Social World Analysis Essay

A social world analysis is a way of breaking groups of people into analytical categories; it is not a classification system with distinct definitions as will soon be made clear. Strauss describes social worlds as a ‘set of common of joint activities or concerns, bound together by a network of communication’. This baseline distinction can neatly organise people into social groups, for example football players would be considered one ‘social world’ because they share the common goal of playing the game and are together in their teams to achieve their goals. There are more qualifications and attributes to social worlds though; Strauss (1978) describes social worlds in terms of primary activities, sites and technology. The primary activity is

Crowe’s (2001) “Astronomy and Religion (1780-1915): Four Case Studies Involving Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life”. This article details the struggles between religious influences on the field of astronomy throughout history, detailing the juxtaposition of a religious society and new scientific discoveries that shook their beliefs to the core. The religious social world would be in this case practicing Christians in Britain and the United States of America. The common activity or goal of this massive social world would be devotion to and worshipping their god. Their sites are the churches, chapels and any other place they came together to worship. However in such a devoutly Christian world (near the beginning of our time period in particular) the religious ideas and beliefs would permeate every corner of society, creating innumerable social battlegrounds where any ideas conflicting with these beliefs would be contested and controversial. In this way we see a flaw in the simplistic social world’s model, by including only the ‘main’ sites the social world uses you unintentionally exclude all the other sites where there is still a tangible influence by this group. In categorising whole social worlds into these simplistic break-downs like a handful of sites, we are implying that this social world does not extend out of these areas and that it does not also intersect with endless other sites that have a more clear ‘claim’ by another social world on