Interactionists

From an interactionist perspective it is not the structure or system of society that creates and shapes our thoughts, actions and behaviour rather we create society through our constant action and interaction with each other. This is why it is a social action, rather than a social system approach. This is why it is a bottom-up rather than a top-down theory.

Interactionists are interested in how people attempt to make sense of the social world, how we try to interpret other people's behaviour in order to discover what that behaviour means.

The interactionist approach is a micro approach - it looks closely at the day-to-day, face-to-face interactions that people have with each other and at how people attempt to negotiate a shared view of reality.

Interactionists, therefore, ask different questions to those asked by structuralist sociologists. They're less concerned with how the family fits into the structure of society or how the structure of society affects the family - they're much more likely to look at what actually goes on inside families - the day-to-day interactions of family life and how people negotiate their roles within the family.

Structuralist theorists, like functionalists and Marxists might ask questions like:

Q "Why does the family, as we know it, exist?"

Q "What purpose does the family serve for society?"

Q "In whose interests, or for whose benefit, does the family operate?"

Interactionist theorists would be much more likely to ask:

Q "How do people decide who is going to perform what tasks within the family?"

Q "Why do boys tend to stop kissing their Dads after a certain age?"

Q "How do people manage to live together in family groups without wanting to kill each other? (usually...)"

We might say that interactionists are less interested in the "what" of family life and more interested in the "why" and "how." Interactionists might say that we can't hope to understand much about the macro ideas in social life - like the significance of class, ethnicity and gender - without investigating the micro.

One of the earliest interactionist studies was conducted by Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner in 1964. They wanted to look at marriage and the relationships, roles and interactions between husbands and wives. They argued that individuals need to make sense of, and create, some sort of order in the world around them in order to avoid what Durkheim referred to as anomie.

According to Berger & Kellner, in their daily interactions with each each other - especially through conversations - husbands and wives wives create a shared view of the world.