How a society is organized

A group is a collection of people interacting together in an orderly way on the basis of shared expectations about one another’s
behavior.

IMPORTANCE OF GROUPS (Salcedo 2002)

 The group is a transmitter of culture.

 The group is a means of social control.
 The group socializes the individual.
 The group is the source of ideas.
 The group trains the individual in communication.

A group is composed of people who share several features, including the following:

 They are in regular contact with one another which must consist of two or more people.
 They share some ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving and must interaction among the members.
 They take one another’s behavior in account and must have shared expectations.
 They have one or more interest or goals in common where the members of the group must possess some sense of common
identity.

Social Category

 Classifying people according to a shared trait or a common status

Social aggregate

 When people gather in the same place at the same time but lack organization or lasting patterns of interaction

Types of groups

- Primary groups – Intimate, personal and informal relationships – Long term, sometimes life long – we develop our self-
identity or who we are – Family members, close friends
- Secondary groups – Impresonal, formal, distant relationships – Short term or temporary – We meet our life long partners
through these – Work, school, associations, etc.

Humans intrinsically categorize people into two social groups: INGROUPS-those like ourselves | Ourgroups-those that differ from
ourselves

Reference groups - Is a group to which an individual compares himself or herself

Kinship, marriage, and the household:

• Family –is defined as a type of social institution that unites people by blood, kinship or alliance into one group within
society.

• Kinship by blood. Kinship is a culture’s system of recognized family roles and relationships that define the obligations,
rights, and boundaries of interaction among the members of a self-recognizing group.

DESCENT & MARRIAGE

UNILINEAL - Descent is identified by tracing the affiliation of a person through descent of only one sex, the female and male, the
mother or the father in the ancestry line.

BILATERAL - Descent traces the affiliation of a person from both the female and the male as recognition of the equal worth and
value both sexes in identifying the ancestry line.

PATRILINEAL - Descent is defined by tracing the ancestry of an individual by his or her relatives from the men, sons or fathers of the
families in the ancestry time.

MATRILINEAL - Descent is identified by tracing the affiliation of an individual by his or her relatives from the women, daughters or
mothers of the families in the ancestry line.