166  CHAPTER 6  Social Interaction in 
Everyday Life
Members of every society rely on social structure to
make sense of everyday situations. As our family’s intro-
duction to the busy streets of Vietnam suggests, the world
can be confusing, even frightening, when society’s rules
are unclear. Let’s take a closer look at the ways in which
societies organize everyday life.
Status
6.2 State the importance of status to social organization.
In every society, people build their everyday lives using
the idea of status, a social position that a person holds. In ev-
eryday use, the word status generally means “prestige,”
as when we say that a college president has more “status”
than a newly hired assistant professor. But sociologically
speaking, both “president” and “professor” are statuses, or
positions, within the collegiate organization.
Status is part of our social identity and helps define
our relationship to others. As Georg Simmel (1950:307,
orig. 1902), one of the founders of sociology, once pointed
out, before we can deal with anyone, we need to know
who the person is.
Status Set
Each of us holds many statuses at once. The term status
set refers to all the statuses a person holds at a given time. A
teenage girl may be a daughter to her parents, a sister to
her brother, a student at her school, and a goalie on her
soccer team.
Status sets change over the life course. A child grows
up to become a parent, a student graduates to become a
lawyer, and a single person marries to become a husband
or wife, sometimes becoming single again as a result of
death or divorce. Joining an organization or finding a job
enlarges our status set; withdrawing from activities makes
it smaller. Over a lifetime, people gain and lose dozens of
statuses.
Ascribed and Achieved Status
Sociologists classify statuses in terms of how people at-
tain them. An ascribed status is a social position a person re-
ceives at birth or takes on involuntarily later in life. Examples
status  a social position that a person holds
ascribed status  a ­social achieved status  a social
position a person ­receives position a person takes on
at birth or takes on voluntarily that reflects
­involuntarily later in life personal ability and effort
status set  all the master status  a status that
statuses a person holds has special importance for
at a given time social identity, often shaping a
person’s entire life
of ascribed statuses include being a daughter, a Cuban,
a teenager, or a widower. Ascribed statuses are matters
about which we have little or no choice.
By contrast, an achieved status refers to a social posi-
tion a person takes on voluntarily that reflects personal ability
and effort. Achieved statuses in the United States include
college student, Olympic athlete, nurse, software writer,
police officer, and thief.
In the real world, of course, most statuses involve a
combination of ascription and achievement. That is, peo-
ple’s ascribed statuses influence the statuses they achieve.
People who achieve the status of lawyer, for example,
are likely to share the ascribed benefit of being born into
relatively well-off families. By the same token, many less
desirable statuses, such as criminal, drug addict, or unem-
ployed worker, are more easily achieved by people born
into poverty.
Master Status
Some statuses matter more than others. A master status
is a status that has special importance for social identity, often
shaping a person’s entire life. For most people, a job is a mas-
ter status because it reveals a great deal about a person’s
social background, education, and income. In a few cases,
name is a master status; being in the Bush or Kennedy
family attracts attention and creates opportunities.
A master status can be negative as well as positive.
Take, for example, serious illness. Sometimes people, even
longtime friends, avoid cancer patients or people with
AIDS because of their illnesses. As another example, the
fact that all societies limit the opportunities of women
makes gender a master status.
Sometimes a physical disability serves as a master sta-
tus to the point where we dehumanize people by seeing
them only in terms of their disability. The Thinking About
Diversity box shows how.
Role
6.3 State the importance of role to social organization.
A second important social structure is role, behavior ex-
pected of someone who holds a particular status. A person holds
a status and performs a role (Linton, 1937). For example,
holding the status of student leads you to perform the role
of attending classes and completing assignments.
Both statuses and roles vary by culture. In the United
States, the status of “uncle” refers to the brother of a

Thinking About Diversity: Race, Class, and Gender
Physical Disability as a Master ­Status
Physical disability works in much the same ways as class,
gender, or race in defining people in the eyes of others. In
the following interviews, two women explain how a physical
disability can become a master status—a trait that overshad-
ows everything else about them. The first voice is that of
twenty-nine-year-old Donna Finch, who lives with her hus-
band and son in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and holds a master’s
degree in social work. She is also blind.
Most people don’t expect handicapped people to grow
up; they are always supposed to be children… . You
Modern technology means that most soldiers
who lose limbs in war now survive and
return to civilian life. How do you think the
loss of an arm or a leg affects a person’s social
identity and sense of self?
mother or a father. In Vietnam, the word for “uncle” is dif-
ferent on the mother’s and father’s sides of the family, and
the two men have different responsibilities. In every so-
ciety, actual role performance varies with an individual’s
unique personality, and some societies permit more indi-
vidual expression of a role than others.
Role Set
Because we hold many statuses at once—a status set—
everyday life is a mix of many roles. Robert Merton (1968)
role  behavior expected role set  a number of roles
of someone who holds a attached to a single status
­particular status
CHAPTER 6  Social Interaction in Everyday Life 167
aren’t supposed to date, you aren’t supposed to have
a job, somehow you’re just supposed to disappear. I’m
not saying this is true of anyone else, but in my own
case I think I was more intellectually mature than most
children, and more emotionally immature. I’d say that
not until the last four or five years have I felt really whole.
Rose Helman is an elderly woman who has retired from
her job and lives near New York City. She suffers from spinal
meningitis and is also blind.
You ask me if people are really different today
than in the ’20s and ’30s. Not too much. They are still
fearful of the handicapped. I don’t know if fearful is
the right word, but uncomfortable at least. But I can
understand it somewhat; it happened to me. I once
asked a man to tell me which staircase to use to get
from the subway out to the street. He started giving
me directions that were confusing, and I said, “Do you
mind taking me?” He said, “Not at all.” He grabbed me
on the side with my dog on it, so I asked him to take
my other arm. And he said, “I’m sorry, I have no other
arm.” And I said, “That’s all right, I’ll hold onto the
jacket.” It felt funny hanging onto the sleeve without
the arm in it.
What Do You Think?
1. Have you ever had a disease or disability that became a
master status? If so, how did others react?
2. How might such a master status affect someone’s
­personality?
3. Can being very fat or very thin serve as a master status?
Why or why not?
Source: Based on Orlansky and Heward (1981).
introduced the term role set to identify a number of roles
attached to a single status.
Figure 6–1 on page 168 shows four statuses of one
person, each status linked to a different role set. First,
as a professor, this woman interacts with students (the
teacher role) and with other academics (the colleague
role). ­Second, in her work as a researcher, she gathers and
­a nalyzes data (the fieldwork role) that she uses in her
­publications (the author role). Third, the woman occupies
the status of “wife,” with a marital role (such as confidante
and sexual partner) toward her husband, with whom she
shares household duties (domestic role). Fourth, she holds
the status of “mother,” with routine responsibilities for her
children (the maternal role), as well as toward their school
and other organizations in her community (the civic role).
168  CHAPTER 6  Social Interaction in Everyday Life
ROLE
Teacher Colleague
role role
Professor
Domestic STATUS
role
Mother
Wife
Marital
role SET
Researcher
Fieldwork Author
role role
SETS
Figure 6–1  Status Set and Role Sets
A status set includes all the statuses a person holds at a given time.
The status set defines who we are in society. The many roles linked
to each status define what we do.
A global perspective shows that the roles people use
to define their lives differ from society to society. In low-in-
come countries, people spend fewer years as students, and
family roles are often very important to social identity. In
high-income nations, people spend more years as students,
and family roles are typically less important to social iden-
tity. Another dimension of difference involves housework.
As Global Map 6–1 on the next page shows, especially in
poor countries, housework falls heavily on women.
Role Conflict and Role Strain
People in modern, high-income nations juggle many re-
sponsibilities demanded by their various statuses and
roles. As most mothers (and more and more fathers) can
testify, the combination of parenting and working outside
the home is physically and emotionally draining. Sociolo-
gists thus recognize role conflict as conflict among the roles
connected to two or more statuses.
We experience role conflict when we find ourselves
pulled in various directions as we try to respond to the
many statuses we hold. One response to role conflict is
deciding that “something has to go.” More than one poli-
tician, for example, has decided not to run for office be-
cause of the conflicting demands of a hectic campaign
schedule and family life. In other cases, people put off
having children in order to stay on the “fast track” for ca-
reer success.
Even roles linked to a single status may make com-
peting demands on us. Role strain refers to tension among
the roles connected to a single status. A college professor may
role conflict  conflict role strain  tension among
among the roles connected the roles connected to a single
to two or more statuses status
Maternal enjoy being friendly with students. At the same time, how-
role
ever, the professor must maintain the personal distance
needed to evaluate students fairly. In short, performing the
various roles attached to even one status can be something
Civic of a balancing act.
role
One strategy for minimizing role conflict is separat-
ing parts of our lives so that we perform roles for one sta-
tus at one time and place and carry out roles connected to
another status in a completely different setting. A familiar
example of this idea is deciding to “leave the job at work”
before heading home to the family.
Role Exit
After she left the life of a Catholic nun to become a univer-
sity sociologist, Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh began to study
her own experience of role exit, the process by which people
disengage from important social roles. Studying a range of
“exes,” including ex-nuns, ex-doctors, ex-husbands, and
ex-alcoholics, Ebaugh identified elements common to the
process of becoming an “ex.”
According to Ebaugh (1988), the process begins as
people come to doubt their ability to continue in a cer-
tain role. As they imagine alternative roles, they ulti-
mately reach a tipping point when they decide to pursue
a new life. Even as they are moving on, however, a past
role can continue to influence their lives. Exes carry with
them a self-image shaped by an earlier role, which can
interfere with building a new sense of self. For example,
an ex-nun may hesitate to wear stylish clothing and
makeup.
Exes must also rebuild relationships with people
who knew them in their earlier life. Learning new social
skills is another challenge. For example, Ebaugh reports,
ex-nuns who enter the dating scene after decades in the
church are often surprised to learn that sexual norms
are very different from those they knew when they were
teenagers.
The Social Construction
of Reality
6.4 Describe how we socially construct reality.
In 1917, the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello wrote
a play called The Pleasure of Honesty about a charac-
ter named Angelo Baldovino, a brilliant man with a