BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES - Universitatea de Medicină şi Farmacie

In relation to the stratification of society is elaborated and idea of
status groups. Status groups are communities that are based on ideas of
proper lifestyles and the honor given to people by others. These groups
only exist because of people's ideas of prestige or dishonor. Also, people
in these communities are only supposed to associate with people of like
status, and all other people are looked at as inferiors. Thus human are
likely to interact with people with the same personal income, the same
political views/position, the same religion, nationality, race or social class.
Status can be changed through a process of social mobility,
understood as change of position within the stratification system. A move
in status can be upward (upward mobility), or downward (downward
mobility). Social mobility allows a person to move to another social status
other than the one he or she was born in. Social mobility is more frequent
in societies where achievement rather than ascription is the primary basis
for social status.
The term social role is borrowed by social scientists originally
from the Greek Drama. Greek actors wore masks when they performed in
their drama. This leads us directly to the definition of the concept of social
role. A social role is a set of social norms that govern a person's behavior
in a group and determine his relationships with other group members. Put
somewhat differently a role is the expected pattern of behavior associated
with a given social status. Status and role are reciprocal aspects of the
same phenomenon. Status, or position, is the static aspect that fixes the
individual's position in a group; role is the dynamic behavioral aspect that
defines how the person who occupies the status should behave in different
situations. Each of the statuses involves a role, set of behavior or actionpatterns
that people belonging to a given status are expected to perform.
One plays as many roles as he has statuses. A given man may both
concurrently and sequentially enact the roles of husband, father breadwinner,
and football fan and so on.
Social roles may be linked to blue-prints for behavior that are
handed to the individual, hypothetically, when he becomes a member of a
group. As such these constitute the group's expectations concerning how
one would behave. Thus, whereas the status of a person tells us what he is,
his role will tell us what he does as a member of a status group. There are
no roles without statuses and no statuses without roles. Indeed, there are
some exceptions. Though all statuses imply some role or roles, it is not
always possible to infer people's statuses from what they do, as for
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