.

For this prompt, I personally chose to focus on using the critical lenses of New Historicism, psychoanalysis and queer theory. From here, I’m able to ask myself questions catered to each perspective such as “What specific cultural values are examined in COAHTR and how does Williams present them?” and, relating this to the prompt at hand by also asking: “Is this presentation condemnatory?”. The lenses you choose should be interlinked with your arguments and thus your analyses, enabling you to show the assessor you understand that this isn’t an English text response! ‍

Introduction

A frequently asked question regarding the intro of a literary perspectives essay is whether or not to state the critical lens/es you are using. The answer to this is that it’s ultimately up to you! Some important points to consider however are:

• Am I able to include this statement without it sounding janky and disruptive of flow?
• If I were not to include it, am I able to make it clear enough to the assessor from the get-go what perspective/s I am using?

Outside of that, a literary perspectives intro is pretty similar to that of any other essay.  One thing to remember however, especially with COAHTR, is to briefly explain certain significant concepts you choose to mention. A good example of this is the American Dream - demonstrating that you understand what it is at its core via a brief explanation in your intro is going to leave a far better impression on the assessor than not elaborating on it at all.

See mine below:

“Defined by its moral incongruity against socially upheld conservative values, Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof illuminates the debilitative effects of subscription to a belief system entrenched in immorality. By highlighting the ways in which values such as heteronormativity and the American Dream — deemed synonymous with “equal opportunity” — serve only as obstructions to genuine human connection, Williams underpins both his condemnation of such mores and, therefore, the eminent human struggle to attain true happiness."

As you can see, I personally chose not to explicitly state what critical lenses I was using in my essay. However, I did make sure to include certain words and phrases commonly associated with the critical lenses they represent.

For example:

• New Historicism: “socially upheld conservative values”, “belief system”, “values such as heteronormativity and the American Dream”
• Psychoanalytical: “moral incongruity”, “human connection/struggle to attain true happiness”
• Queer theory: “heteronormativity”

This allows me to inform the assessor of what lenses I'm using in spite of an absent explicit statement. It’s also far more efficient in this case than having to use the janky phrase “Under the critical lenses of New Historicism, psychoanalysis and queer theory…”.

Body paragraphs:

As I'm sure you already know by now, Literature grants you a lot more freedom than English in terms of structure - and this is especially applicable to the body of your essay! It's important however to find a balance between what structure you’re most comfortable writing with and what’s going to impress the assessor (as opposed to abusing this freedom and floundering about with zero cohesion).

What I personally tend to be comfortable doing is loosely following a TEEL structure, while spicing it up a little by switching around the order here and there.  This is especially evident in my first body paragraph below for the aforementioned prompt, in which I begin with some passage analysis rather than your typical topic sentence:

“Positioning the audience within an American plantation home’s “bed-sitting-room”, Williams immediately envelops the play’s moral foreground in domesticity and the conservative mores of 1950s American society that serve to define such an atmosphere. It being the bedroom of heterosexual couple Brick and Maggie evinces the nature of their exchanges as demonstrative of the morally debilitating effects of the values upheld by the society in which they live — illuminating Williams’ intention to present social mores as obstructive of genuine human connection. Such an intention is foregrounded by the disparity that exists between the external and internal; that is, the socially upheld status of Brick and Maggie’s heterosexual relationship — exempt from subjection to social “disgust” — and the “mendacious” reality of their marriage in its failure to provide either individual with the same sense of primordial wholeness Brick finds in his “clean”, “pure” and “true” homosocial relationship with Skipper. From the outset of the play, heteronormative values are debased as Williams subverts the domestically epitomised dynamic between husband and wife into an embodiment of the inhumane. Maggie is likened to a “priest delivering a liturgical chant”, her lines interspersed with “wordless singing” — alluding to her overly performative nature that compromises the genuineness of human connection. Brick’s visual absence during the play’s opening and his “masked indifference”, too, further undermine the social perception of heterosexuality as the pinnacle of love as it is this reticence that exemplifies the absence of happiness found in their marriage. This sense of disconnection, wherein “living with someone you love can be lonelier — than living entirely alone”, forces Maggie to navigate their relationship through the reductive mode of a “game” wherein it is only by detecting “a sign of nerves in a player on the defensive” that she can attempt to derive genuine emotion from her husband. To reduce human connection to a set of manoeuvrable tactics punctuated only by “the click of mallets” is an act portrayed by Williams as propagative of immorality, vehemently contrasting the reconciliation of the divided self afforded to Brick by the “one, great true thing” in his life: friendship with Skipper. By making the audience privy to the inhumanity lying at the helm of 1950s American social mores, Williams thus presents his scathing critique of such a system, reflecting its capacity for obstructing human connection and therefore the futility of conforming to its standards.”

A key feature of this paragraph is the nature of my analysis - it is, essentially, very similar to what you’d find in a passage analysis essay. It’s important to note that the skills you’ve learnt for the latter can be easily implemented in a literary perspectives essay and is often what allows it to truly stand out! It also forces you to frequently reference the text with quotes in the same way you would in a passage analysis essay, which is glorious in any assessor’s eyes.

With “zooming in” on certain passages in the text (think analysing literary devices, setting, syntax, etc.) however must also follow “zooming out” and evaluating their overall meaning, especially in relation to their significance to the prompt.

A concise example of “zooming in and out” from the previous paragraph can be seen below:

“ Maggie is likened to a “priest delivering a liturgical chant”, her lines interspersed with “wordless singing” — alluding to her overly performative nature that compromises the genuineness of human connection. ”

Below is another example from a different body paragraph for the same essay:

“ Hateful figures transformed into animalistic grotesques, the children of Mae and Gooper are depicted as “no-neck monsters” with “dawg’s names”, with the “fat old body” of Big Mama herself alternating in appearance from “an old bulldog” to a “charging rhino”. Here the moral degradation of a society so heavily reliant on the atomisation of its individuals is made most conspicuous, with Big Daddy’s semblance to a large animal who “pants and wheezes and sniffs” serving as a further testament to such a notion.”

Conclusion:

This is yet another portion of your essay granted freedom by the nature of VCE Literature, so whether or not you choose to intertwine it with your last body paragraph or separate it completely is entirely up to you. What you choose to emphasise in your conclusion is also very similar to that of any other essay as the main focus is to hammer home your interpretation of the text in relation to the prompt!

See my example below:

“Williams, by presenting 1950’s American society as both propagative of atomisation and obstructive of innate morality, ultimately highlights the futility that lies in assimilating to such a belief system as a means of attaining true happiness. The pressure to subscribe to morally reductive values wherein any remnants of the innate are wholly ignored only further shrouds the possibility of happiness at all, and it is here where Williams’ portrayal of the human struggle to attain this ideal is made most conspicuous.”

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Decision-Making Processes in Social Contexts

Elizabeth bruch.

Department of Sociology and Complex Systems

Fred Feinberg

Ross School of Business and Statistics

Over the past half-century, scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Judgment and Decision Making have amassed a trove of findings, theories, and prescriptions regarding the processes ordinary people enact when making choices. But this body of knowledge has had little influence on sociology. Sociological research on choice emphasizes how features of the social environment shape individual behavior, not people’s underlying decision processes. Our aim in this article is to provide an overview of selected ideas, models, and data sources from decision research that can fuel new lines of inquiry on how socially situated actors navigate both everyday and major life choices. We also highlight opportunities and challenges for cross-fertilization between sociology and decision research that can allow the methods, findings, and contexts of each field to expand their joint range of inquiry.

INTRODUCTION

Over the past several decades, there has been an explosion of interest in, and recognition of the importance of, how people make decisions. From Daniel Kahneman’s 2002 Nobel Prize for his work on “Heuristics and Biases,” to the rise in prominence of Behavioral Economics, to the burgeoning policy applications of behavioral “nudges” ( Kahneman 2003 ; Camerer & Loewenstein 2004 ; Shafir 2013 ), both scholars and policy makers increasingly focus on choice processes as a key domain of research and intervention. Researchers in the interdisciplinary field of Judgment and Decision Making (JDM)—which primarily comprises cognitive science, behavioral economics, academic marketing, and organizational behavior—have generated a wealth of findings, insights, and prescriptions regarding how people make choices. In addition, with the advent of rich observational data from purchase histories, a related line of work has revolutionized statistical models of decision making that aim to represent underlying choice process.

But for the most part these models and ideas have not penetrated sociology. 1 We believe there are several reasons for this. First, JDM research has largely been focused on contrasting how a fully informed, computationally unlimited (i.e., “rational”) person would behave to how people actually behave, and pointing out systematic deviations from this normative model ( Loewenstein 2001 ). Since sociology never fully embraced the rational choice model of behavior, debunking it is less of a disciplinary priority. 2 Second, JDM research is best known for its focus on problems that involve risk , where the outcome is probabilistic and the payoff probabilities are known ( Kahneman & Tversky 1979 , 1982 , 1984 ), and ambiguity , where the outcome is probabilistic and the decision-maker does not have complete information on payoff probabilities ( Ellsberg 1961 ; Einhorn & Hogarth 1988 ; Camerer & Weber 1992 ). In both these cases, there is an optimal choice to be made, and the research explores how people’s choices deviate from that answer. But most sociological problems—such as choosing a romantic partner, neighborhood, or college—are characterized by obscurity : there is no single, obvious, optimal, or correct answer.

Perhaps most critically, the JDM literature has by and large minimized the role of social context in decision processes. This is deliberate. Most experiments performed by psychologists are designed to isolate processes that can be connected with features of decision tasks or brain functioning; it is incumbent on researchers working in this tradition to “de-socialize” the environment and reduce it to a single aspect or theoretically predicted confluence of factors. Although there is a rich body of work on how heuristics are matched to particular decision environments ( Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier 2011 ), these environments are by necessity often highly stylized laboratory constructs aimed at exerting control over key features of the environment. 3 This line of work intentionally de-emphasizes or eliminates aspects of realistic social environments, which limits its obvious relevance for sociologists.

Finally, there is the challenge of data availability: sociologists typically do not observe the intermediate stages by which people arrive at decision outcomes. For example, researchers can fairly easily determine what college a person attended, what job they chose, or whom they married, but they rarely observe how they got to that decision—that is, how people learned about and evaluated available options, and which options were excluded either because they were infeasible or unacceptable. But such process data can be collected in a number of different ways, as detailed later in this article. Moreover, opportunities to study sociologically relevant decision processes are rapidly expanding, owing to the advent of disintermediated sources like the Internet and smart phones, which allow researchers to observe human behavior at a much finer level of temporal and geographic granularity than ever before. Equally important, these data often contain information on which options people considered , but ultimately decided against. Such activity data provide a rich source of information on sociologically relevant decision processes ( Bruch et al. 2016 ).

We believe that the time is ripe for a new line of work that draws on insights from cognitive science and decision theory to examine choice processes and how they play out in social environments. As we discuss in the next section, sociology and decision research offer complementary perspectives on decision-making and there is much to be gained from combining them. One benefit of this union is that it can deepen sociologists’ understanding of how and why individual outcomes differ across contexts. By leveraging insights on how contextual factors and aspects of choice problems influence decision strategies, sociologists can better pinpoint how, why, and when features of the social environment trigger and shape human behavior. This also presents a unique opportunity for cross-fertilization. While sociologists can draw from the choice literature’s rich understanding of and suite of tools to probe decision processes, work on decision-making can also benefit from sociologists’ insights into how social context enables or constrains behavior.

The literature on judgment and decision-making is enormous; our goal here is to offer a curated introduction aimed at social scientists new to this area. In addition to citing recent studies, we deliberately reference the classic and integrative literature in this field so that researchers can acquaint themselves with the works that introduced these ideas, and gain a comfortable overview to it. We highlight empirical studies of decision making that help address how people make critical life decisions, such as choosing a neighborhood, college, life partner, or occupation. Thus, our focus is on research that is relevant for understanding decision processes characterized by obscurity, where there is no obvious correct or optimal answer. Due to its selective nature, our review does not include a discussion of several major areas of the JDM literature, most notably Prospect Theory, which focuses on how people can distort both probabilities and outcome values when these are known (to the researcher) with certainty; we also do not discuss the wide range of anomalies documented in human cognition, for example mental accounting, the endowment effect, and biases such as availability or anchoring ( Tversky & Kahneman 1973 ; Kahneman & Tversky 1973 , 1981 ; Kahneman et al. 1991 ).

The balance of the article is as follows. We first explain how decision research emerged as a critique of rational choice theory, and show how these models of behavior complement existing work on action and decision-making in sociology. The core of the paper provides an overview of how cognitive, emotional, and contextual factors shape decision processes. We then introduce the data and methods commonly used to study choice processes. Decision research relies on a variety of data sources, including results from lab and field experiments, surveys, brain scans, and observations of in-store shopping and other behavior. We discuss their relative merits, and provide a brief introduction to statistical modeling approaches. We close with some thoughts about opportunities and challenges for sociologists wanting to incorporate insights and methods from the decision literature into their research programs.

SOCIOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSEPCTIVES ON DECISION PROCESSES

To understand how sociology and psychology offer distinct but complementary views of decision processes, we begin with a brief introduction to the dominant model of human decision-making in the social sciences: rational choice theory. This model, endemic to neoclassical economic analyses, has permeated into many fields including sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy, history, and law ( Coleman 1991 ; Gely & Spiller 1990 ; Satz & Ferejohn 1994 ; Levy 1997 ). In its classic form, the rational choice model of behavior assumes that decision makers have full knowledge of the relevant aspects of their environment, a stable set of preferences for evaluating choice alternatives, and unlimited skill in computation ( Samuelson 1947 ; Von Neumann & Morgenstern 2007 ; Becker 1993 ). Actors are assumed to have a complete inventory of possible alternatives of action; there is no allowance for focus of attention or a search for new alternatives ( Simon 1991 , p. 4). Indeed, a distinguishing feature of the classic model is its lack of attention to the process of decision-making. Preference maximization is a synonym for choice ( McFadden 2001 , p. 77).

Rational choice has a long tradition in sociology, but its popularity increased in the 1980s and 1990s, partly as a response to concern within sociology about the growing gap between social theory and quantitative empirical research ( Coleman 1986 ). Quantitative data analysis, despite focusing primarily on individual-level outcomes, is typically conducted without any reference to—let alone a model of—individual action ( Goldthorpe 1996 ; Esser 1996 ). Rational choice provides a theory of action that can anchor empirical research in meaningful descriptions of individuals’ behavior ( Hedström & Swedberg 1996 ). Importantly, the choice behavior of rational actors can also be straightforwardly implemented in regression-based models readily available in statistical software packages. Indeed while some scholars explicitly embrace rational choice as a model of behavior ( Hechter and Kanazawa 1997 ; Kroneberg and Kalter 2012 ), many others implicitly adopt it in their quantitative models of individual behavior.

Beyond Rational Choice

Sociologists have critiqued and extended the classical rational choice model in a number of ways. They have observed that people are not always selfish actors who behave in their own best interests ( England 1989 ; Margolis 1982 ), that preferences are not fixed characteristics of individuals ( Lindenberg and Frey 1993 ; Munch 1992 ), and that individuals do not always behave in ways that are purposive or optimal ( Somers 1989 ; Vaughan 1998 ). Most relevant to this article, sociologists have argued that the focus in classical rational choice on the individual as the primary unit of decision-making represents a fundamentally asocial representation of behavior. In moving beyond rational choice, theories of decision-making in sociology highlight the importance of social interactions and relationships in shaping behavior ( Pescosolido 1992 ; Emirbayer 1997 ). A large body of empirical work reveals how social context shapes people’s behavior across a wide range of domains, from neighborhood and school choice to decisions about friendship and intimacy to choices about eating, drinking, and other health-related behaviors ( Carrillo et al. 2016 ; Perna and Titus 2005 ; Small 2009 ; Pachucki et al. 2011 ; Rosenquist et al. 2010 ).

But This focus on social environments and social interactions has inevitably led to less attention being paid to the individual-level processes that underlie decision-making. In contrast, psychologists and decision theorists aiming to move beyond rational choice have focused their attention squarely on how individuals make decisions. In doing so, they have amassed several decades of work showing that the rational choice model is a poor representation of this process. 4 Their fundamental critique is that decision-making, as envisioned in the rational choice paradigm, would make overwhelming demands on our capacity to process information ( Bettman 1979 ; Miller 1956 ; Payne 1976 ). Decision-makers have limited time for learning about choice alternatives, limited working memory, and limited computational capabilities ( Miller 1956 ; Payne et al. 1993) As a result, they use heuristics that keep the information-processing demands of a task within the bounds of their limited cognitive capacity. 5 It is now widely recognized that the central process in human problem solving is to apply heuristics that carry out highly selective navigations of problem spaces ( Newell & Simon 1972 ).

However, in their efforts to zero in on the strategies people use to gather and process information, psychological studies of decision-making have focused largely on individuals in isolation. Thus, sociological and psychological perspectives on choice are complementary in that they each emphasize a feature of decision-making that the other field has left largely undeveloped. For this reason, and as we articulate further in the conclusion, we believe there is great potential for cross-fertilization between these areas of research. Because our central aim is to introduce sociologists to the JDM literature, we do not provide an exhaustive discussion of sociological work relevant to understanding decision processes. Rather, we highlight studies that illustrate the fruitful connections between sociological concerns and JDM research.

In the next sections, we discuss the role of different factors—cognitive, emotional, and contextual—in heuristic decision processes.

THE ROLE OF COGNITIVE FACTORS IN DECISION PROCESSES

There are two major challenges in processing decision-related information: first, each choice is typically characterized by multiple attributes, and no alternative is optimal on all dimensions; and, second, more than a tiny handful of information can overwhelm the cognitive capacity of decision makers ( Cowan 2010 ). Consider the problem of choosing among three competing job offers. Job 1 has high salary, but a moderate commuting time and a family-unfriendly workplace. Job 2 offers a low salary, but has a family-friendly workplace and short commuting time. Job 3 has a family-friendly workplace but a moderate salary and long commuting time. This choice would be easy if one alternative clearly dominated on all attributes. But, as is often the case, they all involve making tradeoffs and require the decision maker to weigh the relative importance of each attribute. Now imagine that, instead of three choices, there were ten, a hundred, or even a thousand potential alternatives. This illustrates the cognitive challenge faced by people trying to decide among neighborhoods, potential romantic partners, job opportunities, or health care plans.

We focus in this section on choices that involve deliberation, for example deciding where to live, what major to pursue in college, or what jobs to apply for. 6 (This is in contrast to decisions that are made more spontaneously, such as the choice to disclose personal information to a confidant [ Small & Sukhu 2016 ].) Commencing with the pioneering work of Howard & Sheth (1969) , scholars have accumulated substantial empirical evidence for the idea that such decisions are typically made sequentially , with each stage reducing the set of potential options ( Swait 1984 ; Roberts & Lattin 1991 , 1997 ). For a given individual, the set of potential options can first be divided into the set that he or she knows about, and those of which he or she is unaware. This “awareness set” is further divided into options the person would consider, and those that are irrelevant or unattainable. This smaller set is referred to as the consideration set , and the final decision is restricted to options within that set.

Research in consumer behavior suggests that the decision to include certain alternatives in the consideration set can be based on markedly different heuristics and criteria than the final choice decision (e.g., Payne 1976 ; Bettman & Park 1980 ; Salisbury & Feinberg 2012 ). In many cases, people use simple rules to restrict the energy involved in searching for options, or to eliminate options from future consideration. For example, a high school student applying to college may only consider schools within commuting distance of home, or schools where someone she knows has attended. Essentially, people favor less cognitively taxing rules that use a small number of choice attributes earlier in the decision process to eliminate almost all potential alternatives, but take into account a wider range of choice attributes when evaluating the few remaining alternatives for the final decision ( Liu & Dukes 2013 ).

Once the decision maker has narrowed down his or her options, the final choice decision may allow different dimensions of alternatives to be compensatory; in other words, a less attractive value on one attribute may be offset by a more attractive value on another attribute. However, a large body of decision research demonstrates that strategies to screen potential options for consideration are non-compensatory ; a decision-maker’s choice to eliminate from or include for consideration based on one attribute will not be compensated by the value of other attributes. In other words, compensatory decision rules are “continuous,” while non-compensatory decision rules are discontinuous or threshold ( Swait 2001 ; Gilbride & Allenby 2004 ).

Compensatory Decision Rules

The implicit decision rule used in statistical models of individual choice and the normative decision rule for rational choice is the weighted additive rule. Under this choice regime, decision-makers compute a weighted sum of all relevant attributes of potential alternatives. Choosers develop an overall assessment of each choice alternative by multiplying the attribute weight by the attribute level (for each salient attribute), and then sum over all attributes. This produces a single utility value for each alternative. The alternative with the highest value is selected, by assumption. Any conflict in values is assumed to be confronted and resolved by explicitly considering the extent to which one is willing to trade off attribute values, as reflected by the relative importance or beta coefficients ( Payne et al. 1993 , p. 24). Using this rule involves substantial computational effort and processing of information.

A simpler compensatory decision rule is the tallying rule, known to most of us as a “pro and con” list ( Alba & Marmorstein 1987 ). This strategy ignores information about the relative importance of each attribute. To implement this heuristic, a decision maker decides which attribute values are desirable or undesirable. Then she counts up the number desirable versus undesirable attributes. Strictly speaking, this rule forces people to make trade-offs among different attributes. However, it is less cognitively demanding than the weighted additive rule, as it does not require people to specify precise weights associated with each attribute. But both rules require people to examine all information for each alternative, determine the sums associated with each alternative, and compare those sums.

Non-Compensatory Decision Rules

Non-compensatory decision rules do not require decision makers to explicitly consider all salient attributes of an alternative, assign numeric weights to each attribute, or compute weighted sums in one’s head. Thus they are far less cognitively taxing than compensatory rules. The decision maker need only examine the attributes that define cutoffs in order to make a decision (to exclude options for a conjunctive rule, or to include them for a disjunctive one). The fewer attributes that are used to evaluate a choice alternative, the less taxing the rule will be.

Conjunctive rules require that an alternative must be acceptable on one or more salient attributes. For example, in the context of residential choice, a house that is unaffordable will never be chosen, no matter how attractive it is. Similarly, a man looking for romantic partners on an online dating website may only search for women who are within a 25-mile radius and do not have children. Potential partners who are unacceptable on either dimension are eliminated from consideration. So conjunctive screening rules identify “deal-breakers”; being acceptable on all dimensions is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for being chosen.

A disjunctive rule dictates that an alternative is considered if at least one of its attributes is acceptable to chooser i. For example, a sociology department hiring committee may always interview candidates with four or more American Journal of Sociology publications, regardless of their teaching record or quality of recommendations. Similarly (an especially evocative yet somewhat fanciful example), a disjunctive rule might occur for the stereotypical “gold-digger” or “gigolo,” who targets all potential mates with very high incomes regardless of their other qualities. Disjunctive heuristics are also known as “take-the-best” or “one good reason” heuristics that base their decision on a single overriding factor, ignoring all other attributes of decision outcomes ( Gigerenzer & Goldstein 1999 ; Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier 2011 ; Gigerenzer 2008 ).

While sociologists studying various forms of deliberative choice do not typically identify the decision rules used, a handful of empirical studies demonstrate that people do not consider all salient attributes of all potential choice alternatives. For example, Krysan and Bader (2009) find that white Chicago residents have pronounced neighborhood “blind spots” that essentially restrict their knowledge of the city to a small number of ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods. Daws and Brown (2002 Daws and Brown (2004) find that, when choosing a college, UK students’ awareness and choice sets differ systematically by socioeconomic status. Finally, in a recent study of online mate choice, Bruch and colleagues (2016) build on insights from marketing and decision research to develop a statistical model that allows for multistage decision processes with different (potentially noncompensatory) decision rules at each stage. They find that conjunctive screeners are common at the initial stage of online mate pursuit, and precise cutoffs differ by gender and other factors.

THE ROLE OF EMOTIONAL FACTORS IN DECISION PROCESSES

Early decision research emphasized the role of cognitive processes in decision-making (e.g., Newell & Simon 1972 ). But more recent work shows that emotions—not just strong emotions like anger and fear, but also “faint whispers of emotions” known as affect ( Slovic et al. 2004 , p. 312)—play an important role in decision-making. Decisions are cast with a certain valence, and this shapes the choice process on both conscious and unconscious levels. In other words, even seemingly deliberative decisions, like what school to attend or job to take, may be made not just through careful processing of information, but based on intuitive judgments of how a particular outcome feels ( Loewenstein & Lerner 2003 ; Lerner et al. 2015 ). This is true even in situations where there is numeric information about the likelihood of certain events ( Denes-Raj & Epstein 1994 ; Windschitl & Weber 1999 ; Slovic et al. 2000 ). This section focuses on two topics central to this area: first, that people dislike making emotional tradeoffs, and will go to great lengths to avoid them; and second, how emotional factors serve as direct inputs into decision processes. 7

Emotions Shape Strategies for Processing Information

In the previous section, we emphasized that compensatory decision rules that involve tradeoffs require a great deal of cognitive effort. But there are other reasons why people avoid making explicit tradeoffs on choice attributes. For one, some tradeoffs are more emotionally difficult than others, for example the decision whether to stay at home with one’s children or put them in day care. Some choices also involve attributes that are considered sacred or protected ( Baron & Spranca 1997 ). People prefer not to make these emotionally difficult tradeoffs, and that shapes decision strategy selection ( Hogarth 1991 ; Baron 1986 ; Baron & Spranca 1997 ). Experiments on these types of emotional decisions have shown that, when facing emotionally difficult decisions, decision-makers avoid compensatory evaluation and instead select the alternative that is most attractive on whatever dimension is difficult to trade off ( Luce et al. 2001 ; Luce et al. 1999 ). Thus, the emotional valence of specific options shapes decision strategies.

Emotions concerning the set of all choice alternatives—specifically, whether they are perceived as overall favorable or unfavorable—also affects strategy selection. Early work with rats suggests that decisions are relatively easy when choosing between two desirable options with no downsides ( Miller 1959 ). However, when deciding between options with both desirable and undesirable attributes, the choice becomes harder. When deciding between two undesirable options, the choice is hardest of all. Subsequent work reveals that this finding extends to human choice. For instance, people invoke different choice strategies when forced to choose “the lesser of two evils.” In their experiments on housing choice, Luce and colleagues (2000) found that when faced with a set of substandard options, people are far more likely to engage in “maximizing” behavior and select the alternative with the best value on whatever is perceived as the dominant substandard feature. In other words, having a suboptimal choice set reduces the likelihood of tradeoffs on multiple attributes. Extending this idea to a different sociological context, a woman confronted with a dating pool filled with what she perceives as arrogant men may focus her attention on selecting the least arrogant of the group.

Emotions as Information

Emotions also serve as direct inputs into the decision process. A large body of work on perceptions of risk shows that a key way people evaluate the risks and benefits of a given situation is through their emotional response ( Slovic et al. 2004 ; Slovic and Peters 2006 ; Loewenstein et al. 2001 ). In a foundational and generative study, Fischhoff et al. (1978) discovered that people’s perceptions of risks decline as perceived benefits increase. This is puzzling, because risks and benefits tend to be positively correlated. The authors also noted that the attribute most highly correlated with perceived risk was the extent to which the item in question evoked a feeling of dread. This finding has been confirmed in many other studies (e.g., McDaniels et al. 1997 ). Subsequent work also showed that this inverse relationship is linked to the strength of positive or negative affect associated with the stimulus. In other words, stronger negative responses led to perception of greater risk and lower benefits ( Alhakami & Slovic 1994 ; Slovic & Peters 2006 ).

This has led to a large body of work on the affect heuristic , which is grounded in the idea that people have positive and negative associations with different stimuli, and they consult this “affect pool” when making judgments. This shortcut is often more efficient and easier than cognitive strategies such as weighing pros and cons or even disjunctive rules for evaluating the relative merits of each choice outcome ( Slovic et al. 2004 ). Affect— particularly how it relates to decision-making—is rooted in dual process accounts of human behavior. The basic idea is that people experience the world in two different ways: one that is fast, intuitive, automatic, and unconscious, and another that is slow, analytical, deliberate, and verbal ( Evans 2008 ; Kahneman 2011 ). A defining characteristic of the intuitive, automatic system is its affective basis ( Epstein 1994 ). Indeed, affective reactions to stimuli are often the very first reactions people have. Having determined what is salient in a given situation, affect thus guides subsequent processes, such as information processing, that are central to cognition ( Zajonc 1980 ).

Over the past two decades, sociologists—particularly in the study of culture—have incorporated insights from dual process theory to understand how actions may be both deliberate and automatic (e.g., Vaisey 2009 ). Small and Sukhu (2016) argue that dual processes may play an important role in the mobilization of support networks. Kroneberg and Esser ( Kroneberg 2014 ; Esser and Kroneberg 2015 ) explore how automatic and deliberative processes shape how people select the “frame” for making sense of a particular situation. Although some scholars debate whether automatic and deliberative processes are more like polar extremes or a smooth spectrum (for an example of this critique within sociology, see Leschziner and Green 2013 ), the dual process model remains a useful framework for theorizing about behavior.

THE ROLE OF CONTEXTUAL FACTORS IN DECISION PROCESSES

Sociologists have long been interested in how social environments—for example, living in a poor neighborhood, attending an affluent school, or growing up in a single-parent household—shape life outcomes such as high school graduation, non-marital fertility, and career aspirations ( Sharkey and Faber 2014 ; Lee et al. 1993 ; Astone and McLanahan 1991 ). Social environments shape behavior directly through various forms of influence such as peer pressure and social learning, and indirectly by dictating what opportunities or social positions are available ( Blalock 1984 ; Manski 2000 ; Schelling 1971 ). But while the sociological literature on contextual effects is vast, the subset of that work which focuses on decisions emphasizes the causes or consequences of those decisions more than the processes through which they are made.

Decision researchers devote considerable attention to contextual effects, but typically “context” in this field refers to architectural features of choice environments such as the number of alternatives; whether time pressures limit the effort that can be put into a decision; and what option is emphasized as the default. (In the world, of course, these features are socially determined. But this is less emphasized in decision research, much of which occurs in a laboratory setting.) The overwhelming finding from these studies is that people’s choices are highly sensitive to context. This insight has led to an influential literature on the “Construction of Preferences” (see Sidebar) as well as a great deal of interest in policy interventions that manipulate features of choice environments ( Thaler and Sunstein 2008 ; Shafir 2013 ). Recently, decision researchers have begun to look at how decisions are shaped by more explicitly social environments such as poverty (e.g., Mullainathan and Shafir 2013 ). In this section, we discuss how four aspects of social context—what opportunities are available, the importance of the “default” option, time pressure and constrained resources, and the choices of others—shape decision processes.

Choice Sets and Defaults

A classic assumption of conventional choice models is that the ratio of choice probabilities for any two options is independent of what other options are available ( Luce 1959 ). (In the literature on statistical models of choice, this is known as the principle of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives [IIA].) But it is well established that people’s choices depend heavily on the relative merits of a particular set of options rather than their absolute values ( Tversky & Simonson 1993 ). For example, people tend to avoid more extreme values in alternatives (the “compromise effect”); thus, adding a new option to the mix can lead choosers to shift their views about what constitutes a reasonable choice ( Simonson 1989 ; Simonson & Tversky 1992 ). In a similar vein, a robust finding is that adding a new “asymmetrically dominated” alternative – one dominated by some items in the set but not by others – can actually increase the choice probabilities of the items that dominate it. Such a “decoy effect” ( Huber et al. 1982 ) should be impossible under IIA, and in fact violates regularity (i.e., new items cannot increase probabilities of existing ones). Both of these effects have been attributed to the fact that people making choices are trying to justify them based on reasons ( Simonson 1989 ; Dhar et al. 2000 ); changing the distribution of options may alter how compelling a particular reason might be.

Choice outcomes are also highly influenced by what option is identified as the “default.” Defaults are whatever happens in a decision if the chooser “decides not to decide” ( Feinberg & Huber 1996 ). Defaults exert a strong effect on people’s choices, even when the stakes of the decision are high ( Johnson et al. 1993 ; Johnson & Goldstein 2013 ). Defaults also tap into other, well-established features of human decision making: procrastination, bias for the status quo, and inertial behavior ( Samuelson & Zeckhauser 1988 ; Kahneman et al. 1991 ). In recent years, manipulating the default option—for example making retirement savings or organ donation something people opt out of rather than opt into—has been identified as a potentially low cost, highly impact policy intervention ( Shafir 2013 ). Defaults are also of potentially great sociological interest. A number of sociological studies have theorized about how people “drift” into particular outcomes or situations (e.g., Matza 1967 ); defaults exist in part because choices are embedded in specific environments that emphasize one set of options over others. 8

Scarcity and Social Influence

A number of recent studies examine how conditions of scarcity— with regard to time, resources, and energy—shape decision-making. Consistent with studies of cognitive effort and decision-making, a variety of experimental results demonstrate that time pressure reduces people’s tendency to make tradeoffs ( Wright & Weitz 1977 ; Edland 1989 ; Rieskamp & Hoffrage 2008 ). This finding is especially interesting in light of recent line of work by Shah et al. (2015) , who show via experiments that resource scarcity forces people to make tradeoffs, e.g., “If I buy dessert, I can’t afford to take the bus home.” Weighing tradeoffs is cognitively costly; they deplete people’s resources for other decision tasks, which overall reduces their ability to engage in deliberative decision-making ( Pocheptsova et al. 2009 ). Given the fact that people living in conditions of extreme scarcity are typically limited in both time and financial resources, a cognitive perspective suggests that they are “doubly taxed” in terms of cognitive effort, and offers important insights in understanding how conditions of poverty shape, and are shaped by, people’s choices ( Bertrand et al. 2004 ). In short, the context of poverty depletes people’s cognitive resources in an environment where mistakes are costly ( Mullainathan & Shafir 2013 , Gennetian & Shafir 2015 ).

There are also a small number of studies that examine how the actions of other people influence decision processes. They focus on the role of descriptive norms ( Cialdini 2003 ; Cialdini & Goldstein 2004 ), which are information about what other people are doing. The key finding is that people are more likely to adopt a particular behavior—such as conserving energy in one’s home or avoiding changing sheets and towels at a hotel—if they learn that others are doing the same ( Goldstein et al. 2008 ; Nolan et al. 2008 ). The more similar the comparison situation is to one’s own, the more powerful the effect of others’ behavior on one’s own. For instance, people are more likely to be influenced if the descriptive norm references their neighbors or others who share social spaces ( Schultz et al. 2007 ). The finding that descriptive norms are most powerful when they are immediate is reinforced by a study of charitable giving, which shows that people’s behavior is disproportionately influenced by information about what others have given, especially the most recent, non-specified donor ( Shang & Croson 2009 ).

This work on social influence is consistent with a classic literature in sociology that emphasizes how people’s beliefs about the sort of situation they are in shape their behavior (e.g., Thomas & Znaniecki 1918 ; Goffman 1974 ). Social cues provide information about what choices are consistent with desired or appropriate behavior. For example, a classic study demonstrates that whether a Prisoner’s dilemma game was presented to research subjects as a simulated “Wall Street” or “Community” shaped subsequent playing decisions ( Liberman et al. 2004 ; Camerer & Thaler 1993 ). In other words, there is an interpretive component to decision-making that informs one’s views about the kind of response that is appropriate.

STUDYING DECISION PROCESSES

Psychologists have devised a number of techniques to shed light on human decision processes in conjunction with targeted stimuli. Process tracing is a venerated suite of methods broadly aimed at extracting how people go about acquiring, integrating, and evaluating information, as well as physiological, neurological, and concomitants of cognitive processes ( Svenson 1979 ; Schulte-Mecklenbeck et al. 2010 ). (Note that this approach is quite different from what political scientists and sociologists typically refer to as process tracing [ Mahoney 2012 ; Collier 2011 ].) In a classic study, Lohse & Johnson (1996) examine individual-level information acquisition using both computerized tracing and eye-tracking across multiple process measures (e.g., total time, number of fixations, accuracy, etc.)

More recently, the use of unobtrusive eye-trackers has allowed researchers to discern which information is being sought and assimilated in the sort of stimuli-rich environments that typify online interactions, without querying respondents’ knowledge or intermediate goals ( Duchowski 2007 , Wedel & Pieters 2008 ). Also, it has recently become possible to use neuroimaging techniques like PET, EEG, and fMRI ( Yoon et al. 2006 ) to observe decision processes in vivo , although at a high cost of invasiveness. Such studies offer the benefit of sidestepping questions about, for example, the emotional reactions experienced by decision-makers, by observing which portions of the brain are active when information is being accessed and processed, as well as final decisions arrived at.

Stated and Revealed Preferences

While not directly focused on the process of decision-making (i.e., in terms of identifying decision strategies), a large literature assumes a linear compensatory model and aims to capture the weights people ascribe to different choice attributes (see Louviere et al. 1999 for a broad overview; also Train 2009 ). These methods, long known to social scientists ( Samuelson 1948 ; Manski and McFadden 1981 ; Bruch and Mare 2012 ), rely on both field data—where the analyst records decision-makers’ “revealed preferences” as reflected in their actions—and choice experiments, where analysts enact control over key elements of the decision environment through vignettes. Stated choice experiments have two advantages that are relevant in modeling choice processes: their ability to (1) present decision-makers with options unavailable in practice or outside their usual purview; and (2) record multiple (hypothetical) choices for each decision-maker, even for scenarios like mate choice or home purchase that are made few times in a lifespan. The downside is that they are difficult to fully contextualize or make incentive-compatible; for example, experiment participants are routinely more willing to spend simulated experimental money than their own hard-won cash ( Carlsson & Martinsson 2001 ).

Among the main statistical methods for enacting choice experiments is conjoint analysis ( Green and Srinivasan 1978 , Green et al. 2001 ), a broad suite of techniques, implemented widely in dedicated software (e.g., Sawtooth), to measure stated preferences and how they vary across a target population. Conjoint works by decomposing options into their attributes , each of which can have several levels. For example, housing options each provide cooking facilities, sleeping quarters, bathrooms, among other attributes, and each of these varies in terms of their quality levels (e.g., larger vs. smaller; number overall; and categorical attributes like type of heating, color, location, etc.) The goal of conjoint is to assign a utility or part-worth to each level of each attribute, with higher numbers representing more preferred attribute levels; for example, one might say that, for families with several children, a home with four bedrooms has a much higher utility than one with two. Conjoint approaches can be—and have been ( Wittink & Cattin 1989 ; Wittink et al. 1994 )—applied to a wide range of settings where it is useful to measure the importance of specific choice attributes.

Field data such as residential, work, or relationship histories have the advantage of reflecting actual choices made in real contexts ( Louviere et al. 1999 ). However, such data suffer from several drawbacks: (1) variables necessarily covary (i.e., higher neighborhood prices correlate with levels of many attributes at once); (2) we cannot infer how people would respond to possible novel options, like affordable, diverse neighborhoods that may not yet exist; and (3) each person typically makes just one choice. Such problems are exacerbated when researchers cannot in principle know the entire “consideration set” of options available and actively mulled over by each decision-maker, which is typically the case in sociological applications. 9 When such confounds are present in field data, conjoint and other experimental methods allow researchers to control and “orthogonalize” the attributes and levels used in choice experiments, to achieve maximal efficiency and avoid presenting each participant with more than a couple of dozen hypothetical choice scenarios ( Chrzan & Orme 2000 ). 10

Two other choice assessment methods deserve brief mention, as they leverage some of the best features of experimental and field research: natural experiments and field experiments. In a natural experiment, an event exogenous to the outcome of interest affects only certain individuals, or affects different individuals to varying degrees. One example is the effect of natural disasters, like the 2005 flooding of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, on migration decisions (Kirk 2009). In field experiments, researchers exert control over focal aspects of people’s choice environments. Although it may seem difficult to study sociologically relevant choice processes this way, the use of web sites as search tools enables a nontrivial degree of experimental control over choice environments (see, for example, Bapna et al. 2016).

Statistical Models of Choice Processes

The bedrock formulation of statistical analyses of choice is the random utility model , which posits that each option available to a decision-maker affords a certain value (“utility”), which can be decomposed into that explicable by the analyst and a (“random”) error ( Ben-Akiva & Lerman 1985 ; Train 2009 ). 11 The former can be related through regression-based techniques to other observed covariates on the options, decision-maker, and environment, whereas the latter can be due to systematically unavailable information (e.g., income or education) or intrinsic unobservables (e.g., the mood of the decision-maker). Of particular importance is McFadden’s conditional logit model ( McFadden 1973 ), 12 which allows attributes of options to vary across choice occasions (e.g., prices or waiting times for different transportation modes; neighborhoods or room sizes for renting vs. buying a home; etc.) Because this model is supported in much commercial statistical software, and converges rapidly even for large data sets, it is by far the most widely deployed in choice applications.

Statistical models of choice have been grounded primarily in rational utility theory, with concessions towards efficient estimation. As such, the utility specifications underlying such models have tended to be linear, to include all available options, and incorporate full information on those options. Much research reveals not only the psychological process accuracy, but the statistical superiority, of relaxing these assumptions by incorporating limits on information, cognitive penalties, and nonlinear/noncompensatory utility. For example, the formal incorporation of consideration sets into choice modeling ( Horowitz, & Louviere 1995 ; Louviere, Hensher, & Swait 2000 , section 10.3) has demonstrated superior fit and predictive accuracy for explicit models of exclusion of certain options from detailed processing, with some analyses (see Hauser & Wernerfelt 1990 ) attributing in excess of 75% of the choice model’s fit to such restrictions. Similarly, lab studies have confirmed that decision-makers wish to conserve cognitive resources, and formal statistical models (e.g., Shugan 1980 , Roberts & Lattin 1991 ) have attempted to account for and measure a “cost of thinking” or consideration from real-world data.

However, despite a decades-deep literature on noncompensatory evaluation processes ( Einhorn 1970 ), the practical estimation of such models is largely in its infancy, due to complexities of specification and data needs (e.g., Elrod et al. 2004 ). Although nonlinearity can be captured using polynomial functions of covariates, these impose smoothness of response; by contrast, conjunctive and disjunctive processes impose cutoffs beyond which evaluation is either wholly positive or insurmountably negative ( Bruch et al. , 2016 ). We view the development of this area as critical to the widespread acceptance of formal choice models to social scientists and sociologists in particular, who typically wish to know which neighborhoods we would never live in, jobs we would never take, etc.

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Sociology has long been interested in individuals’ choices and their implications for social life, and there is renewed interest in theories that can explain human action (e.g., Kroneberg 2014 ; Gross 2009 ). Our hope is that this review enables interested scholars to pursue a more nuanced and structurally accurate representation of the choice process. Greater insight into human behavior will also allow for greater insights into the dynamic relationship between micro- and meso-level processes and their larger-scale implications ( Hedstrom and Bearman 2009 ). Consider how choice sets are constructed in the first place. People may rule out certain options due to preferences, affordability and/or time constraints—classic cognitive, temporal, and economic variables—but also the anticipation of unfair treatment or discrimination. For example, a high school student searching for colleges may eliminate those that are too expensive, too far from home, or are perceived as unwelcoming. Identifying the criteria through which people rule themselves (or others) out can illuminate more precise mechanisms through which people’s actions shape, and are shaped by, larger-scale inequality structures.

We also believe that many of the data limitations that hampered sociologists’ ability to study decision processes in the past are becoming far less of an issue. This is due at least in part to increasingly available data sources that can aid sociologists in studying choice processes. These so-called “big data” are often behavioral data: specific actions taken by individuals that can shed light on processes of information search, assimilation, and choice. Moreover, the online environments through which we increasingly communicate and interact enable not only observational “field” data, but also targeted, unobtrusive experiments where the decision environment is directly altered. The latter possibility offers greater precision than ever before in isolating both idiosyncratic and potentially universal features of behavior, as well as better understanding the interplay between context and human action.

However, existing approaches from marketing and psychology are often not suited to sociological inquiry directly out of the box, creating both challenges and opportunities for future work. For example, most extant models were designed to capture more prosaic decisions, like supermarket shopping, where attributes are known, options are stable, and “stakes” are modest. Although some choices of sociological interest may fit this pattern, most do not. For example, many pivotal life decisions—purchasing a home (where sellers and buyers must agree on terms); college admissions; dating and marriage decisions; employment offers—require a partnership , wherein each decision maker must “choose you back.” Sociologists must therefore be circumspect in applying models developed for choice among “inert” options (such as flavors of yogurt) to the data they most commonly analyze.

The fact that so many sociological choices are characterized by obscurity (i.e., there is no obvious or single optimal choice to be made) is also a good reason to proceed with caution in applying ideas from JDM to sociological research. Take, for example, the literature discussed earlier on interventions that manipulate people’s default option. It is one thing to encourage healthier eating by putting apples before chocolate cake in the cafeteria line; it is quite another to nudge someone towards a particular neighborhood or school. Sociologists rarely have a clear sense of what choice will be optimal for a group of people, let alone particular individuals. On the other hand, few would argue that growing up surrounded by violence isn’t universally harmful (Harding 2009; Sharkey et al. 2013). Policies can only be improved by a more nuanced understanding of how choices unfold in particular environments, and how the default options are shaped by contextual factors.

Thus, this challenge also creates the opportunity to build knowledge on how heuristics operate under conditions of obscurity. JDM research has largely focused on documenting whether and how heuristics fall short of some correct or optimal answer. In sociology, by contrast, we typically lack a defensible metric for the “suboptimality” of decisions. While some decisions may be worse than others, it is impossible to know, for example, whether one has chosen the “right” spouse or peer group, or how to set up appropriate counterfactual scenarios as yardsticks against which specific decisions could be dispassionately assessed. By branching into decision domains where the quality or optimality of outcomes cannot be easily quantified (or in some cases even coherently conceptualized), sociologists can not only actively extend the range of applications of decision research, but also break new theoretical ground.

SIDEBAR 1: THE CONSTRUCTION OF PREFERENCES

Decision researchers have amassed several lines of evidence to suggest that, rather than being stable constructs that are retrieved on demand, preferences are constructed in the moment of elicitation ( Lichtenstein & Slovic 2006 ; Bettman, Luce, and Payne 1998 ). This finding is echoed in studies of judgments and attitudes, which are also sensitive to contextual cues ( Ross and Nisbett 1991 ; Schwarz 1999 , 2007 ). Preference variation can be generated from simple anchors or changes in question wording (e.g., Mandel & Johnson 2002 ). A classic finding is that people exhibit preference reversals when making multiattribute choices; in one context they indicate a preference of A over B, but in another context they indicate they prefer B over A (e.g., Cox & Grether 1996 ; Seidl 2002 ). Several theories have been put forward to explain this effect (see Lichtenstein & Slovic 2006 , Chapter 1 for a review and synthesis). One explanation is that people’s preferences, attitudes, judgments reflect what comes to mind; and what is salient at one time point may not be salient at another ( Higgins 1996 ; Schwarz, Strack, and Mai 1991 ).

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Scott Rick Mario Small, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful feedback on this manuscript. This work was supported by a training grant (K01-HD-079554) from the National Institute of Child and Human Developent

1 A notable exception is Herb Simon’s concept of “satisficing,” which many influential sociological works—especially in the subfield of economic sociology—have incorporated into models of action and behavior (e.g., Baker 1984 ; Granovetter 1985 ; Uzzi 1997 ; Beckert 1996 ).

2 Although rational choice has had a strong influence sociological research—for example, Coleman’s (1994) Foundations of Social Theory has almost 30,000 citations and there is a journal, Rationality and Society , devoted to related topics—this framework never overtook the discipline as it did economics.

3 While this is accurate as a broad characterization, there are studies that examine decision-making “in the wild” through observation or field experiments (e.g., Camerer 2004 ; Barberis 2013 ).

4 The best-known critique of the rational choice model within JDM comes from the “Heuristics and Biases” school of research (Tversky 1972; Kahneman & Tversky 1979 ; Tversky & Kahneman 1981 ). Their studies show that decision makers: (1) have trouble processing information; (2) use decision-making heuristics that do not maximize preferences; (3) are sensitive to context and process; and (4) systematically misperceive features of their environment. Since then, a large body of work provides convincing evidence that individuals are “limited information processing systems” ( Newell & Simon 1972 ; Kahneman 2003 ).

5 Heuristics are “problem-solving methods that tend to produce efficient solutions to difficult problems by restricting the search through the space of possible solutions, on the basis of some evaluation of the structure of the problem” ( Braunstein 1972 , p. 520).

6 The decision strategies presented in this section are sometimes known as “reasons” heuristics (c.f., Gigerenzer 2004 ) because they are the reasons people give for why they chose the way that they did. As such, they are less applicable in situations where people have few if any options. For example, a person evicted from their home may have a single alternative to homelessness: staying with a family member. In this case, the difficulty of the decision is not information processing.

7 There is a rich literature in sociology on how emotions are inputs to and outcomes of social processes (e.g., Hochschild 1975; Scheff 1988 ). While this work has not historically been integrated with psychology ( Turner and Stets 2014 , p. 2), this may be a fruitful direction for future research.

8 We are grateful for conversations with Rob Sampson and Mario Small that led to this insight.

9 Newer online data sources—for example, websites for housing search and dating—generate highly granular, intermediate data on consideration sets. This parallels a revolution that occurred among choice modelers in marketing 30 years ago: the introduction of in-store product code scanners and household panels whose longitudinal histories provided information not only on which options were eventually chosen, but also which were actually available at the time of purchase, but rejected.

10 A review of the vast choice experiment design literature is beyond the scope of this article, but turnkey solutions for designing, deploying, and estimating discrete choice models for online panels are commercially available (e.g., Sawtooth Software’s “Discover”).

11 There is an enormous literature on the analysis of discrete choice data—items chosen from a known array with recorded attributes. Our treatment here is necessarily brief and highly selective. For more comprehensive introductions to this topic, we refer the reader to the many treatments available (e.g., Ben-Akiva & Lerman 1985 , Hensher et al. 2005 , Louviere et al. 2000 , Train 2009 ).

12 Empirical work typically refers to this as the multinomial logit model, although economists often distinguish the latter as applicable to when attributes change for the decision-maker (e.g., age, income), not the options themselves.

Contributor Information

Elizabeth Bruch, Department of Sociology and Complex Systems.

Fred Feinberg, Ross School of Business and Statistics.

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Social Psychology: Definition, Theories, Scope, & Examples

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, intentions, and goals are constructed within a social context by the actual or imagined interactions with others.

It, therefore, looks at human behavior as influenced by other people and the conditions under which social behavior and feelings occur.

Baron, Byrne, and Suls (1989) define social psychology as “the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations” (p. 6).

Topics examined in social psychology include the self-concept , social cognition, attribution theory , social influence, group processes, prejudice and discrimination , interpersonal processes, aggression, attitudes , and stereotypes .

Social psychology operates on several foundational assumptions. These fundamental beliefs provide a framework for theories, research, and interpretations.

• Individual and Society Interplay : Social psychologists assume an interplay exists between individual minds and the broader social context. An individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are continuously shaped by social interactions, and in turn, individuals influence the societies they are a part of.
• Behavior is Contextual : One core assumption is that behavior can vary significantly based on the situation or context. While personal traits and dispositions matter, the circumstances or social environment often play a decisive role in determining behavior.
• Objective Reality is Difficult to Attain : Our perceptions of reality are influenced by personal beliefs, societal norms, and past experiences. Therefore, our understanding of “reality” is subjective and can be biased or distorted.
• Social Reality is Constructed : Social psychologists believe that individuals actively construct their social world . Through processes like social categorization, attribution, and cognitive biases, people create their understanding of others and societal norms.
• People are Social Beings with a Need to Belong : A fundamental assumption is the inherent social nature of humans. People have an innate need to connect with others, form relationships, and belong to groups. This need influences a wide range of behaviors and emotions.
• Attitudes Influence Behavior : While this might seem straightforward, it’s a foundational belief that our attitudes (combinations of beliefs and feelings) can and often do drive our actions. However, it’s also understood that this relationship can be complex and bidirectional.
• People Desire Cognitive Consistency : This is the belief that people are motivated to maintain consistency in their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Cognitive dissonance theory , which posits that people feel discomfort when holding conflicting beliefs and are motivated to resolve this, is based on this assumption.
• People are Motivated to See Themselves in a Positive Light : The self plays a central role in social psychology. It’s assumed that individuals are generally motivated to maintain and enhance a positive self-view.
• Behavior Can be Predicted and Understood : An underlying assumption of any science, including social psychology, is that phenomena (in this case, human behavior in social contexts) can be studied, understood, predicted, and potentially influenced.
• Cultural and Biological Factors are Integral : Though earlier social psychology might have been criticized for neglecting these factors, contemporary social psychology acknowledges the roles of both biology (genes, hormones, brain processes) and culture (norms, values, traditions) in shaping social behavior.

Early Influences

Aristotle believed that humans were naturally sociable, a necessity that allows us to live together (an individual-centered approach), whilst Plato felt that the state controlled the individual and encouraged social responsibility through social context (a socio-centered approach).

Hegel (1770–1831) introduced the concept that society has inevitable links with the development of the social mind. This led to the idea of a group mind, which is important in the study of social psychology.

Lazarus & Steinthal wrote about Anglo-European influences in 1860. “Volkerpsychologie” emerged, which focused on the idea of a collective mind.

It emphasized the notion that personality develops because of cultural and community influences, especially through language, which is both a social product of the community as well as a means of encouraging particular social thought in the individual. Therefore Wundt (1900–1920) encouraged the methodological study of language and its influence on the social being.

Early Texts

Texts focusing on social psychology first emerged in the 20th century. McDougall published the first notable book in English in 1908 (An Introduction to Social Psychology), which included chapters on emotion and sentiment, morality, character, and religion, quite different from those incorporated in the field today.

He believed social behavior was innate/instinctive and, therefore, individual, hence his choice of topics.  This belief is not the principle upheld in modern social psychology, however.

Allport’s work (1924) underpins current thinking to a greater degree, as he acknowledged that social behavior results from interactions between people.

He also took a methodological approach, discussing actual research and emphasizing that the field was a “science … which studies the behavior of the individual in so far as his behavior stimulates other individuals, or is itself a reaction to this behavior” (1942: p. 12).

His book also dealt with topics still evident today, such as emotion, conformity, and the effects of an audience on others.

Murchison (1935) published The first handbook on social psychology was published by Murchison in 1935.  Murphy & Murphy (1931/37) produced a book summarizing the findings of 1,000 studies in social psychology.  A text by Klineberg (1940) looked at the interaction between social context and personality development. By the 1950s, several texts were available on the subject.

Journal Development

• 1950s – Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology

• 1963 – Journal of Personality, British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology

• 1965 – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

• 1971 – Journal of Applied Social Psychology, European Journal of Social Psychology

• 1975 – Social Psychology Quarterly, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

• 1982 – Social Cognition

• 1984 – Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Early Experiments

There is some disagreement about the first true experiment, but the following are certainly among some of the most important.

Triplett (1898) applied the experimental method to investigate the performance of cyclists and schoolchildren on how the presence of others influences overall performance – thus, how individuals are affected and behave in the social context.

By 1935, the study of social norms had developed, looking at how individuals behave according to the rules of society. This was conducted by Sherif (1935).

Lewin et al. then began experimental research into leadership and group processes by 1939, looking at effective work ethics under different leadership styles.

Later Developments

Much of the key research in social psychology developed following World War II, when people became interested in the behavior of individuals when grouped together and in social situations. Key studies were carried out in several areas.

Some studies focused on how attitudes are formed, changed by the social context, and measured to ascertain whether a change has occurred.

Amongst some of the most famous works in social psychology is that on obedience conducted by Milgram in his “electric shock” study, which looked at the role an authority figure plays in shaping behavior.  Similarly,  Zimbardo’s prison simulation notably demonstrated conformity to given roles in the social world.

Wider topics then began to emerge, such as social perception, aggression, relationships, decision-making, pro-social behavior, and attribution, many of which are central to today’s topics and will be discussed throughout this website.

Thus, the growth years of social psychology occurred during the decades following the 1940s.

The scope of social psychology is vast, reflecting the myriad ways social factors intertwine with individual cognition and behavior.

Its principles and findings resonate in virtually every area of human interaction, making it a vital field for understanding and improving the human experience.

• Interpersonal Relationships : This covers attraction, love, jealousy, friendship, and group dynamics. Understanding how and why relationships form and the factors that contribute to their maintenance or dissolution is central to this domain.
• Attitude Formation and Change : How do individuals form opinions and attitudes? What methods can effectively change them? This scope includes the study of persuasion, propaganda, and cognitive dissonance.
• Social Cognition : This examines how people process, store, and apply information about others. Areas include social perception, heuristics, stereotypes, and attribution theories.
• Social Influence : The study of conformity, compliance, obedience, and the myriad ways individuals influence one another falls within this domain.
• Group Dynamics : This entails studying group behavior, intergroup relations, group decision-making processes, leadership, and more. Concepts like groupthink and group polarization emerge from this area.
• Prejudice and Discrimination : Understanding the roots of bias, racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice, as well as exploring interventions to reduce them, is a significant focus.
• Self and Identity : Investigating self-concept, self-esteem, self-presentation, and the social construction of identity are all part of this realm.
• Prosocial Behavior and Altruism : Why do individuals sometimes help others, even at a cost to themselves? This area delves into the motivations and conditions that foster cooperative and altruistic behavior.
• Aggression : From understanding the underlying causes of aggressive behavior to studying societal factors that exacerbate or mitigate aggression, this topic seeks to dissect the nature of hostile actions.
• Cultural and Cross-cultural Dimensions : As societies become more interconnected, understanding cultural influences on behavior, cognition, and emotion is crucial. This area compares and contrasts behaviors across different cultures and societal groups.
• Environmental and Applied Settings : Social psychology principles find application in health psychology, environmental behavior, organizational behavior, consumer behavior, and more.
• Social Issues : Social psychologists might study the impact of societal structures on individual behavior, exploring topics like poverty, urban stress, and crime.
• Education : Principles of social psychology enhance teaching methods, address issues of classroom dynamics, and promote effective learning.
• Media and Technology : In the digital age, understanding the effects of media consumption, the dynamics of online communication, and the formation of online communities is increasingly relevant.
• Law : Insights from social psychology inform areas such as jury decision-making, eyewitness testimony, and legal procedures.
• Health : Concepts from social psychology are employed to promote health behaviors, understand doctor-patient dynamics, and tackle issues like addiction.

Example Theories

Allport (1920) – social facilitation.

Allport introduced the notion that the presence of others (the social group) can facilitate certain behavior.

It was found that an audience would improve an actor’s performance in well-learned/easy tasks but leads to a decrease in performance on newly learned/difficult tasks due to social inhibition.

Bandura (1963) Social Learning Theory

Bandura introduced the notion that behavior in the social world could be modeled. Three groups of children watched a video where an adult was aggressive towards a ‘bobo doll,’ and the adult was either just seen to be doing this, was rewarded by another adult for their behavior, or was punished for it.

Children who had seen the adult rewarded were found to be more likely to copy such behavior.

Festinger (1950) –  Cognitive Dissonance

Festinger, Schacter, and Black brought up the idea that when we hold beliefs, attitudes, or cognitions which are different, then we experience dissonance – this is an inconsistency that causes discomfort.

We are motivated to reduce this by either changing one of our thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes or selectively attending to information that supports one of our beliefs and ignores the other (selective exposure hypothesis).

Dissonance occurs when there are difficult choices or decisions or when people participate in behavior that is contrary to their attitude. Dissonance is thus brought about by effort justification (when aiming to reach a modest goal), induced compliance (when people are forced to comply contrary to their attitude), and free choice (when weighing up decisions).

Tajfel (1971) –  Social Identity Theory

When divided into artificial (minimal) groups, prejudice results simply from the awareness that there is an “out-group” (the other group).

When the boys were asked to allocate points to others (which might be converted into rewards) who were either part of their own group or the out-group, they displayed a strong in-group preference. That is, they allocated more points on the set task to boys who they believed to be in the same group as themselves.

This can be accounted for by Tajfel & Turner’s social identity theory, which states that individuals need to maintain a positive sense of personal and social identity: this is partly achieved by emphasizing the desirability of one’s own group, focusing on distinctions between other “lesser” groups.

Weiner (1986) – Attribution Theory

Weiner was interested in the attributions made for experiences of success and failure and introduced the idea that we look for explanations of behavior in the social world.

He believed that these were made based on three areas: locus, which could be internal or external; stability, which is whether the cause is stable or changes over time: and controllability.

Milgram (1963) – Shock Experiment

Participants were told that they were taking part in a study on learning but always acted as the teacher when they were then responsible for going over paired associate learning tasks.

When the learner (a stooge) got the answer wrong, they were told by a scientist that they had to deliver an electric shock. This did not actually happen, although the participant was unaware of this as they had themselves a sample (real!) shock at the start of the experiment.

They were encouraged to increase the voltage given after each incorrect answer up to a maximum voltage, and it was found that all participants gave shocks up to 300v, with 65 percent reaching the highest level of 450v.

It seems that obedience is most likely to occur in an unfamiliar environment and in the presence of an authority figure, especially when covert pressure is put upon people to obey. It is also possible that it occurs because the participant felt that someone other than themselves was responsible for their actions.

Haney, Banks, Zimbardo (1973) – Stanford Prison Experiment

Volunteers took part in a simulation where they were randomly assigned the role of a prisoner or guard and taken to a converted university basement resembling a prison environment. There was some basic loss of rights for the prisoners, who were unexpectedly arrested, and given a uniform and an identification number (they were therefore deindividuated).

The study showed that conformity to social roles occurred as part of the social interaction, as both groups displayed more negative emotions, and hostility and dehumanization became apparent.

Prisoners became passive, whilst the guards assumed an active, brutal, and dominant role. Although normative and informational social influence played a role here, deindividuation/the loss of a sense of identity seemed most likely to lead to conformity.

Both this and Milgram’s study introduced the notion of social influence and the ways in which this could be observed/tested.

Provides Clear Predictions

As a scientific discipline, social psychology prioritizes formulating clear and testable hypotheses. This clarity facilitates empirical testing, ensuring the field’s findings are based on observable and quantifiable phenomena.

The Asch conformity experiments hypothesized that individuals would conform to a group’s incorrect judgment.

The clear prediction allowed for controlled experimentation to determine the extent and conditions of such conformity.

Emphasizes Objective Measurement

Social psychology leans heavily on empirical methods, emphasizing objectivity. This means that results are less influenced by biases or subjective interpretations.

Double-blind procedures , controlled settings, and standardized measures in many social psychology experiments ensure that results are replicable and less prone to experimenter bias.

Empirical Evidence

Over the years, a multitude of experiments in social psychology have bolstered the credibility of its theories. This experimental validation lends weight to its findings and claims.

The robust body of experimental evidence supporting cognitive dissonance theory, from Festinger’s initial studies to more recent replications, showcases the theory’s enduring strength and relevance.

Limitations

Underestimates individual differences.

While social psychology often looks at broad trends and general behaviors, it can sometimes gloss over individual differences.

Not everyone conforms, obeys, or reacts in the same way, and these nuanced differences can be critical.

While Milgram’s obedience experiments showcased a startling rate of compliance to authority, there were still participants who resisted, and their reasons and characteristics are equally important to understand.

Ignores Biology

While social psychology focuses on the social environment’s impact on behavior, early theories sometimes neglect the biological underpinnings that play a role.

Hormones, genetics, and neurological factors can influence behavior and might intersect with social factors in complex ways.

The role of testosterone in aggressive behavior is a clear instance where biology intersects with the social. Ignoring such biological components can lead to an incomplete understanding.

Superficial Snapshots of Social Processes

Social psychology sometimes offers a narrow view, capturing only a momentary slice of a broader, evolving process. This might mean that the field fails to capture the depth, evolution, or intricacies of social processes over time.

A study might capture attitudes towards a social issue at a single point in time, but not account for the historical evolution, future shifts, or deeper societal underpinnings of those attitudes.

Allport, F. H. (1920). The influence of the group upon association and thought. Journal of Experimental Psychology , 3(3), 159.

Allport, F. H. (1924). Response to social stimulation in the group. Social psychology , 260-291.

Allport, F. H. (1942). Methods in the study of collective action phenomena. The Journal of Social Psychology , 15(1), 165-185.

Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1963). Vicarious reinforcement and imitative learning. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67(6), 601.

Baron, R. A., Byrne, D., & Suls, J. (1989). Attitudes: Evaluating the social world. Baron et al, Social Psychology . 3rd edn. MA: Allyn and Bacon, 79-101.

Festinger, L., Schachter, S., & Back, K. (1950). Social processes in informal groups .

Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). Study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. Naval Research Reviews , 9(1-17).

Klineberg, O. (1940). The problem of personality .

Krewer, B., & Jahoda, G. (1860). On the scope of Lazarus and Steinthals “Völkerpsychologie” as reflected in the. Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 1890, 4-12.

Lewin, K., Lippitt, R., & White, R. K. (1939). Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created “social climates”. The Journal of Social Psychology , 10(2), 269-299.

Mcdougall, W. (1908). An introduction to social psychology . Londres: Methuen.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67(4), 371.

Murchison, C. (1935). A handbook of social psychology .

Murphy, G., & Murphy, L. B. (1931). Experimental social psychology .

Sherif, M. (1935). A study of some social factors in perception. Archives of Psychology (Columbia University).

Tajfel, H., Billig, M. G., Bundy, R. P., & Flament, C. (1971). Social categorization and intergroup behavior. European journal of social psychology , 1(2), 149-178.

Triplett, N. (1898). The dynamogenic factors in pacemaking and competition. American journal of Psychology , 9(4), 507-533.

Weiner, B. (1986). An attributional theory of motivation and emotion . New York: Springer-Verlag.

All Subjects

Social context

The immediate physical and social environment in which individuals interact with others. It includes cultural norms, societal expectations, social roles, and relationships.

Related terms

Social norms : Implicit or explicit rules about acceptable behaviors within a particular group or society.

Conformity : Adjusting one's attitudes or behaviors to match those of a group, often due to social pressure.

Socialization : The lifelong process through which individuals learn and internalize the values, beliefs, and norms of their society.

" Social context " appears in:

Subjects ( 37 ).

• Advanced Communication Research Methods
• Advanced Visual Storytelling
• Art Theory and Criticism
• Art and Technology
• Bilingualism in History
• Business Communication
• Communication Technologies
• Crime and Human Development
• Design Strategy and Software I
• Drugs, Brain, and Mind
• Epic and Saga
• Foundations of Social Work Practice
• Fundamentals of the Grammar of Standard English
• Greek Philosophy
• Greek and Roman Comedy
• Introduction to Communication Studies
• Introduction to Film Theory
• Introduction to Literary Theory
• Introduction to Performance Studies
• Introduction to Public Speaking
• Introduction to Sociolinguistics
• Introduction to Theatre Arts
• Introduction to Visual Thinking
• Language and Cognition
• Legal Method and Writing
• Media Criticism
• Media Effects
• Media Expression and Communication
• Narrative Journalism
• Performance Studies
• Philosophy of Law
• Rescuing Lost Stories
• Set Design for Theater and Film
• Social Psychology
• Theories and Methods of Art History
• Writing the Episodic Drama

Practice Questions ( 2 )

• Who proposed that an individual's behavior is influenced by both the person's traits and their social context?
• Which theory best represents the interaction between people’s traits (including their thinking) and their social context?

17 Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts

Sarah Seeley; Kelly Xu; and Matthew Chen

This chapter is a collaboration between a professor (Sarah Seeley) and two former students (Kelly Xu and Matthew Chen). [1] We begin with a discussion of a key concept: the discourse community. In doing so, we illustrate why it is necessary to examine the social side of communication. This is an invitation for readers to think about the fact that academic communication practices are structured in ways that are actually quite similar to the more familiar communication practices they use on a daily basis. We offer readers a framework for understanding how the social assumptions associated with familiar communicative contexts may be useful in understanding new or unfamiliar contexts.

We use the social media platform TikTok as an extended example as we explore the various criteria that define a discourse community. Xu and Chen then offer examples of how people become competent communicators within the context of new new-to-them scientific discourse communities. They cover topics including learning a “hidden” lexicon, building confidence and independence, and navigating tacit power hierarchies. These experiences reinforce the fact that effective communication requires contextual awareness and that understanding social norms is essential for developing that awareness.

Navigating new communicative contexts can be tricky. This is true of enrolling at a new school, starting a new job, or joining a new friend group. In each case, we need to start by “reading the room.” This means identifying the values and circumstances that shape the new social context so we can communicate confidently and appropriately. But, as we know, what it means to speak or write “appropriately” is not the same in all social contexts. While it may seem like a stretch to compare the task of writing a lab report and that of writing a text message, each context equally requires us to examine what counts as “appropriate.” This chapter offers you tools and examples that should help you examine and respond to the social circumstances that characterize unfamiliar contexts in your own life.

To help guide the process of “reading” whatever “room” you may find yourself in, we will begin with a discussion of an important concept: the discourse community. We will use the social media platform TikTok as an example as we explore the various criteria that define a discourse community. We will then move on to offer two narrative-based examples of how college students have navigated the social challenges involved with becoming productive members of new-to-them scientific discourse communities. Kelly Xu will detail her experiences as a biology student interning at a cancer research institution, and Matthew Chen will discuss his experiences of being a mechanical engineering student doing research in an ecology laboratory. We juxtapose these scientific examples with the TikTok example because we want you, the reader, to understand that academic communication practices are structured in ways that are actually quite similar to the more familiar communication practices you use on a daily basis.

The Discourse Community

Being new to “the room” is an inevitable experience. This happens whenever we start a new class or accept a new job. We have to learn the language and expectations required to succeed in the new situation. The discourse community concept will help you examine, understand, and thus succeed in those new situations. The linguist John Swales first developed a list of criteria for defining discourse communities in his book Genre Analysis (1990). In a more recent (2017) article, he revised these criteria because he wanted to account for the changing nature of communication in our contemporary world. In the following list, we are paraphrasing an article published in the journal Composition Forum , where Swales suggests that discourse communities are defined by the following eight criteria:

• broadly agreed upon sets of goals
• ways of communicating within the group
• member participation that provides information, feedback, and initiates action
• the use of specific formats (genres) for communicating within the group
• the use of specific vocabulary (lexis) for communicating within the group
• a core group of experienced members
• the sense that certain things can be left unsaid
• horizons of expectation

In the next section, we will have a closer look at each of these criteria.

How Can These Criteria be Used to Understand TikTok?

At the time of this writing, TikTok is consistently in the news for its role in circulating conspiracy theories and cultivating extremism (Ovide; Clayton). The community is receiving increasing amounts of attention, and, with the mobile app having been downloaded more than 2 billion times, it offers a timely case study: can TikTok “tick” all the boxes in Swales’ list (Brown; Leskin)?

First, Swales suggests that a discourse community is defined by a broadly agreed upon set of goals. Can we say this is true of the TikTok community as a whole? Probably not. Like most others of its kind, this platform is made up of distinctive interest communities (more on this in a moment). Such divisions make it hard to say that the community is defined by shared goals. For example, it is difficult to claim that the dancer Charli D’Amelio shares the same goals as the people behind the far-right extremist accounts. It is similarly difficult to claim that #CottageCore creators like @speckledhijabi or users posting to #BlackLivesMatter share the same goals as content creators who are cancelled for their use of racist slurs (Jennings). Within this vast social landscape, the only agreed upon goals are very, very broad: producing, circulating, and accessing new and quickly consumable content. As we know, that could mean nearly anything.

What about ways of communicating and participating within the community? Here is where we move onto firmer ground. All social media platforms offer methods for group communication and participation. From rotating trends to “likes” and hashtags, TikTok seems to tick boxes two and three on Swales’ list.

How about specific formats and vocabulary? Tick, tick. TikTok is defined by short video content sharing. Creators can loop or otherwise string together shorter clips to circulate “larger” videos that are up to 60 seconds long. In this way, TikTok builds on the short video format, or genre, that was a staple of its predecessor Musical.ly. Of course, this genre has also been popularized by Vine’s 6 second videos (R.I.P.), and we can also see short form video content sharing in other places, like 15-second Instagram Reels.

Now, does TikTok have a core group of experienced members? Well, yes and no. We cannot answer this question without circling back to our discussion of the first criterion. Recall, we had trouble saying that the TikTok community, as a whole , shares any specific goals. Building on this, we can say that there are experienced or core members, but that they are clustered across different “pockets” of the community. These clusters can be mapped across one important divide: Alt TikTok vs. Straight TikTok. Within these very large categories, content is characterized by wildly different goals and values. So, while there are core members within “sub-communities” across, for example, Alt TikTok, individual users also retain the freedom to shape genres and vocabulary in individualistic and grassroots ways (Sung).

Swales’s seventh criterion relates to the fact that, within a given community, certain things can be left unsaid. Drawing on the work of the linguist Alton Becker, Swales calls this “silential relations.” To understand this concept, we could think about the building abbreviations and program acronyms that are used on our respective campuses. For example, as members of our own campus-based discourse community, we, the writers, know exactly what “COMM+D” means, so we don’t need to spell out the Center for Global Communication and Design. We’re sure there are similar acronyms and abbreviations that define your campus community. We could also think about “silential relations” in terms of slang. From platform-wide slang like “story time” and “duet” to the slang that characterizes TikTok’s niche communities, this box is ticked.

The final criterion relates to something Swales calls a “horizon of expectation.” As he puts it, a discourse community “develops horizons of expectation, defined rhythms of activity, a sense of its history, and value systems for what is good and less good work” (Swales, “Concept”). There are a lot of considerations bundled here. Linking back to the idea that TikTok users generally aim to produce, circulate, and access new and quickly consumable content, we can see, once again, that the TikTok community as a whole is too large to be meaningfully examined in terms of some of these criteria. Numerous histories, value systems, and associated social expectations are observable across TikTok at any given moment. For example, at the time of this writing, the TikTok site indicates that videos categorized under #BLM have received a collective 12.3 billion views. On the other hand, TikTok also had to issue an apology in June 2020 over allegations of censoring this very hashtag (Harris). In other words, TikTok is comprised of a myriad of “rooms” that may need to be “read” quite differently.

As a new(ish) member of a university community, you may be interested to know that, like TikTok, the academic community as a whole is also too large to be meaningfully examined as a singular discourse community. What counts as “good” writing or “successful” communication is going to vary widely across the classes you take in different disciplines. This is because disciplinary goals, genres, languages, and expectations all vary. We must always read the room and respond accordingly. Now that we’ve explored how the discourse community criteria can (and cannot) help us understand TikTok, Kelly Xu and Matthew Chen will apply the same ideas in their stories of learning social norms and gaining authority as new members of scientific discourse communities.

The Lab Experience: Free Trial vs. Full Membership (Kelly)

After interning at a medical oncology lab for two summers, I have experienced being a member, an outsider, and everything in between. In what follows, I will reflect on these experiences using the discourse community framework. As you likely know from your own experiences, the conceptual boundaries of any community are most evident to anyone who is new. Simply not understanding the tacit rules, structure, and lexis of a community can make one feel ostracized as an outsider to the “in group.” In the case I’m about to describe, I entered the lab community as an intern who had minor publications and one year of undergraduate education under my belt. I was certainly under-qualified, and I felt daunted before I even stepped foot in the lab.

In lab settings, educational qualifications underlie all power structures. In other settings, positions may be malleable and accommodating based on pertinent experience, but in the lab, power is clearly defined by education and publication status. The Principal Investigator holds the most authority, followed by MD/PhDs and post-doctoral students, then doctoral students, followed by lab technicians, and finally undergraduate interns. We will also see how this same type of hierarchy structures other lab contexts in the next section, but for now, we should keep in mind: no amount of seniority as an undergraduate can ever allow for a “promotion” to the level of a PI.

Upon receiving my internship offer, I felt like I was infiltrating the company, rather than earning my position. Although I owned a company ID and looked like any other lab member, there were clearly invisible borders that I needed to breach to become an integrated member of the community. I was a long way from understanding the means of participating and communicating that were seemingly obvious to core members of the community. For example, even menial tasks like picking up mice revealed the fact that I was still an outsider. My mentor often said that mice perceive their handler’s emotions and react correspondingly. While she confidently grabbed the base of their tails with ease and they would immediately stop squirming, my hesitant grip allowed the mice to wriggle out with ease.

Lab-specific lexis, or vocabulary, also proved to have a learning curve. I was fascinated by the secret language of abbreviations and terminology that researchers commanded so fluently. I took fastidious notes on the aliases we used for reagents, the tiny modifications made to procedures, etc. But I found that even self-proclaimed mastery of the genres and lexis of this community were insufficient for me to establish a place in the lab. Though I rehearsed the words I heard my colleagues use so expertly, they felt ill-fitting and improper when I used them in practice, akin to a child wearing an oversized suit. More precisely, I didn’t (yet) feel I had the right to use such mature terminology because I still had so little experience. I now realize that the attribute I lacked and yearned for so distinctly was authority. Since gaining authority is a multi-faceted task, I want to discuss two components of this process: autonomy and reputation.

From where I sit now, I see my first summer interning as a “training period” wherein I lacked the agency to plan my own schedule or act without supervision. To put it in Swales’ terms, I could not yet participate independently or initiate my own action. While my days were rigidly structured and scheduled by my mentor, I looked upon the independence of my lab peers with admiration. They were so familiar with the intervals of time they needed to complete aspects of their projects that they could come into work at any time and leave at their leisure. Whereas I was paid hourly and expected to work 9-5, their jobs seem so much more integrated into their lifestyles and tailored to their personal work ethic.  Perhaps more importantly, they were confident enough in their skills to complete tasks within a time window they allotted themselves. Circling back to Swales’ criteria, it is clear that my peers were self-sufficient enough that they were able to recognize and participate in the rhythms of work that support overarching lab goals. Meanwhile, I was given a generous margin of error in everything I did, from booking lab machines times to pipetting reagents from a mastermix. I had to gain my own footing and learn to function as an individual before I could participate as a member of the community and contribute towards its goals.

For an undergraduate with little formal lab training, there is only so much autonomy you can attain since most procedures must be learned under supervision. However, I would like to argue that I did make some progress towards attaining autonomy. At first, I repeatedly executed the same protocol under strict observation. After verifying that I could successfully replicate one protocol, I was invited to apply the same skills (e.g. pipetting or making a gel) to other protocols without supervision. I repeated this process until I was gradually trusted to learn new protocols entirely on my own. Though I still felt restricted by the structure of the lab hierarchy, I came to appreciate these small landmarks of independence as they reminded me of the progress I was making. The better I understood the goals, actions, and lexis of the community, the more my autonomy increased. Hence, personal growth and increased familiarity are the keys to establishing an autonomous position within any discourse community. Whereas my earliest days in the lab felt like a stressful lab practical, I felt like a valuable partner by the end.

I was often scared of asking questions during the first year of my internship. Not only did I lack the confidence to ask a question, but I lacked the basic understanding needed to even form a question. At meetings, I would often stay quiet. This was out of fear that I would ask about something that had already been clearly explained or that I had misinterpreted a figure. Even during my second year, after having completed two rigorous 4000-level biology courses, I still found it challenging to interpret the specifics of my colleagues’ experiments. This, of course, was because I was still developing an understanding of my colleagues’ goals, and I was still in the process of mastering their genres. During the typical lab day, I felt like a nuisance asking what I thought were overly simplistic questions. In fact, I would ask questions in a “bottom-up” manner. I started with asking my undergraduate peers and then worked my way up the ladder if needed because I didn’t want to damage my reputation by annoying the higher-ups. In doing so, I was actually internalizing and taking action within the social structure of the lab.

This social work eventually started to pay off. Another lab member actually consulted me for advice on executing an assay that I commonly performed. I was shocked and honored. This was a recognition of my proficiency and knowledge, and I was elated that, despite my position in the academic hierarchy, my work and reputation preceded me. I had established my colleague’s respect, which went a long way toward making me feel like I was establishing my own authority. Afterwards, I proudly listed “PCR” as a lab skill on my resume; I finally felt confident enough in my technique to claim that I specialized in it. I no longer felt like I was a child donning an ill-fitting lab coat, but began to believe in my own credibility. Thus, practice with the genres and lexis of the lab allowed me to gain confidence as a researcher.

Finally, I took the ultimate test of trust and reputation: the dreaded lab meeting. Lab meetings are notoriously difficult because one is required to present their research progress to-date. In addition, rigorous follow-up questions test your knowledge of every detail of your project and (potentially) highlight every oversight. For example, it was insufficient for me to just know the names of the cell lines I was growing. I also needed to know why they were chosen and be able to discuss the levels of expression for multiple genes in each. To put it in Swales’ terms, the lab meeting is a demonstration of member participation: you provide information, receive feedback, and action is initiated. Though it was incredibly daunting, I was proud to work with my mentor to create the slides I would present as well as field questions from the audience. By being held to the same scrutiny and high standards as my peers, I really felt like I was no longer just an undergraduate intern but recognized as a true researcher.

One of the most important ways to gain membership within a new discourse community is to cultivate your confidence and a sense of belonging. While this involves rather gradual changes in perception, it is something we can all take control of as individual communicators. Ultimately, though, becoming integrated into a discourse community is a more nuanced process than a simple list of criteria might indicate. Learning vocabulary and techniques is merely the beginning of fitting into a discourse community. This is true in the same way that reading a book can’t replace having the actual experience being described. However, the novice communicator can make the integration process less daunting by setting more attainable goals. We can proudly reflect on the landmarks we achieve. In my case, this meant presenting with my mentor during a lab meeting or pausing to feel gratified after a peer had asked me for advice. Upon concluding my two-year internship, I finally felt like I earned a place in my lab community. I have moved beyond the free trial into the highest level of membership I can afford for now.

From Robots to Frog Guts: An Engineer in Ecologist’s Clothes (Matthew)

Going into my second semester of college, I found myself wanting to do something apart from my regimented engineering classes, so I decided to join an ecology lab. My routine of experimenting with circuits and fixing up machines was no more. Instead, I was experimenting with snails and fixing lunch for frogs. Some may ask why I would do this. Through countless hours spent hiking, mountain biking, and camping, the environment has become significant to me. That said, I quickly realized the vast difference between my personal environmental interests and the ecological knowledge these researchers possessed. Similar to the situation described in the previous section, I had some work to do! In order to establish myself within this discourse community, I had to accomplish three main tasks: adapting to their way of communicating, understanding their professional motives, and building their trust. Progressively meeting these goals allowed me to integrate myself into the ecology community in increasingly meaningful ways.

Throughout that first semester, I picked dead invertebrates from a slushy mixture of dirt and sand for eight hours a week. As we saw in the previous section, mundane tasks often serve as a foundation for adjusting to new environments. After weeks spent alone in a windowless lab, churning through one Petri dish of smudge after another, a post-doc invited me to their weekly “journal discussions.” I accepted the invitation immediately and found out later that these meetings were a venue for discussing ecology and environmental science papers.

Going into my first journal meeting, I felt that my contributions were going to be pointless. At first, this fear was confirmed. While the graduate students and postdocs shared their thoughts, I was frantically Googling on my laptop in an attempt to understand them. Though I had read the entire paper front to back, I hadn’t grasped the context behind it. These ecologists came to these discussions with years of experience conducting, writing up, and publishing experiments. Thinking in terms of Swales’ criteria, these years of experience furnished them with a context for understanding the goals of ecological research, for critiquing such research, for decoding ecology genres, and for using ecology vocabulary. I had had none of that.

However, after attending a few of the discussions, I started to understand more. For example, I realized that no one says “standard artificial media 5-salt culture water.” This phrase is ridiculously long and thus shortened to SAM-5S water. Here, we can see the concept of silential relations at play, yet understanding what should be said and what can remain unsaid required more than just learning word definitions. It also required me to understand the ideas within a larger context. For example, through talking with a grad student, I learned the context surrounding the issue of pseudoreplication, which is a situation where one would artificially inflate their sample size by sampling multiple times from a single source. She explained how she would avoid this by setting up 50 individual pools of water with the experimental chemicals and animals. Thus, the experiment would generate true statistical significance, which would make it publishable, thus serving one of the main goals of this discourse community.

In addition, I realized that the journal discussions were always guided by a series of standard questions. Where and when was the paper published? What is the significance of the results? Do they make sense? Are there any discrepancies? Recognizing the format of the discussions and learning more about ecology and scientific genres, I was able to understand the goals of the lab and the context behind their experiments. After attending several journal discussions, I became comfortable speaking my thoughts to the group. I began relating the paper we were discussing to the current research being done in the lab, and making these connections allowed me to get a deeper understanding of the life of an ecologist. Doing this, my comments and questions began sparking a more in-depth discussion, rather than a dead-end conversation. I no longer needed to stress about what to say next or worry about the discussion becoming awkward. Thinking in Swales’ terms, this is when I started to internalize one facet of the community’s horizon of expectations: the value system that defines meaningful (and not-so-meaningful) commentary and critique.

On another occasion, a postdoc started passionately exclaiming how the figures in a paper were way too confusing and complex. This showed me how undoubtedly passionate they are about their work, and how they meticulously critique the textual artifacts that make up their scientific community. It was also relieving to know how even the most experienced in the lab sometimes found figures difficult to interpret too, with the difference being that they are able to back up their critiques with an onslaught of evidence. With each passing journal discussion, I was increasingly able to relate to the ecologists’ work and get to know them better. This is how I started to break free of that “new person” feeling.

While these journal discussions expanded my knowledge of ecology, I also gained insight into how the scientific research community communicates and circulates information. Put differently, these are the actions encompassed by Swales’ second and third criteria. As opposed to engineering, the scientific method for demonstrating results is quite textual. This differs from the more physical nature of engineering, as while I am resizing the fit of a 3D model, the ecologists are meticulously rewriting their manuscripts so as to appease reviewer two. In noting this realization about textual vs. material communication, we can circle back to Swales’ first and fourth criteria. Here we see members of engineering and ecology discourse communities using very different research genres, or formats, to achieve very different goals. And, to put it in more day-to-day terms, I learned that emailing busy ecologists is a nuanced task. These messages had to be short and to the point if I wanted to receive a response in the same week!

At the end of the fall semester working in the lab, I’d learned how these ecologists communicate, how they characterize their passions and goals, and how I fit into the community. These successes paved the way for my next opportunity: a summer internship position. Shifting into the new role, I would continue the work of picking dead invertebrates out of wet dirt. Then, after three weeks, a grad student asked me if I wanted to catch snails from a pond. I was so excited to finally work with an organism that was alive . A little slow, but alive, nonetheless. I picked each snail out from the pond so gently, like they were the last one on earth, and I brought them back to the lab for the graduate student. Upon examining the snails and realizing they were all alive, she told me “good job.” This very brief interaction demonstrated that she regarded snail collection as the most basic of tasks, while I perceived it to be more involved and sophisticated. Essentially, I was the ecologists’ coffee boy, but instead of delivering coffee, I delivered snails!

Nevertheless, after having success with retrieving snails, I was able to communicate to my co-workers that I am capable of successfully carrying out more complex tasks. After around two weeks of snail work, I advanced to a more complex (and quicker!) organism: frogs. I began transporting live (jumping!) frogs from outdoor experiments into the lab. Given the strong possibility that I might lose a frog, or a data point in the eyes of a PhD student, I worked alongside another person. After a week as a member of the frog-catching duo, I was told I could catch them on my own. I was no longer the undergrad who picks dead worms from dirt. I had become the undergrad who catches live frogs out of kiddie pools!

In addition, I started to realize subtleties in the way my colleagues worked, and I developed my own daily routines. I was finally gaining some of that autonomy Kelly Xu discusses in the previous section. For example, each morning I would organize the glassware, check-up on the live animals, collect specific animals, and touch base with the director. At the close of each day, I would start washing glassware and check our chemical inventory. Initially, I did not do any of those things; it was only after talking to them over lunch each day that I came to recognize my colleagues’ workloads and time constraints. So, when I was given a menial task like washing dishes, I worked it into my routine and continued to do it each day, thus freeing up crucial time for my colleagues. By demonstrating that I shared the ecologists’ goals and viewpoints, I was able to gain their trust and integrate myself into their discourse community.

Regardless of the discourse community, gaining membership and authority involves recognizing the social context that surrounds communication. It demands that we read the room. In doing so, we can gain trust through demonstrating our awareness of a community’s goals, genres, and language. As we have seen through our explorations of social media and scientific discourse communities, understanding situated social norms is essential for developing that awareness. Effective communication always requires contextual awareness. This is the social side of communication. In order to understand and be understood, one must learn to read the room. We hope that our examples and discussions have illustrated the intellectual and emotional components of being a novice communicator. Further, we hope you now have the tools to embrace this novice status. It is inevitable that we will all wander into a new room from time to time. Once we cross a new threshold, it is up to us to find knowledge and power there.

Works Cited

Barbaro, Michael. “Cancel Culture, Part 1: Where It Came From.” The Daily , The New York Times, 10 Aug. 2020. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/podcasts/the-daily/cancel-culture.html . Accessed 10 Aug. 2020.

Becker, Alton L. Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology . University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Brown, Dalvin. “Survey Finds More Than Half of All Americans Back Potential Ban on TikTok.” USA Today , 12 Aug. 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/08/12/harris-poll-survey-americans-tiktok-ban/3353051001/ . Accessed 12 Aug. 2020.

Clayton, James. “TikTok’s Boogaloo Extremism Problem.” BBC News , 2 July 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53269361 . Accessed 9 Aug. 2020.

Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology . Basic Books, 1983.

Gumperz, John J. “The Speech Community.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences , edited by David L. Sills and Robert K. Merton, Macmillan, 1968, pp. 381-86.

—. Language in Social Groups . Stanford University Press, 1971. Harris, Margot.

“TikTok Apologized for the Glitch Affecting the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Hashtag After Accusations of Censorship: ‘We Know This Came at a Painful Time.’” Insider , 1 June 2020, https://www.insider.com/tiktok-apologizes-for-blm-hashtag-glitch-after-censorship-allegations-2020-6 . Accessed 6 Aug. 2020.

Jennings, Rebecca. “This Week in TikTok: The Racism Scandal Among the App’s Top Creators.” Vox , 28 April 2020, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/28/21239065/emmuhlu-n-word-mattia-polibio-chase-hudson-tiktok . Accessed 6 Aug. 2020.

Johns, Ann M. “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity.” Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies , Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 51-70.

Leskin, Paige. “TikTok Surpasses 2 Billion Downloads and Sets a Record for App Installs in a Single Quarter.” Business Insider , 30 April 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-app-2-billion-downloads-record-setting-q1-sensor-tower-2020-4 . Accessed 9 Aug. 2020.

Luu, Chi. “Cancel Culture is Chaotic Good.” JSTOR Daily , 18 Dec. 2019, https://daily.jstor.org/cancel-culture-is-chaotic-good/ . Accessed 10 Aug. 2020.

Ovide, Shira. “A TikTok Twist on ‘PizzaGate.’” The New York Times , 29 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/technology/pizzagate-tiktok.html . Accessed 9 Aug. 2020.

Rectenwald, Michael and Lisa Carl. Academic Writing, Real World Topics . Broadview Press, 2015.

Sung, Morgan. “The Stark Divide Between ‘Straight TikTok’ and ‘Alt TikTok.’” Mashable , 21 June 2020, https://mashable.com/article/alt-tiktok-straight-tiktok-queer-punk/ . Accessed 9 Aug. 2020.

Swales, John M. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings . Cambridge University Press, 1990.

—. “The Concept of Discourse Community: Some Recent Personal History.” Composition Forum , vol. 37, 2017, https://compositionforum.com/issue/37/swales-retrospective.php .

Teacher Resources for Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts

Overview and teaching strategies.

John Swales’s discourse community framework has been widely anthologized. It is, of course, something he has updated over time ( Genre ; “Concept”). It also builds on prior work in linguistic anthropology (Gumperz “Speech”; Language ), and it is often understood as being adjacent or complementary to other frameworks relating to the social nature of communication (Geertz; Johns). We raise these points because they offer a good context for how one might teach this chapter in a way that makes the discourse community concept plausible for students who are new(ish) members of academic discourse communities. Learning to read the room is only truly helpful if one can also understand a broader lay of the land, so to speak.

Scholars (in any discipline) develop ideas that retain varying amounts of power and authority over time. They do this within their discourse communities. Because this is an academic context, it means they do so within disciplines and sub-disciplines, which are “rooms” of differing sizes that students may need to learn how to “read.” For example, we could visualize disciplinary relationships as a series of nesting circles. The largest category in figure 1, social science, encompasses many distinct disciplines: anthropology, sociology, political science, etc. The diagram further maps out one tiny corner of the anthropological knowledge-making terrain. What’s more, we could have just as easily selected the biological sciences or the humanities and displayed a similarly small slice of disciplinary relationships within, for example, ecology or media studies.

Our overarching point is this: the smallest subset of academic inquiry pictured within our diagram—paleoanthropology—is a discourse community. It may share features with the larger social science or anthropology discourse communities, but we can still expect that it will have its own unique features. Paleoanthropology is, in effect, its own room, and ought to be read as such. Yet, one can still learn to understand it by applying what they know from inhabiting other rooms: adjacent academic disciplines and subdisciplines, or different workplace or media communities. Similarly, the TikTok section of our chapter offers a pop cultural framework for illustrating how far Swales’ criteria can (and cannot) stretch as we attempt to read a room. We believe this social media discussion can productively set the stage for parallel in-class discussions about academic knowledge production and the boundaries of academic discourse communities.

Tracing the history of an idea—when it appeared, where, and how it’s been used or expanded—is only possible when we can map out these kinds of disciplinary relationships. The powerful ideas tend to be cited, developed, and expanded on by other scholars within and across disciplinary discourse communities. The migration of Swales’ framework out of linguistics and into writing studies is a good example. In order to truly understand an idea, students must go outside of the content to examine the context of its production. These are very important skills. This is especially true for speakers and writers—like your students—who are in the process of becoming members of new academic discourse communities. As we illustrate in our chapter, this novice status is an inevitable social condition.

This chapter may be assigned during a unit focused on discourse communities, but it also presents ideas and prompts discussion that may be productive for transitioning into a unit on conducting academic research and narrowing research questions. In support of these goals, we offer two class activities. The first is specifically focused on helping students develop their understanding of the discourse community concept. The second is more a method for integrating oneself into an academic discourse community— particularly those associated with the humanities and social sciences.

Discourse Communities and Power Struggles: Examining Cancel Culture

This first activity was created for use during class time, so the podcast (audio and transcript options linked below) should be assigned in advance. At that point, class time could be loosely structured in “think, pair, share” terms.

As we know, there are core members within social media “subcommunities,” but individual users also retain the freedom to shape genres and vocabulary in individualistic and grassroots ways. This freedom can be seen across social media outlets, for example: upvoting on Reddit or the general phenomenon of cancel culture.

Today, we will examine cancel culture. The rise of this phenomenon draws attention to an important question on the social media discourse community landscape: How is power distributed? How are people scrambling to redistribute it? What are the implications of our own participation in these power structures?

You listened to (or read) an episode of The Daily called “Cancel Culture, Part 1: Where It Came From” (Barbaro). In it, host Michael Barbaro explores what it means to be canceled and how the whole thing began. Take five minutes to recall the episode, review any notes you made, or skim the transcript. Once you’re up to speed, we will form groups and engage with the discussion questions outlined below. I’ll pop in to hear some of your ideas individually, but you should regard the small group discussion as a platform for contributing to a full class discussion when we come back together toward the end of class.

Discussion Questions

Please begin by reading all the questions that follow. Decide whether you’d like to focus your discussion on Cluster 1 or Cluster 2. Once you make that choice, you should be thinking in discourse community terms. In other words, how might the discourse community concept help us to wade through this messiness and create situational answers to these questions? For example, what can genre and vocabulary tell us about any of these definitions or applications of cancel culture? Are terms like “liberal” or “young person” narrow enough for analyzing cancel culture? Are all “young people” members of the same discourse communities? Recall Swales’ concept of silential relations. How does a sense that certain things can be left unsaid support (or thwart) the politicization or weaponization of cancel culture?

Barbaro presents speech snippets where both Barack Obama and Donald Trump discuss cancel culture. How can cancel culture be labeled as “bad” in two ways that are so very different? Is “canceling” to be avoided because it’s impolite or some kind of cop-out as Obama seems to suggest? Is it to be criticized because the “liberals” are weaponizing it, as Trump suggests? Is it even possible to analyze this phenomenon apolitically?

All types of people exhibit socially unacceptable behavior, whether they are relatively powerful or relatively powerless. Given this, how can we make a distinction between canceling a celebrity and canceling an “average” citizen? How should personal security and loss of income factor into this distinction? Should we even draw a line here? Where does it seem to be drawn currently? In whose minds? Should it be re-drawn?

The Synthesis Grid

The Synthesis Grid activity, as adapted from Rectenwald and Carl, may be enacted during class or used as a formal assignment. It can be productive to assign students to submit a synthesis grid as a supporting document that accompanies, for example, a discourse community analysis, a genre analysis, or a researched argument.

What Is Synthesis?

Synthesis is an important writing practice. It is an especially important rhetorical strategy for learning to write in academic contexts. When writers offer a synthesis, they are combining, blending, or weaving related ideas from different sources.

What Is the Value of a Synthesis Grid?

Producing a synthesis grid offers you an opportunity to take notes in a structured way so you deepen your understanding of a particular topic or question. In effect, a synthesis grid is a material artifact of your research process. It is a record of all the reading and thinking you’ve done as a part of your writing process. Since writing can’t proceed without reading and thinking, it can feel particularly satisfying to document all this “behind the scenes” work. Then, you want to apply that “behind the scenes” work in your writing. For example, offering a synthesis within an academic argument is a very common (and effective!) method for establishing credibility.

How Do You Create a Synthesis Grid?

• You want to begin by settling on a particular topic or concept that will be the subject of your grid. For example, perhaps you want to write about cancel culture. This is a complex and controversial phenomenon with its own history, so starting a synthesis grid may help you to solidify your own ideas on the subject.
• Once you have your topic, you need to locate three or four pieces of writing that deal with the topic. Keeping with the cancel cultruel example, I might decide to start with a podcast transcript—Barbaro—and an article—Luu—then build my grid from there.
• Once you have the topic and some reading material, you want to create the “shell” of the grid. This involves making a series of rows that correspond to the number of readings you want to include. This also involves making a series of columns that correspond to the sub-topics you are interest in learning more about. See table 1 for an example.

• Once you’ve created the shell, you want to continuously add your notes as you move through readings related to your topic. Keep in mind that you won’t know all the sub-topics when you begin this activity. You will fill them in as you learn more. For example, perhaps you were interested in the redistribution of power ot start with, theyn you noticed that writers were often discussing the politicization of cancel culture. That’s a good indicator that you might want to add a column for politicization. Perhaps you then realize many writers are discussing the history of the phenomenom or how the pandemic has shaped the phenomenon. Perhaps you notice many writers discussing a specific social implication—for example, the negativity or destructiveness that is often attributed to cancel culture. If so, you should similarly follow such cues to add additional columns to your grid.

How Do You Use a Synthesis Grid?

Recall, the value of the grid is two-fold. It allows you to document the “backstage” work of reading and thinking, and it assists you in pulling the ideas you developed into the “foreground.” What follows is a sample synthesis that could be derived from this grid (even in though it’s still a work in progress). We can see how the ideas presented by Barbaro and Luu might be woven together to set up a line of inquiry in Table 2.

A Sample Synthesis

While cancel culture may appear to be a relatively new phenomenon, people have long been mobilizing against perceived injustice both on and offline. Both Michael Barbaro and Chi Luu have recently discussed this phenomenon and how it relates to internet language and culture at large. Barbaro and Luu each present the perceived positives and negatives surrounding cancel culture. Barbaro’s podcast episode was released more than six months after Luu’s article was published, and it draws on the words and experiences of politicians, celebrities, and everyday racists as a method for exploring the complexities of this phenomenon. One major question within all of this is how to differentiate between the “cancelation” of a relatively powerful person versus that of a relatively powerless person.

Connecting the Synthesis Grid to the Discourse Community Concept

As we suggest in our chapter, learning to mobilize the discourse community concept is an important method for “reading the room.” Learning how, for example, vocabulary or genre is shaped by social expectations sets student-writers up to understand writing as an audience-driven act. And, learning to map the epistemological landscape of a social debate similarly sets student-writers up to understand academic writing in terms of situated social exigencies.

• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and is subject to the Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ , email [email protected] , or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.org/terms-of-use . ↵

Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Seeley; Kelly Xu; and Matthew Chen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Methodology

• Critical Discourse Analysis | Definition, Guide & Examples

Critical Discourse Analysis | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on August 23, 2019 by Amy Luo . Revised on June 22, 2023.

Critical discourse analysis (or discourse analysis) is a research method for studying written or spoken language in relation to its social context. It aims to understand how language is used in real life situations.

When you conduct discourse analysis, you might focus on:

• The purposes and effects of different types of language
• Cultural rules and conventions in communication
• How values, beliefs and assumptions are communicated
• How language use relates to its social, political and historical context

Discourse analysis is a common qualitative research method in many humanities and social science disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, psychology and cultural studies.  

Table of contents

What is discourse analysis used for, how is discourse analysis different from other methods, how to conduct discourse analysis, other interesting articles.

Conducting discourse analysis means examining how language functions and how meaning is created in different social contexts. It can be applied to any instance of written or oral language, as well as non-verbal aspects of communication such as tone and gestures.

Materials that are suitable for discourse analysis include:

• Books, newspapers and periodicals
• Marketing material, such as brochures and advertisements
• Business and government documents
• Websites, forums, social media posts and comments
• Interviews and conversations

By analyzing these types of discourse, researchers aim to gain an understanding of social groups and how they communicate.

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Unlike linguistic approaches that focus only on the rules of language use, discourse analysis emphasizes the contextual meaning of language.

It focuses on the social aspects of communication and the ways people use language to achieve specific effects (e.g. to build trust, to create doubt, to evoke emotions, or to manage conflict).

Instead of focusing on smaller units of language, such as sounds, words or phrases, discourse analysis is used to study larger chunks of language, such as entire conversations, texts, or collections of texts. The selected sources can be analyzed on multiple levels.

Discourse analysis is a qualitative and interpretive method of analyzing texts (in contrast to more systematic methods like content analysis ). You make interpretations based on both the details of the material itself and on contextual knowledge.

There are many different approaches and techniques you can use to conduct discourse analysis, but the steps below outline the basic structure you need to follow. Following these steps can help you avoid pitfalls of confirmation bias that can cloud your analysis.

Step 1: Define the research question and select the content of analysis

To do discourse analysis, you begin with a clearly defined research question . Once you have developed your question, select a range of material that is appropriate to answer it.

Discourse analysis is a method that can be applied both to large volumes of material and to smaller samples, depending on the aims and timescale of your research.

Step 2: Gather information and theory on the context

Next, you must establish the social and historical context in which the material was produced and intended to be received. Gather factual details of when and where the content was created, who the author is, who published it, and whom it was disseminated to.

As well as understanding the real-life context of the discourse, you can also conduct a literature review on the topic and construct a theoretical framework to guide your analysis.

Step 3: Analyze the content for themes and patterns

This step involves closely examining various elements of the material – such as words, sentences, paragraphs, and overall structure – and relating them to attributes, themes, and patterns relevant to your research question.

Step 4: Review your results and draw conclusions

Once you have assigned particular attributes to elements of the material, reflect on your results to examine the function and meaning of the language used. Here, you will consider your analysis in relation to the broader context that you established earlier to draw conclusions that answer your research question.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Measures of central tendency
• Chi square tests
• Confidence interval
• Quartiles & Quantiles
• Cluster sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Thematic analysis
• Cohort study
• Peer review
• Ethnography

Research bias

• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Conformity bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Availability heuristic
• Attrition bias
• Social desirability bias

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Social Context of Education

Introduction, democracy and education.

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Social Context of Education by Claire Smrekar , Lydia Bentley LAST REVIEWED: 15 December 2011 LAST MODIFIED: 15 December 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756810-0039

The study of the social context of education explores contemporary issues in education through the lenses of philosophical, political, and sociological theories, concepts, and research traditions. Studies in this field involve the relationship between schools and society, with specific reference to the role of race and ethnicity, social class, and gender in education. The focus often rests on the intersection of schooling and broad social policy, including health, housing, work, and community development. Scholars in this field explore issues of equity, opportunity, and the organization of schooling across an array of school contexts, including domestic and international, traditional public schools, choice programs (e.g., magnet, charter, voucher), and home-based and private schooling. Pertinent questions related to social stratification and social reproduction commonly frame studies in this domain: How do race and class affect the educational experiences of students? Did desegregation contribute to closing the achievement gap? How do neighborhoods coalesce with educational institutions to produce patterns of inequality? How does the organization of schooling (e.g., tracking) shape student outcomes? Broader frameworks in the field probe fundamental questions about the relationship of schools to society: What is the purpose of public education? How do principles of democracy and civility shape contemporary school policies and educational debates? The citations included in this bibliography encompass the core concepts and important research studies related to the social context of education. Some are included because they are seminal works that have shaped the field and the foundational studies that have followed; others are listed here because they reflect the most recent, rigorous, and insightful work in this field. The entries listed here span books, book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, policy reports, and issue briefs. All the citations represent significant contributions to understanding the social context of education.

What is the purpose of public education in a democracy? Tyack 1966 answers this question with a seminal piece on the history of public education. Barber 1992 moves from the historical rationale for public education—creating a civil society—to examine the contradictions and challenges of this education goal in a contemporary democracy filled with consumerism and cynicism. Fuhrman and Lazerson 2005 provides a contemporary context to assess the historical arguments for devising and sustaining a public school system as an engine for producing a civil and free society. For readers interested in philosophical debates and policy dilemmas, Gutmann 1999 underscores the tensions between liberty and civility, the central tenets of a democracy, and the challenges facing educators as efforts are made to reconcile and balance these tensions. Ravitch and Viteritti 2001 complements these works by presenting an edited volume with chapters that span multiple disciplinary lenses through which to consider the power and limitations of public education in a democratic state. How do you apply the principles of democratic education to the formation of student-citizens? Readers interested in this question will find thoughtful analyses and substantive models in Westheimer and Kahne 2004 , related to elementary and secondary contexts, and should refer to Colby, et al. 2003 for a robust discussion of civic engagement in higher education programs and policies. Skocpol, et al. 1999 provides a provocative, deeply theoretical perspective on civic engagement.

Barber, Benjamin R. 1992. An aristocracy of everyone: The politics of education and the future of America . New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

A vision of education as the fount and mainstay of a democratic society. Incorporates themes relating to postmodernism, conservative excess, and community service.

Colby, Anne, Thomas Ehrlich, Elizabeth Beaumont, and Jason Stephens. 2003. Educating citizens: Preparing America’s undergraduates for lives of moral and civic responsibility . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Describes how some colleges are attempting to shape the moral and civic development of students, explains the nature of this development, articulates the challenges faced in the process, and offers recommendations for future efforts.

Fuhrman, Susan, and Marvin Lazerson, eds. 2005. The public schools . New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

A compilation of essays covering historical, theoretical, political, and pragmatic topics related to democracy and the American public school. Provides a historical frame of reference and discusses matters of citizenship and mechanisms for enhancing democracy through education.

Gutmann, Amy. 1999. Democratic education . Rev. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Defends the cultivation of deliberative skills and virtues necessary for civic education and advocates the principle of shared educational authority among parents, citizens, and educators.

Ravitch, Diane, and Joseph P. Viteritti, eds. 2001. Making good citizens: Education and civil society . New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.

This collection of work targets politics, values, and religion as topics intrinsic to the connection between education and civil society. Includes multidisciplinary perspectives from history, psychology, philosophy, political science, and law.

Skocpol, Theda, and Morris P. Fiorina, eds. 1999. Civic engagement in American democracy . Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

A compendium of predominantly institutionalist and rational-choice theoretical perspectives on the roots of civic engagement, long-term changes in civic activity, and the need for a more critical analysis of newer forms of civic activism.

Tyack, David. 1966. Forming the national character. Harvard Educational Review 36.1: 29–41.

A historical account of how Jefferson, Rush, and Webster formulated educational theories pertaining to the republicanization of the young nation.

Westheimer, Joel, and Joseph J. Kahne. 2004. What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy. American Educational Research Journal 41.2: 237–269.

DOI: 10.3102/00028312041002237

This article unpacks the concept of good citizenship by drawing on a two-year study of democratic educational programs while exploring the political ramifications of such programs.

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Ch. 1: Social Context and Physical Environment

The first reading presents a general overview of theories concerning the role of social contexts and physical environments in substance use, substance use disorders, and opportunities for prevention or treatment. These are often referred to as sociocultural theories, but that label does not provide sufficient emphasis about the role of environmental factors. Evidence points to many relevant social and environmental factors that play a role, such as:

• Family and family system dynamics
• Peer groups
• School and workplace
• Neighborhood and community
• Policy and enforcement
• National and global forces

In this first chapter you will read about:

• Social systems, the physical environment, and the social ecological model;
• Social norms theory;
• Social structure influences, culture/subculture and deviance theory, the impact of “isms,” and labeling theory; and,
• key terms used in relation to the social context of substance use and addiction.

Social Systems

Anthropologists argue that the use of substances can only be properly understood when placed within a social context: the family, social, school, work, economic, political and religious systems (Hunt & Barker, 2001). An obvious physical environment aspect of context that is important to consider has to do with a person’s access to alcohol or other drugs. In general, the physical environment produces opportunities and obstacles that shape the behavior of people living or functioning in those spaces and places. For example, a person who grows up in a warm southern climate may not have an opportunity to learn snowboarding. Someone living in a dangerous neighborhood may not build outdoor exercise into his or her regular daily routine. And, the nutritional value of a person’s diet is influenced by living in a “food desert” versus in an area where healthful foods are easily accessed and affordable. Specific to our discussion of substance use, we need to consider how difficult or easy it is to gain access to alcohol, tobacco, or other substances in the family home, school, workplace, peer group, or neighborhood.

One set of questions tracked over time in the U.S. national survey of middle and high school students called Monitoring the Future concerns how easy or difficult the students believe it is to obtain various substances. As you can see from Table 1, the 12 th graders believed they had easier access to all of the substances (cigarettes not reported) than did 8 th and 10 th graders. We have no way of knowing for certain if access actually increased with age, only that belief in access increased; however, the belief may be based on reality.

Table 1. Percent of students responding “fairly” or “very” easy to obtain substances, 2016*

*Table created from data presented in Monitoring the Future report for 2016.

Social Ecological Model. The social ecological model presents a framework with great applicability for understanding human development and behavior within social systems and contexts. To consider how the social ecological model might apply to the problems of substance use, misuse, and addiction, we can start with the central sphere that represents the individual person. This innermost sphere contains what we have studied so far in relation to a person’s biological and psychological makeup—the biopsycho components from our earlier course modules. This is what the person brings to any interactions with the social or physical environments in which he or she functions. Next, we look at the many spheres of influence that form that individual’s social ecology: the micro, meso, exo, and macro systems with which individuals interact (see Figure 1). These systems influence us, we influence them, and they influence each other, which explains why there are arrows between the system levels in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Diagram representing social ecological model’s multiple system levels

Microsystem components include those social systems with which we directly interact on a regular basis: partners, immediate family members, close friends and others in our most personal, intimate sphere of daily living.

Within this framework, we can look more closely at theories concerning the mechanisms by which these social ecology elements have their impact, and at evidence concerning these different elements.

Social Norms Theory

Social norms are a key aspect of the social processes involved in substance use—both in terms of initiating use for the first time and in terms of misusing and using to excess. For example, most cultures that accept the use of alcohol also have norms related to the boundaries of acceptable use—when, where, by whom, and how much. Social norms also come into play because a person who believes that everyone else using alcohol or another substance, or at least approves of that substance’s use, is far more likely to use than a person who believes that it is not common or accepted in their social context.

Looking at the Monitoring the Future study results again, we can explore middle and high school students’ level of disapproval toward people who use substances. As you can see, occasional and regular use of substances gains more disapproval than trying it once or twice, and the level of disapproval for marijuana and alcohol use declines among the older 12 th grade students compared to the younger groups of 8 th and 10 th graders (see Table 2). What is interesting to note is that the 12 th graders seem to make a greater distinctions between types of substances than do the younger students: they disapprove more strongly than the younger students about LSD and heroin, and equally strongly about cocaine, but less strongly about alcohol and marijuana.

Table 2. Percent of students disapproving or strongly disapproving of people who…*

Social norms about alcohol and other substance use also tend to be tied to ethnic identity. For example, there exist many drinking-related stereotypes about Irish Americans and Americans with Russian roots. These ethnic stereotypes can have a significant effect on a person’s decisions about drinking and drinking to excess. On the other hand, cultural prohibitions around drinking to the point of intoxication may be strong in a person’s cultural context. This social disapproval of excessive use (misuse) can be a protective factor against substance use becoming a substance use disorder.

Social Structur e Influence Theories.

A number of theories draw from the science of sociology to explain the phenomena of substance use, misuse, and addiction. These theories “view the structural organization of a society, peer group, or subculture as directly responsible for drug use” (Hanson, Ventruelli, & Fleckenstein, 2015, p. 78).

Culture and subculture . Policy is a form of intervention heavily influenced by theories about the origin of the problems to which it is responding. To a large extent, policy also is influenced by a culture’s values and belief systems, such as the philosophy concerning whether the problem of substance use is better addressed through punishment or treatment. Cultural systems are even responsible for defining what is a drug in the first place. For example, in the majority culture of the United States, hallucinogenic substances like peyote are defined as drugs of abuse. However, according to anthropologists, peyote religion among certain Native American groups defines this substance quite differently (Hill, 2013).

Or, consider the argument that fast food has addictive potential—is a fast food burger to be  considered  a drug and the fast food restaurants responsible for causing an addiction like drug trafficking?

Subculture is about groups that form within a larger culture. The values, beliefs, attitudes, and behav iors within the subculture group may complement or contradict those of the larger cultural context. When they are contradictory, deviance theory may come into play. According to deviance theory, a person (or group) elects to engage in behaviors disapproved of by the conventional “majority” culture specifically because of that disapproval. These individuals embrace their deviance identity—the label becomes an important aspect of identity. Why would someone want to belong to a deviant subculture or group? For many people, it is a matter of belonging somewhere, anywhere, being better than belonging nowhere. Participating in deviant behavior seems a small price to pay for admission to the group. For others it is a means of differentiating self from others—particularly from those who represent the conventional culture. For example, it is one way of making clear to yourself and the world that you are your own person, distinct from who your parents are. Having strong prosocial bonds with members of the conventional culture is a protective force against deviance—the extent to which a person desires approval and wishes to avoid disapproval of the people with whom they have these prosocial bonds helps them make choices that conform to convention (Sussman & Ames, 2008).

Consider how social justice concerns and disparities function at the neighborhood and community level. For example, consider the difference between empowered and distressed neighborhoods to defend against the intrusion of illegal drug trafficking and the crime, violence, and exploitation that accompany drug trafficking. Also consider how difficult it becomes in many communities to gain access to evidence-supported prevention or treatment services that are accessible in terms of being affordable, close to home, culturally appropriate, and developmentally (age) appropriate.

What Comes Next?

Now you have been introduced to several theories and models concerning the ways that the physical environment and social contexts might play a role in substance use, misuse, and addiction. Let’s turn our attention to specific arenas where the social world has an impact. This would be the microsystem elements of family and peer group influences. But, let’s not forget the significance of the larger social systems and social institutions that are involved, as well.

SWK 3805: Social Context Theories Copyright © by Dr. Audrey Begun is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Social-Cultural Context of Child Development and Learning

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It is essential to understand that child development and learning occur within a social-cultural, political, and historical context. 49 within that context, each person’s experiences may vary based on their social identities and the intersection of these identities. social identities bring with them socially constructed meanings that reflect biases targeted to marginalized groups, resulting in differential experiences of privilege and injustice. 50 these systems can change over time, although many have remained stubbornly rooted in our national ethos..

Traditionally, the dominant narrative in the United States—in our history, scientific research, education, and other social policy and media—has reflected the ways in which society has granted or denied privilege to people based on certain aspects of their identity. Whiteness, for example, confers privilege, as does being male. Other aspects of identity that society tends to favor with easier access to power structures include being able-bodied, US born, Christian, heterosexual, cisgender, thin, educated, and economically advantaged. 51 Conversely, other aspects of identity tend to be associated with societal oppression, experienced, for example, by those who are members of indigenous societies and those who do not speak fluent, standard English. By naming such privilege and acknowledging the intersection of privilege and oppression, the intent is not to blame those who have benefited, but to acknowledge that privilege exists and that the benefits are unfairly distributed in ways that must be addressed.

Dominant social biases are rooted in the social, political, and economic structures of the United States. Powerful messages—conveyed through the media, symbols, attitudes, and actions—continue to reflect and promote both explicit and implicit bias. These biases, with effects across generations, stem from a national history too often ignored or denied—including trauma inflicted through slavery, genocide, sexual exploitation, segregation, incarceration, exclusion, and forced relocation. Deeply embedded biases maintain systems of privilege and result in structural inequities that grant greater access, opportunity, and power to some at the expense of others. 52

Few men enter the field of early childhood education, reflecting the historic marginalization of women’s social and economic roles—which has had a particularly strong impact on women of color. Comprising primarily women, the early childhood workforce is typically characterized by low wages. 53 It is also stratified, with fewer women of color and immigrant women having access to higher education opportunities that lead to the educational qualifications required for higher-paying roles. 54 Systemic barriers limit upward mobility, even when degrees and qualifications are obtained. 55 As a result, children are typically taught by White, middle-class women, with women of color assisting rather than leading. Some evidence, especially with elementary-grade children, suggests that a racial and gender match between teachers and children can be particularly beneficial for children of color without being detrimental to other children. 56, 57, 58, 59

The professional research and knowledge base is largely grounded in a dominant Western scientific-cultural model that is but “one perspective on reality and carries with it its own biases and assumptions.” 60 These shortcomings of the knowledge base reflect the historical issues of access to higher levels of scholarship for individuals of color and the need to expand the pipeline of researchers who bring different lived experiences across multiple social identities. It is important to consider these biases and their impact 61 on all aspects of system delivery, including professional development, curriculum, assessment, early learning standards, 62 and accountability systems.

The research base regarding the impact of implicit bias in early childhood settings is growing. 63 Teachers of young children—like all people—are not immune to such bias. Even among teachers who do not believe they hold any explicit biases, implicit biases are associated with differential judgments about and treatment of children by race, gender, ability and disability, body type, physical appearance, and social, economic, and language status—all of which limit children’s opportunities to reach their potential. Implicit biases also result in differential judgments of children’s play, aggressiveness, compliance, initiative, and abilities. These biases are associated with lower rates of achievement and assignment to “gifted” services and disproportionately higher rates of suspension and expulsion, beginning in preschool, for African American children, especially boys. Studies of multiple racial and ethnic subgroups in different contexts point to the complexity of the implicit bias phenomenon, with different levels and types of bias received by different subgroups. 64 Children’s expression of implicit bias has also been found to vary across countries, although some preference for Whites was found even in nations with few White or Black residents. 65

By recognizing and addressing these patterns of inequity, society will benefit from tapping the potential of children whose families and communities have been systematically marginalized and oppressed. Early childhood educators, early learning settings, higher education and professional development systems, and public policy all have important roles in forging a new path for the future. By eliminating systemic biases and the structures that sustain them, advancing equity, and embracing diversity and inclusivity, we can strengthen our democracy as we realize the full potential of all young children—and, therefore, of the next generation of leaders and activists.

Click to view the full list of endnotes.

Evidence for the Statement

Social Context Essays

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Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda (1997)

Chapter: 4 the social context of school learning, 4— the social context of school learning.

Whereas the previous chapter reviewed cognitive aspects of literacy and content learning, this chapter examines research related to a variety of social factors involved in school learning. It is clear that children may arrive at school ready to learn in a number of different ways. One way is to have high levels of language, emergent literacy, and world knowledge acquired at home or in preschool. Equally important, though, is readiness in the emotional, social, and motivational realms: the ability to adapt to the new constraints of the classroom, the social skills that are needed to participate effectively in classroom discourse, and the self-esteem and sense of agency required to work hard and learn intentionally. School learning is a social as well as a cognitive process, one influenced by the relationships between student and teacher and among students. Furthermore, what children learn at school is not exclusively academic content; schools are designed to make children productive citizens who are respectful of the diversity of their society. While there has been a great deal of research on the social and motivational determinants of school success for mainstream children, attention to these matters with regard to language-minority children has focused more on issues of mismatch between the social rules these children bring from home and those that obtain in the classroom. In this chapter, we identify some of the salient themes in research on social factors as related to academic achievement for language-minority children.

State Of Knowledge

This section reviews the findings of research on social factors in school learning in five areas: the social nature of knowledge acquisition, the issue of

differential treatment of ethnic minority students, cultural differences in the motivation to achieve, children's social and group relationships, and parental involvement in children's school learning

The Social Nature of Knowledge Acquisition

Were we to focus only on issues examined in the previous chapter, such as the nature of understanding across subject matter, the various forms of knowledge learners possess, and the way prior knowledge influences the acquisition of new knowledge, we would be ignoring a vital aspect of school learning: the fact that most learning occurs in a social context in which individual actions and understandings are negotiated by the members of a group. There are two theoretical perspectives on the locus of this negotiation. The individual perspective is based on the idea of constructivism—that individuals actively construct meanings from interaction with the world around them, an idea traced back to Piaget's (1970) theories of cognitive development (see Chapter 3). In contrast, the social perspective is based on sociocultural theories of learning that emphasize the role of social interaction with more knowledgeable others (Vygotsky, 1978) and activity-oriented work in a social setting (Leont'ev, 1981). While there has been a tradition of debate over the relative accuracy of these perspectives in depicting learning processes, recent work suggests it may be more profitable to determine when and how the two perspectives might work together to describe student learning (Bereiter, 1994; Cobb, 1994).

We focus here not on this debate, but on the context of negotiation as related to the social nature of learning. We propose that in a classroom learning situation, negotiation occurs within at least two domains: the rules for how to talk in the classroom and the construction of actual content knowledge through talk. It is from the interpretation of these negotiations that students construct their own knowledge and understanding. However, it is typically the teacher who, either implicitly or explicitly, initiates negotiation across these dimensions.

Negotiating How to Talk

The process of negotiating the way classroom participants will talk about subject matter is of concern for researchers from a sociocultural perspective because participation in situated cultures of practice is assumed to be an important influence on an individual's academic performance. Thus, students who understand that a teacher's question about a text requests an explanation for their interpretation rather than the literal interpretation itself will participate more effectively in that classroom's practice. Research on learning outside the classroom has demonstrated the extent to which context influences the nature of such learning for any given individual (Brown et al., 1989; Carraher et al., 1985; Lave et al., 1984; Resnick, 1987; Scribner, 1984). Classroom participants similarly

negotiate how they will talk about the subject matter at hand (Wertsch, 1979, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978; Cobb et al., 1993; Moll and Whitmore, 1993; Lampert, 1990). To date, these issues have not been addressed systematically in the study of student learning across subject matter domains. However, they have obvious implications for second-language education, in part because negotiating these matters is much more difficult in a second language and in part because the negotiated rules are likely to be heavily influenced by culture.

Ideally, conclusions about cultural mismatch in the negotiation of talk are based on observations of children both at home and at school. One such study was conducted by Philips (1983) in the homes and classrooms of Native American students. Using an ethnographic approach to the study of language-use practices among Warm Springs Indian children, Philips identified and described the different participant structures to which the children had access in home, community, and school settings. She found that the children's verbal participation was much greater in classrooms whose participant structures were similar to those used routinely in their homes and community. Similarly, in her ethnographic study of how language is learned by African American and white children in the rural south, Heath (1983) showed that certain language-use patterns characteristic of the African American community differed from those used by white teachers—both in their homes and in their classrooms to structure talk—in the schools the African American children attended.

Both Gee (1988a, 1988b) and Michaels (1991) have focused on the social meaning of children's own discourse forms, both as effective ways of expressing their own intentions and as forms that lead to miscommunication with and negative reactions from teachers. Michaels analyzed the sharing-time turns of an African-American child, identifying the culturally specific pattern of story telling she used and the ways it violated the rules for sharing time imposed by the teacher (see also Gee, 1985, 1990). The mismatches identified by Gee and Michaels make access to full participation in educational interactions more difficult for the speakers of the less-valued discourse forms.

Other studies leading to conclusions about cultural mismatch have been conducted exclusively in classroom settings; these are of the type Cazden (1986:446) identifies as the ''culturally different case," that is, comparison with an assumed mainstream pattern of interaction. For example, Au and Mason (1981) focus their comparisons on the discourse of two teachers—one who had little experience with Polynesian children and one who had a long history of working with them. The latter teacher's reading lessons were characterized by discourse patterns that resembled those identified in studies of native Hawaiian teachers (Au, 1980) and children (Boggs, 1985). This teacher's students engaged in the kinds of collaborative and overlapping talk that are characteristic of talk story, a native Hawaiian joint story-telling event. The students taught by this teacher performed better on several verbal measures related to academic engagement and reading ability (amount of academically engaged time, number of reading-related

and correct responses to teachers' questions, and number of idea units and logical inferences) than the students of the other teacher. Gutierrez et al. (1995) demonstrate how particular classroom communities evolve, and illustrate how the schooling practices of an urban school serve to marginalize rather than accommodate the linguistic, social, and cultural capital of its diverse student population.

Other studies focusing on enactments of sociocultural pedagogy in schools and classrooms have investigated efforts to incorporate into classrooms features of learning and talking that are characteristic of the homes and communities of English-language learners. Perhaps the most well-known such effort to make classroom instruction culturally responsive is the Kamehameha Early Education Program (Au and Mason, 1981), which incorporated the talk story format discussed above into literacy instruction, with positive results.

Negotiating Knowledge

In addition to negotiation of the rules for classroom talk, social practices for talking about a particular subject matter are negotiated by the participants, who thus are able to discuss the subject in a routine, predictable way. For example, studies have demonstrated that students' text comprehension is improved when the classroom participants, both teachers and students, take an active role in constructing their understanding of the text through the techniques of questioning the author (Beck et al., in press) and reciprocal teaching (Palincsar and Brown, 1984; Palincsar et al., 1993). Expert explanations have been found to facilitate student learning in history and mathematics for students of both low and high ability (Leinhardt, 1993). To participate in an explanation, students must understand the goals of the explanation and their role in attaining those goals. Students have the opportunity to learn the subject matter content through negotiations about that content during classroom discourse.

Using the classroom as a social arena for the public examination of ideas accomplishes three important things: (1) students gradually gain competence in using terminology and in connecting actions and concepts within a discipline; (2) in the course of dialogue, students naturally build on or refute old ideas as these are merged with new knowledge; and (3) actions of discussion, proof, and explanation are merged with networks of concepts and principles that are part of a particular subject matter. The examination of classroom discourse has informed research in primary-language content learning (see Chapter 3) by focusing on how social interaction influences the nature of learning by classroom students.

A recent volume of Linguistics and Education (6:1, 1994) focuses on the efforts of researchers, most of whom are participants in the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group, working in classrooms of Spanish/English bilingual students in the elementary and middle grades. As the editors state in their introduction to the volume, these studies contribute to our understanding of "the ordinary

discursive and social practices in an everyday setting—classrooms and how these practices contribute to the construction of knowledge in classrooms" (p. 234). A central notion underlying these studies is that classroom discourse is both the process by which knowledge is constructed and the source of specific content, as well as the content of students' knowledge production. Implicit in each study is the view of a dialectical process in which participants' interactions both shape and are shaped by a range of contextual forces. It is this notion of dialectic and the way it contributes to the construction of knowledge that is implicit in the situated view of learning and the learner set forth in these studies.

Many studies that focus on teaching and learning literacy in classrooms include an examination of the issues associated with a particular pedagogical perspective or practice. Several of these studies have helped extend our understanding of the conditions that have led to variations in the way a particular approach is applied. For example, in her ethnographic study of journal sharing in nine different bilingual classrooms, Gutierrez (1992, 1994) found that teachers shared one of three "scripts" or pedagogical views of writing. Based on Gutierrez's 1992 descriptions, only one of these scripts provided enriched contexts for literacy learning in line with the tenets of sociocultural theory outlined above, that is, "contexts that give students both assistance and the occasions to use and write elaborated and meaningful discourse" (p. 259).

A number of researchers have focused on a discussion format known as instructional conversation that is grounded in the Vygotskian notions of assisted performance (e.g., Goldenberg and Gallimore, 1991; Rueda et al., 1992; Saunders et al., 1992; Patthey-Chavez and Goldenberg, 1995), as used in classrooms serving language-minority students. Instructional conversation contrasts markedly with the traditional teacher-fronted and skills-based approaches to instructional discourse most often available to language-minority students. Studies of this approach have shown that it is characterized by a thematic focus, teachers' efforts to build upon students' previous verbal contributions and experiences, and direct teaching. Although the use of this approach in classroom settings has not been linked to formal assessment of student learning, evidence of learning may be gleaned from an examination of the instructional conversations themselves. For example, as teachers become more proficient with the format, student talk increases, as measured by the percentage of total turns they take and the mean turn length (Patthey-Chavez and Goldenberg, 1995; Dalton and Sison, 1995).

Similarly, research by Warren and Rosebery in two bilingual science classrooms has focused on the nature of the scientific discourse used by students and teachers and the extent to which students appropriate scientific ways of knowing and reasoning. This research has tended to be quite detailed, focusing on a specific device or pattern. For example, in a recent article, Warren and Rosebery (1995) examine the role of argumentation in one of the classrooms. As they state in their introduction to this work, the intent of the study is to further articulate sociocultural theory on how science can be learned in classroom settings, using

Bakhtin's notion of dialogism as a filter for understanding this discourse sequence. 1 (From a Bakhtinian perspective, utterances within a social context are imbued with multiple meanings and subject to evaluation, revision, and refinement.) In their analysis of argumentation in a bilingual Haitian Creole science class, Warren and Rosebery (1995) focus on students' disagreements over scientific claims, how these disagreement sequences shape the students' scientific understanding, and more specifically what it means for a claim to be accountable to evidence. This interpretive approach to the analysis of a single discussion yields insights into how norms of scientific practice, as well as elements of scientific thinking, can be jointly constructed by students engaged in meaningful acts of inquiry.

What distinguishes Warren and Rosebery's research from many other interpretive studies is the attention they pay to student learning (Rosebery et al., 1992). During interviews conducted in September and June, students were asked to think aloud about how they would research and explain two scientific dilemmas. The researchers' quantitative analyses revealed that the students had increased their appropriate uses of content knowledge and hypothesis statements by the time of the June interviews. Their qualitative analyses showed that the students were better able to reason in terms of larger explanatory frameworks by June. Students who had solved problems with simplistic, unexplained conjectures in September were using their scientific understandings to generate hypotheses and experiments by the end of the school year.

The work of Moll and his colleagues (Moll et al., 1992) at the University of Arizona represents an important and all-too-rare collaboration between researchers and teachers aimed at utilizing community-based knowledge in classroom settings. Drawing on the principle that "the students' community represents a resource of enormous importance for educational change and improvement," teachers and researchers involved in his work have interviewed parents and other community members to identify the information and skills or "funds of knowledge" that are available to Mexicano households through an elaborate set of social networks that connects each household to other households and institutions. Teacher-researchers participating in the project then organize their curriculum around this information and these skills. In addition, they call upon the expertise of community members in their efforts to incorporate community-based knowledge sources into their curriculum.

Ethnographic research that situates the school experiences of language-minority children within the context of culture, community, and society has

1 When describing their intent, Warren and Roseberry (1995:1) state: "We intend to illustrate how our perspective on learning in science is emerging through contact with socioculturally based theoretical perspectives and with the everyday experiences of teachers and students as they work to build sense-making communities in their classrooms."

provided a rich and complex portrayal of variations in the range of social contexts and circumstances that influence academic performance. While much of this research has focused on those factors implicated in the difficulties students encounter in school, its overall message situates the issue of academic achievement within the context of the social environments in which students participate, consistent with the view that knowledge is socially constructed.

Differential Treatment

While cultural mismatch is one explanation for the relatively poor academic performance of language-minority children, another avenue of research, known in the literature as differential treatment studies, starts from the assumption that some of those children may not be socialized toward academic achievement. This literature has contributed to the view that language-minority students, along with other ethnic minority students, are treated differently from mainstream students as a result of forces both within and outside of school that implicitly and explicitly promote and sustain the perspectives and institutions of the majority. Ogbu, a primary contributor to this view (Ogbu, 1978; Ogbu and Matute-Bianchi, 1986), has focused on how societal forces have contributed to socialization and acculturation patterns that ultimately influence minority students' academic achievement. Other researchers have concentrated on schools and classrooms when investigating the interaction among cultural, societal, and school influences on student achievement.

Like cultural mismatch studies, differential treatment studies focus on different kinds of comparisons, including those within a single classroom (e.g., Moll and Diaz, 1987) and those within the context of an entire school population (e.g., Gibson, 1988; Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco, 1995; Tuan, 1995; Harklau, 1994). As Losey (1995) reports, some of the early differential treatment studies include large-scale studies with many subjects, while more recent research has tended to take the form of ethnographic or qualitative accounts of a classroom or school. The latter studies have shown how schools engage in a number of practices that favor the status quo by enabling middle- and upper-class English-speaking students to progress through an educational pipeline that is often inaccessible to low-income ethnic minority students, including those who are deemed to have limited English proficiency. Studies that compare the experiences of language-minority students who have been successful in school with those who have had difficulties have provided important insights into the complex role played by culture and discrimination in the academic experiences of these students.

Despite the vivid and complex picture provided by these studies, it is often difficult to assess the degree to which differential treatment actually explains the circumstances faced by the groups under study. One major problem is operationalizing the term "underachievement" or "lower achievement" as used to

characterize the groups under study. Studies seldom rely on individually assessed data on learning outcomes, particularly as pertains to the students being studied, because such data are seen as part of the positivistic paradigm with which the researchers contrast themselves. Instead, general descriptions of student underachievement (i.e., percentage of dropouts in a given ethnic group, average grade point) or information about the amount and nature of student participation (e.g., total amount of student talk) are used. Assessments of student learning tied to teachers' instructional goals are almost always lacking in these studies.

Another related problem is the inability to determine whether a given set of circumstances is really the cause of the difficulty students encounter in school. This problem is most apparent in the mismatch studies, which leave an important question unanswered: Which of the differences are the important ones for explaining student underachievement? The qualitative designs used in these studies do not establish causal connections between particular discontinuities and student learning. For most researchers working within this tradition, of course, this criticism is not a valid concern.

Cultural Differences in Achievement Motivation

A major nexus of hypotheses about the relatively poor academic performance of language-minority (and English-speaking ethnic minority) children implicates cultural differences in achievement motivation—the set of beliefs children hold about how and why to do well in school. The notion that achievement motivation may vary culturally has been supported by cross-national studies (e.g., Stevenson et al., 1990; Stevenson et al., 1986) showing that Asian children believe high achievement is the result of effort, whereas American children believe it is the result of innate ability. In the United States, however, these ethnic differences are eliminated or even reversed: second-generation Korean American children attribute success to ability more than do European American children (Choi et al., 1994), and high achievers across a variety of ethnic groups (African American, Latino, Indochinese American, and European American, all low-income) attribute their success to their high innate ability (Bempechat et al., in press).

Further analysis of the achievement motivation of Latino and Indochinese immigrant children suggests they have similar perceptions of parental socialization strategies and similar theories of educational success and failure. Nonetheless, the Indochinese immigrants were found to perform better than the Latino children (Bempechat and Williams, 1995). Moreover, Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco (1995) found that adolescents of Mexican descent showed higher academic achievement and orientation to academic achievement in the immigrant group than in later generations. One aspect of assimilation seems to be a lowering of academic goals, perhaps because of incorporation into a caste-like minority

status or peer stigmatization of high achievement (Ogbu, 1995). It may be that Asian immigrants are less susceptible to the negative consequences of assimilation because, as voluntary immigrants, they place their faith in schools as agents of improvement (DeVos, 1978).

The above findings suggest that while achievement motivation is an important factor in helping to explain school success, it does not explain differences in success among language-minority groups or between immigrant and mainstream groups.

Children's Social and Group Relationships

Research by Harrison (cited in Garcia, 1993) indicates that the dialects spoken by students influence teacher perceptions of their academic ability, the students' learning opportunities, evaluations of their contributions to class, and the way they are grouped for instruction. The languages students speak also influence perceptions of their academic ability and their learning opportunities (Ryan and Carranza, 1977). Language can be the basis as well for categorization and the formation of ingroups and outgroups, especially within an institutional context in which the languages spoken have unequal status. Languages are often symbols of group boundaries and are therefore the sources of intergroup conflicts and tensions (Giles, 1977; Issacs, 1992). The following subsections examine studies of these issues in four areas: social identity theory, or the minimal group paradigm; the contact hypothesis; cooperative learning and interracial contact; and curriculum interventions.

Social Identity Theory: The Minimal Group Paradigm

Whenever ingroups and outgroups form, stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination develop. Consequently, it becomes necessary for educators to design and implement strategies for improving intergroup relations. Social psychological theory and research addressing what is known as social identity theory or the minimal group paradigm indicate that when mere categorization develops, individuals favor the ingroup (their own group) over the outgroup and discriminate against the outgroup (Rothbart and John, 1993; Smith and Mackie, 1995). This phenomenon can occur in situations involving no prior historical conflict and animosity, competition, or physical differences—indeed no important differences at all. Writes Tajfel (1970:98-99), "Whenever we are confronted with a situation to which some form of intergroup categorization appears directly relevant, we are likely to act in a manner that discriminates against the outgroup and favors the ingroup." In a series of studies, Tajfel and colleagues (Tajfel, 1970; Billig and Tajfel, 1973) produced considerable evidence to support the postulate that individuals are likely to evaluate the ingroup more positively than the outgroup and to treat the ingroup more favorably, even when the differences between the

groups are minimal, contrived, and insignificant. Language can become the basis for such categorization when some students speak a particular language and others do not, although little of the existing research on intergroup relations examines variables related to language. Lacking such research, we must glean from existing research those policies and practices which can help improve intergroup relations in linguistically, culturally, and racially diverse classrooms.

The minimal group paradigm is more helpful in explaining the development of ingroup-outgroup boundaries than in suggesting practices for reducing them. One implication of the paradigm is that to increase positive intergroup contact, the salience of group characteristics should be minimized, and a superordinate group with which students from different cultural and language groups can become identified should be constructed. In a classroom characterized by language diversity, group salience is likely to be reduced to the extent that all students become competent in the same languages. For example, in a classroom with both Anglos and Mexican Americans, group salience is increased if only the Mexican American students speak Spanish. However, if both Anglo and Mexican American students become competent in both English and Spanish, this bilingual competency can be the basis for the formation of a superordinate group to which all of the students belong.

Two-way bilingual programs, in which students from two different language groups learn both languages, may provide an effective way of reducing group salience and constructing a superordinate group identity. As an example, 300 students were enrolled in the Amigos two-way elementary school bilingual program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1993 (Lambert and Cazabon, 1994). Half of the students enrolled in the program were native Spanish speakers and half native English speakers. Each language was used as the medium of instruction for half of the school day. Lambert and Cazabon found that the students in the program formed close friendships with members of both their own and the other group.

The Contact Hypothesis

Most of the work in social psychology related to race relations has been guided by the contact hypothesis and related research that emerged out of the events surrounding World War II. The rise of Nazi anti-Semitism and its devastating consequences motivated social scientists in the post-war years to devote considerable attention to theory and research related to improving intergroup relations. The contact hypothesis that guides most of the research and theory in intergroup relations today emerged from the classic work by Williams (1947) and Allport (1954). The hypothesis explains the conditions that must exist in interaction situations among different racial and ethnic groups in order for the interactions to result in positive rather than negative attitudes.

Allport (1954) states that contact between groups improves intergroup relations

when the contact is characterized by four conditions: (1) equal status, (2) cooperation rather than competition, (3) sanctioning by authorities, and (4) interpersonal interactions in which people become acquainted as individuals. Stephan and Stephan (1996) describe the latter condition as "individualized contact." Writes Allport (1979/1954:281):

Prejudice (unless deeply rooted in the structure of the individual) may be reduced by equal status contact between majority and minority groups in the pursuit of common goals. The effect is greatly enhanced if this contact is sanctioned by institutionalized supports (i.e., by law, custom, or local atmosphere), and provided it is of a sort that leads to the perception of common interests and common humanity between members of the two groups.

It should also be noted, however, that despite its significant influence on theory and practice, the contact hypothesis has a number of limitations. Pettigrew (1986:171) suggests that it is a theory "of modest scope derived to explain a particular and limited set of conflicting empirical findings in an applied area of interest—changes in intergroup attitudes as a function of intergroup contact under varying conditions." Moreover, most intergroup research related to classrooms was conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, and almost none of it in the 1990s. Thus, most of the research on race relations and cooperative groups was conducted using African Americans and whites as subjects. Race relations changed in significant ways during the 1980s and 1990s, however, when large numbers of students from Asia and Latin America entered the nation's classrooms. 2 Nevertheless, to improve intergroup relations in the nation's schools, educators must use the best theories available. The contact hypothesis is a theory that can be used to help educational practitioners improve intergroup relations in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms.

Cooperative Learning and Interracial Contact

Since 1970, investigators have accumulated an impressive body of research on the effects of cooperative learning groups and activities on students' racial attitudes, friendship choices, and achievement. Much of this research has been conducted as well as reviewed by investigators such as Aronson and colleagues (Aronson and Bridgeman, 1979; Aronson and Gonzalez, 1988), Cohen and colleagues (Cohen, 1972, 1986; Cohen and Roper, 1972; Cohen and Lotan, 1995), Johnson and Johnson (1981, 1991), Slavin (1979, 1983, 1985), and Slavin and Madden (1979). Schofield (1995) has written an informative review of this

2 Between 1981 and 1990, about 67 percent of the immigrants that entered the United States came from Mexico and nations in Central America and Asia; less than 10 percent came from Europe (Hansen and Bachu, 1995).

research, most of which has been conducted using elementary and high school students as subjects (Slavin, 1983, 1985).

The research on cooperative learning and interracial contact that has been conducted since 1970 is grounded in the theory of intergroup relations developed by Allport (1954). The results of this research lend considerable support to the postulate that if the conditions stated by Allport are present in the contact situations, cooperative interracial contact in schools has positive effects on both student interracial behavior and academic achievement (Aronson and Gonzalez, 1988; Slavin, 1979, 1983). In his review of 19 studies of the effects of cooperative learning methods, Slavin (1985) found that 16 showed positive effects on interracial friendships. In a more recent review, Slavin (1995) also describes the positive effects of cooperative groups on cross-racial friendships, racial attitudes, and behavior.

Most of this research supports the following postulates: (1) students of color and white students have a greater tendency to make cross-racial friendship choices after they have participated in interracial cooperative learning teams (Aronson and Bridgeman, 1979; Slavin, 1979); and (2) the academic achievement of students of color, such as African Americans and Mexican Americans, is increased when cooperative learning activities are used, while the academic achievement of white students remains about the same in both cooperative and competitive learning situations (Aronson and Gonzalez, 1988; Slavin, 1985). Investigators have also found that cooperative learning methods increase student motivation and self-esteem (Slavin, 1985) and help students develop empathy (Aronson and Bridgeman, 1979).

An essential characteristic of effective cooperative learning groups and methods is that the students experience equal status in the contact situation (Allport, 1954). Cohen (1972) points out that in an initial contact situation, both African American and white students may attribute higher status to whites that may perpetuate white dominance. Cohen and Roper (1972) designed an intervention to change this expectation for African American and white students. She also implemented a project in bilingual classrooms made up largely of children of Hispanic background with a small proportion of white, African American, and Asian children (Cohen and Intili, 1981; Cohen, 1984a, 1984b). Mixed groups of children worked together in learning centers on math and science activities; bilingual versions of the materials were available.

The research by Cohen and Roper (1972) indicates that equal status between groups in interracial and interethnic situations must be constructed by teachers, rather than assumed. If students from diverse racial, ethnic, and language groups are mixed without structured interventions that create equal-status conditions in the contact situation, racial and ethnic categorization and conflict are likely to increase. In a series of perceptive and carefully designed studies that span two decades, Cohen and colleagues (Cohen, 1984a, 1984b; Cohen and Roper, 1972; Cohen and Lotan, 1995) have consistently found that contact among different

groups without deliberate interventions to increase equal status and positive interactions will increase rather than reduce intergroup tensions. Cohen (1994) has developed practical guidelines and strategies that can be used by teachers and other practitioners to create equal status within racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse classrooms.

There is a great deal of discussion but little agreement about what constitutes equal status in intergroup contact situations. Some researchers interpret equal status to mean equal socioeconomic status. For example, in his summary of favorable and unfavorable conditions that influence interracial contact, Amir (quoted in Hewstone and Brown, 1986:7) describes the following as an unfavorable condition: ''contact between a majority and a minority group, when the members of the minority group are of lower status or are lower in any relevant characteristics than the members of the majority group." Yet Cohen and Roper (1972) interpret equal status differently. Although the African American and white students in their study were from different social-class groups, the researchers created equal status in the classroom by modifying the students' perceptions of each racial group. They accomplished this by assigning the African-American students a task that increased their status in the classroom. Cohen and Roper applied a social-psychological, rather than a socioeconomic, view of equal status.

Curriculum Interventions

The representations of different ethnic, racial, and language groups that are embedded in curriculum materials and textbooks and within the activities and teaching strategies of instructors privilege some groups of students (thus increasing their classroom status) and erode the status of others by reinforcing their marginal status in the larger society. Studies of textbooks indicate that the images of groups they project reflect those which are institutionalized within the larger society (Sleeter and Grant, 1991). If we view status from a social-psychological perspective, as do Cohen and Roper (1972), a multicultural curriculum that includes representations of diverse groups in realistic and complex ways can help equalize the status of all groups within the classroom or school. Only a few studies of curriculum intervention are reviewed here; see Stephan (1985) and Banks (1993, 1995) for more comprehensive reviews.

Since the 1940s, several curriculum intervention studies have been conducted to determine the effects of multi-ethnic and -racial lessons and materials, role playing, and other kinds of simulated experiences on the attitudes and perceptions of students. The limitations of these studies are similar to those that characterize most intergroup relations studies, such as those on categorization (Tajfel, 1970) and cooperative groups (Slavin, 1985). Most curriculum intervention studies are related to African Americans and whites, are of rather short duration, involve little follow-up, rarely measure the actual behavior of the subjects,

use a variety of measures that have low intercorrelation, and have used interventions that are often not well defined so that it is difficult for the studies to be replicated by other researchers (Banks, 1995).

Despite the limitations of these studies, however, they provide guidelines that can help educators improve intergroup relations in the nation's classrooms and schools. In a study conducted by Litcher and Johnson (1969), white second grade children developed more positive racial attitudes after using multi-ethnic readers. However, when Litcher et al. (1973) replicated this study using photographs instead of readers, the children's racial attitudes were not significantly changed. The investigators suggested that the shorter length of the latter study (1 month versus 4) and the different racial compositions of the two communities in which the studies were conducted could help explain why there were no significant effects on the children's racial attitudes in the second study. (The community in which the second study was conducted had a much higher percentage of African American residents than did the community in which the first was conducted.)

The effects of a simulation on the racial attitudes of third graders were examined by Weiner and Wright (1973). They divided a class into orange and green people. The children wore colored armbands that designated their group status. On one day of the intervention, the students who wore orange armbands experienced discrimination; on the other day, the children who wrote green armbands were the victims. On the third day and again 2 weeks later, the children expressed less-prejudiced beliefs and attitudes.

The effects of multi-ethnic social studies materials and related experiences on the racial attitudes of 4-year-old African American children were examined by Yawkey and Blackwell (1974). The children were divided into three groups. The students in group 1 read and discussed the materials. The group 2 students read and discussed the materials and also took a related field trip. The students in group 3 experienced the traditional preschool curriculum. The interventions in groups 1 and 2 had a significant, positive effect on the students' racial attitudes toward African Americans and whites.

Research indicates that curriculum interventions such as plays, folk dances, music, and role playing can also have positive effects on the ethnic and racial attitudes of students. Four plays about African Americans, Chinese Americans, Jews, and Puerto Ricans increased racial acceptance and cultural knowledge among fourth, fifth, and sixth graders in the New York City schools (Gimmestad and DeChiara, 1982). McGregor (1993) used meta-analysis to integrate findings of 26 studies and examine the effects of role playing and antiracist teaching on reducing prejudice in students. He concluded that role playing and antiracist teaching "significantly reduce racial prejudice, and do not differ from each other in their effectiveness" (p. 215).

With particular relevance to language-minority children, two-way bilingual programs have been shown to foster friendships across ethnic lines, as well as

high self-esteem among both the language-minority and language-majority children (Cazabon et al., 1993; Lambert and Cazabon, 1994). The Lambert and Cazabon (1994) study of third-graders who had been in a two-way program since kindergarten found that the children expressed a preference for multi-ethnic classrooms. Of course, such attitudes may be less a product of the program than a reflection of the home experiences of children whose parents chose such a program.

Parental Involvement in Children's School Learning

There may be differing views between home and school regarding parents' appropriate role in the education of their children. Parents may feel that school subjects are the responsibility of the teacher, that the parent is responsible only for sending the child to school ready to learn. American schools, on the other hand, value a certain amount of parental participation in education and may unwittingly punish parents who fail to contribute in the culturally prescribed way (see Hidalgo et al., 1995).

Much research has emphasized the parental role in ensuring children's academic achievement (Epstein, 1990, 1992). Parents are seen as providing their children with motivational resources, including self-esteem, agency, and self-control (e.g., Connell and Wellborn, 1990), and as helping to instill in them high expectations and good work habits (Entwisle and Alexander, in press). Parents often establish partnerships with their children's schools, thus extending school learning effectively into the home and reinforcing academic values outside school (Henderson, 1987; Dornbusch and Ritter, 1988). Positive effects of such partnerships have been found with both low- and middle-income populations, as well as populations of different racial/ethnic groups (Comer, 1986; Delgado-Gaitan, 1990; Epstein and Dauber, 1991; Dauber and Epstein, 1993; Hidalgo et al., 1995; Robledo Montecel, 1993).

Studies describing parental involvement in immigrant and language-minority families can be classified according to Epstein's types or categories of involvement. The first type covers actions taken in the home to promote child academic achievement; much evidence suggests that immigrant and language-minority children benefit from this form of parental involvement. For example, ethnographic work reveals that Puerto Rican parents use four different strategies—monitoring, communication, motivational, and protective—to promote their children's academic success (Hidalgo et al., 1995). Monitoring strategies are actions related to the academic learning of the child; communication strategies are processes that aim to foster open, nurturing family relationships; motivational strategies stimulate the child's interest in school; and protective strategies are actions geared to maintaining child safety.

Chinese American parents display two patterns of parental involvement based on, among other things, whether they are recent immigrants. Siu's (1995) longitudinal

ethnographic study found that immigrant Chinese American parents tightly structured their children's learning environment because the parents were often unfamiliar with the school and its ways. These parents tried to ensure their children's academic success by engaging in such tasks as assigning additional homework. The Chinese American parents who themselves had experienced schooling in the United States allowed their children more choices, placing less emphasis on regulated academic work and more on independence and creativity. Siu labels these two parental involvement approaches low- and high-security patterns, respectively.

Vélez-Ibañez and Greenberg's (1992) qualitative work with Mexican-American families defines domains of knowledge transmitted by families to their children, which, borrowing from Moll (1992), they call "funds of knowledge." Mexican American families express a preference for social networks in which families operate to form clusters of social relations: "…these networks form social contexts for the transmission of knowledge, skills, information, and assistance, as well as cultural values and norms" (Moll et al., 1990:4). Funds of knowledge are reaffirmed and maintained through the interchange of information within the social relational framework.

In her qualitative study of 59 Puerto Rican families of high- and low-achieving students, Diaz-Soto (1988) found that "parents acted as facilitators within an organized framework of expectations" (p. 19). Diaz-Soto found a number of recurrent themes in the homes of high achievers: language (parents used both Spanish and English in communicating with their children), aspirations (parents held high expectations for their children's future careers), discipline (parents employed consistent controlling strategies), and protectiveness ("parents always knew where their children were") (p. 12).

These and related studies reveal parental behaviors that foster child learning. However, those behaviors may not be visible to school personnel, and the learning may not be highly valued at school, either. Teachers' notions of desirable parent involvement include coming to conferences, responding to notes, and participating in the classroom—notions that may be foreign to immigrant parents (Allexsaht-Snider, 1992; Matsuda, 1989). Explicit information from teachers about their expectations for parental involvement may well not be communicated to parents (Delgado-Gaitan, 1990, 1993; Glenn, 1996) in the absence of explicit programs such as parent centers designed to promote the exchange of such information (Johnson, 1993, 1994; Rubio, 1995). Two-generation literacy programs (McCollum, 1993), parent training seminars (Smith, 1993), and Epstein's program Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork (Epstein et al., 1995) have all been demonstrated to help align parental involvement with teacher expectations.

Research Needs

4-1. Research is needed to examine what innovative classroom organizations and interventions, such as curriculum content, can influence children's views of themselves and of members of other ethnic groups, promoting cross-ethnic friendships and positive regard.

There is some evidence, both from experimental studies and from educational experiments such as desegregation and two-way bilingual programs, that it is possible to promote healthy cross-ethnic relationships as well as positive self-identities for children from minority groups. These demonstrations, however, have been few and limited in the range of groups they have involved. Fostering full participation as a productive citizen in a society that is characterized by racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity requires incorporating positive intergroup relations into our goals for school outcomes and assessing the best ways of achieving this end.

4-2. There is a need for research on academic learning, including both literacy learning and content area learning, that incorporates information about the social and motivational factors known to affect outcomes. Does excellent instruction take into account home-school mismatches or simply teach children the school discourse effectively? Does promoting parent-school contact affect children's learning by increasing motivation, by changing teacher attitudes, or by enabling parents to help their children more effectively? Can we devise programs that directly affect children's motivation to succeed in order to examine secondary effects on their academic outcomes?

We argue that fully understanding the nature of school achievement for language-minority children, as for native English speakers, requires operating with a model that incorporates both cognitive and social/motivational factors known to be of importance. Future research should attempt at least to acknowledge the relevance of the full array of factors, and if possible to assess the contributions of both cognitive and social/motivational processes in ensuring school success.

Status Differences Among Children's Language

4-3. There are two important questions for research regarding status differences among various languages. First, what are the consequences of such differences for children's intergroup and interpersonal relations? Second, how do teachers' perceptions of the status of children's languages influence their interactions with, expectations of, and behavior toward the children?

Most of the current intergroup studies conceptualize problems of intergroup relations as African American/white, with African Americans often viewed as "the problem." Myrdal and colleagues (Myrdal et al., 1944) titled their study, which was destined to become a classic, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy . Today we realize that intergroup problems in the United States are much more complex than African American/white. Studies are needed to examine intergroup relations both across and within ethnic groups, e.g., Mexican Americans/African Americans and Mexican Americans/Puerto Rican Americans.

Nonobtrusive studies that examine intergroup relations in natural settings are also needed. Most existing intergroup studies are laboratory or curriculum interventions that have a highly limited focus. It is difficult to generalize some of the findings of these studies to the world of classrooms and schools.

In addition, studies are needed to describe the extent to which language-minority students are stigmatized because of their language characteristics and how those characteristics affect their self-perceptions and classroom status. Studies are also needed to develop interventions that can help raise the status of language-minority students in classrooms and schools.

New paradigms and theories that can guide research and practice in intergroup relations need to be conceptualized and tested empirically. Existing paradigms and theories, such as social identity theory and the contact hypothesis, need to be seriously examined in light of the important demographic changes that have occurred in U.S. society within the last two decades. These paradigms and theories were developed during a time when race relations problems in the United States were different in important ways. Although they are the best we have to guide interventions at this time, thoughtful funding of field-initiated research is likely to attract a new generation of scholars into intergroup relations research—many from racial and language-minority communities—who are most likely to develop new paradigms, theories, and findings that are more appropriate for a new century.

Home-School Alignment in Instructional Practices

4-4. Research needs to address the alignment between home and school. Are there classroom structures and practices that are particularly familiar to language-minority children and thus promote their learning by minimizing home-school mismatches? Are there procedures for inducting language-minority children into novel classroom and instructional interactions that promote their learning of English and of subject matter?

Novel instructional practices are often seen as universally desirable, rather than as possibly more helpful for some subgroups of children than others. Careful attention to the kinds of instructional interactions that occur in the homes of

language-minority children is needed, as well as much more work on analyzing the nature of the classroom organization and of instructional interactions in classrooms that serve these children successfully.

Academic Socialization in Language-Minority Homes

4-5. Research is needed to examine the nature of socialization practices in the homes of language-minority children with regard to both content (e.g., exposure to literacy, opportunities for participation in substantive conversations) and socialization in ways of learning (e.g., through observation versus participation, in a relationship of collaboration versus respectful distance from the expert).

E nough research has been done on cultural differences in home socialization practices with regard to school learning that we know these differences exist. We have, however, almost no information about these issues for many of the ethnic groups that are now well represented among America's language-minority children. We have some knowledge of these socialization practices among families of Mexican descent, but know almost nothing about them among Puerto Rican, Santo Domingan, Central American, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Haitian, or Cape Verdean families. Much more basic descriptive work is needed, both as input to understanding the factors that operate in academic achievement and as input to the education of teachers who will have these children in their classrooms.

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How do we effectively teach children from homes in which a language other than English is spoken?

In Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children , a committee of experts focuses on this central question, striving toward the construction of a strong and credible knowledge base to inform the activities of those who educate children as well as those who fund and conduct research.

The book reviews a broad range of studies—from basic ones on language, literacy, and learning to others in educational settings. The committee proposes a research agenda that responds to issues of policy and practice yet maintains scientific integrity.

This comprehensive volume provides perspective on the history of bilingual education in the United States; summarizes relevant research on development of a second language, literacy, and content knowledge; reviews past evaluation studies; explores what we know about effective schools and classrooms for these children; examines research on the education of teachers of culturally and linguistically diverse students; critically reviews the system for the collection of education statistics as it relates to this student population; and recommends changes in the infrastructure that supports research on these students.

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