Group Structure and Models of Social Group Formation
Senior 6 · Psychology
Group Structure and Models of Social Group Formation
Lesson 1 of 5
25 min
Look at the list and decide, for each, whether its members form a real group:
Most people say the family and the cooperative are groups, the people born in 2008 are not, and hesitate over the passengers and the Umuganda workers. Social psychologists have tools for making these judgements precisely.
Definition
Social group: two or more people who interact with one another, are interdependent, share some goals or a common identity, and have at least some structure (roles and norms). Kurt Lewin stressed "interdependence of fate": what happens to one member affects the others.
Entitativity: the degree to which a set of people is perceived as a single, unified entity rather than a loose collection (Donald Campbell, 1958).
The American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1909) described primary groups as those "characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation". He called them primary because they are the first and most basic source of a person's values, identity and sense of belonging. His examples were the family, children's play groups and the neighbourhood.
Features: small size; face-to-face, personal and emotional relationships; long duration; members valued for who they are, not for what they do; the relationship is an end in itself. Examples in Rwanda: the family (umuryango), a close circle of friends, the members of a small prayer cell.
Later sociologists contrasted primary groups with secondary groups: larger, more impersonal groups formed to achieve a specific goal. Relationships are partial and role-based (you know the cooperative's treasurer mainly as treasurer), and membership can end when the goal or the need ends. Examples: a school, a savings and credit cooperative (SACCO), a trade union, a political party, a professional association.
| Feature | Primary group | Secondary group |
|---|---|---|
| Size | Small | Usually large |
| Relationships | Personal, emotional, whole-person | Impersonal, role-based, partial |
| Purpose | The relationship itself (expressive) | A task or goal (instrumental) |
| Duration | Long, often lifelong | Often temporary or until the goal is met |
| Control of members | Informal: affection, disapproval | Formal: rules, contracts, sanctions |
| Example | A family | A tea cooperative |
The two often overlap: close friendships (a primary group) form inside a school (a secondary group), and they shape how much pupils enjoy and stay in school.
A collective (sometimes called an aggregate or crowd) is a set of people who are in the same place at the same time, but who have little interaction, no lasting structure and no shared identity: bus passengers, a crowd at a football match, people queueing at a bank. A collective can briefly behave like a group: if the bus breaks down, passengers may cooperate to push it, choose a spokesperson and develop a short-lived sense of "us".
A social category is a set of people who share a characteristic but do not necessarily interact or even know one another: people born in 2008, left-handed people, women farmers, S6 candidates. Statisticians, health planners and advertisers work with categories. A category can turn into a group when its members become aware of what they share and organise, for example when S6 candidates form a revision network.
Brian Lickel and colleagues (2000) asked people to rate many kinds of grouping. Intimate groups such as families were seen as most "group-like", task groups next, social categories lower, and loose collections lowest. Entitativity rises with interaction, importance, similarity, shared goals and duration (Figure 1).
Important
Case study: Umuganda. Umuganda is Rwanda's community work, held on the last Saturday of each month, in which able adults aged 18 to 65 take part. The practice dates back to pre-colonial Rwanda and was reintroduced after 1994 as a "home-grown solution"; committees from village (umudugudu) level upwards plan and supervise it (Rwanda Governance Board, 2017). Notice how it moves people along the continuum: neighbours who would otherwise be a mere category (residents of a village) meet face to face, share a goal, and often stay afterwards for a community meeting. Repeated over years, this can build the interaction and shared identity that make a group.
CrashCourse: "Social Groups: Crash Course Sociology #16" (about 10 minutes). Watch for primary and secondary groups, and for how the video describes in-groups, out-groups and reference groups, which come in the next lessons.
Warning
A category is not a group. A common error is to call "the youth" or "women" a group. They are categories unless their members interact, share goals and have structure, as in a youth club or a women's cooperative.
Tip
Four tests for "group": Do they interact? Are they interdependent? Do they share a goal or identity? Do they have structure (roles, norms)? Four "yes" answers mean a group; fewer place it lower on the continuum.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the text, the diagram (Figure 1), the table and the exercises.
