Peer Groups

Expanding Our Study of Small Group Communication

SunWolf

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412926867
• eBook ISBN: 9781483343440
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"I enjoyed the book, learned a LOT, and LOVE her creativity in discussing different examples that help group constructs some to life. It represents the breadth of the new Group Communication Division in NCA better than any book I have seen."

—David Seibold, University of California, Santa Barbara

"I can unequivocally state that the proposed text is LONG overdue! Over the years I have reviewed several text proposals. SunWolf?s proposal ranks in the 99th percentile. . . . This is one of the most innovative, heuristic, pragmatic, and engaging proposals I have ever perused."

—Jim L. Query, Jr., University of Houston

"Peer Groups is different from the run-of-the-mill group text book. I can see that my students will learn so much more from Dr. SunWolf?s orientation than they have from the other books I?ve used. The benefits are that the topics related to [students?] practical world and that there is so much to foster in-class discussion. Although many students are familiar with the ?work world,? they are not yet there. Dr. SunWolf provides them with what is relevant in their lives now!"

—Audrey E. Kali, Framingham State College

Clans, cliques, clubs, or classmates: Students of group communication should be encouraged to think critically about concepts to the groups that matter to them most—peers. Peer Groups is the first textbook to explore group communication dynamics with this vital group. Drawing on a combination of traditional and new theories, Dr. SunWolf uses an inviting writing style, shares the words and provocative thinking of real world group members, and draws on research from social psychology, communication, and group dynamics. This innovative book offers suggestions for critical thinking and new behaviors in students? own peer groups and will inspire further exploration of small group dynamics.

Features and Benefits

• Introduces students and researchers to cutting-edge cross-disciplinary thinking with new theories that explain group dynamics and member behaviors: Symbolic-Interpretive Perspective, Group Dialectics, Decisional Regret Theory, Social Comparison Theory, and the Bona Fide Group Perspective
• Examines the dynamics of real world peer groups: children?s play groups, adolescence cliques, street gangs, elite hot task groups, and decision-making juries
• Generates readers? interest in studying group behaviors by drawing upon students? personal experiences with groups
• Brings marginalized groups and ethnicities to the stage, from African American cowboys to multi-ethnic street gangs, including the painful issue of those left out of peer groups
• Offers a student-friendly reference guide with an extensive and easy-to-read table that summarizes group concepts and theories
• Guides classroom discussion, triggers critical thinking, and suggests useful written assignments and tools for break-out discussions with end-of-chapter sections

Intended Audience
This accessible and innovative text is designed for undergraduate students of Communication, Social Psychology, and Sociology. It is designed to supplement and partner with any current group textbook, as well as act as a stand-alone text.

Dr. SunWolf is a scholar of unusual breadth and depth. She is a cross-disciplinary scholar in the fields of legal communication, persuasion, multicultural storytelling, social exclusion, and group decision making. Her national award-winning productivity in the past five years has been astonishing: the publication of five books, 22 journal articles or book chapters, a published educational DVD, and serving on the editorial board of five journals. Dr. SunWolf broke new ground by publishing in a top journal a new theory of communication (Decisional Regret Theory), expanding the field of small group communication to include the study of childhood group processes, gathering data from 680 adolescents in the Bay Area, as well as being the first author in trial advocacy to devote sustained attention to jurors? religious beliefs and the role of empathy and compassion in jury deliberations.

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Peer Group Lenses

Theories and Perspectives

the•o•ry, n., 1. a coherent explanation for events, behaviors, or observations. 2. a proposed explanation or opinion, whose status can be tested. 3. a guess or idea about what causes certain things to happen.

We are all theorists. Our ideas about why things happen, or what causes people to behave in certain ways, are integral parts of our everyday thinking. Our theories might be mistaken, of course, but they often help us feel in control of our social worlds. Our everyday theories also guide our choices—mental tools that can make other people seem (a little) more predictable and life events seem (somewhat) less uncertain. Our personal theories organize our thinking, for better or for worse.

Social science theories operate in much the same way. Their goal is to increase understanding about the world around us. Scholars agree, however, that what distinguishes social science theories from personally held theories is that we attempt to test scientific theories with research, and then to extend or refine these theories in systematic ways.¹ Formal theories and models about social behaviors attempt to fulfill one or more purposes:

to describe behaviors,

to explain behaviors,

to predict future behaviors, or

to offer variables that may change behavior in the future.

For example, Decisional Regret Theory²

1. describes how people talk and think about significant decisions,
2. explains how the counterfactual imagining of possible outcomes appears when people face decisional choices,
3. predicts that people who cannot imagine a positive outcome of a decisional choice will reject it, and
4. offers variables that affect behavior (importance of the decision, unwanted outcomes of past decisions, resolution of imagined unwanted outcomes, anticipation of decisional regret, to name a few).

When a theory or model performs any of these four functions well, helping us understand our own behaviors and those of others around us, it can be argued that such a theory is a practical theory.

Groups can be frustrating places in which to find ourselves (yet they are entirely impossible to avoid), so it is not surprising that formal theories have emerged that attempt to explain group processes and group behaviors. Group research was recently described by leading scholars Poole and Hollingshead as a “fragmented and discipline bound,” with few attempts to connect theory and research across disciplinary boundaries.³ Aptly reflecting the vagaries of real life, however, not all group theories have received their fair share of attention from scholars. Furthermore, some theories that have managed to grab the lion’s share of academic ink have devoted little, if any, attention to explaining or describing what happens in peer groups. We spend most of our life-span group time communicating in peer groups.*

Seven useful perspectives are set forth to guide new thinking about peer group processes, drawing on the latest cross-disciplinary thinking about group dynamics. The specific assumptions of each is described to illustrate how each one is valuable in divergent ways, illuminates different constructs, and contributes to new knowledge about peer group communication, although each contributes differently. A visual tool is offered in Table 1.1 that sets out these theories and perspectives in a way that allows them to be more easily compared and contrasted. In Table 1.1, for each theoretical perspective included, the following is described:

• Key assumptions about groups from that perspective
• Applications to peer groups
• Challenges of studying group dynamics from that perspective

THEORETICAL LIGHTS THAT ILLUMINATE PEER GROUP DYNAMICS

This book shines a spotlight on intriguing (and useful) theories or perspectives that have something to say about communication in peer groups—even though (or perhaps especially because) these newer perspectives have received less attention. These theoretical perspectives can help us understand more about group communication processes in general—and peer group dynamics in particular—because they invite more events to the scholarly group-thinking party.

Symbolic-Interpretive Perspective: The Effects of Symbol Usage

Symbols are one of the primary forms of communication that all people use to share meaning with others. Rituals, objects, colors, music, silences, humor, rewards, punishments, and language are symbolic tools for human communication.

Recently, Frey and SunWolf offered the Symbolic-Interpretive (S-I) Perspective as a useful theoretical framework for understanding small-group dynamics.⁴ An S-I Perspective is concerned with

(a)	understanding how group members use symbols,
(b)	the effects of symbol usage on individual, relational, and collective processes and outcomes, and
(c)	the manner in which groups and group dynamics themselves are the products of such symbolic activity.*

Table 1.1 Group Theories and Perspectives that Apply to Peer Groups

Theory or Perspective	Key Assumptions
Symbolic-Interpretivist Perspective

Applications to Peer Groups	Challenges of Studying Group Dynamics From That Perspective
Useful to group leaders and facilitators by suggesting symbolic practices that create cohesion, satisfaction, and solve peer group challenges (for example, losing a group member or competing with other peer groups).

This perspective is particularly appropriate as a foundation at the outset of this chapter, because the S-I Perspective is a conceptual framework that holds or includes other group theories, including Symbolic Convergence Theory, Structuration Theory, the Group Dialectical Perspective, Decisional Regret Theory, and the Bona Fide Group Perspective (discussed individually below).

The S-I Perspective offers a dynamic understanding of two primary aspects of group life, the use of symbolic communication, and the products of such use. Group research that fits an S-I Perspective might investigate (1) the ways in which group members use symbols (words, objects, or actions that stand for or represent something else) to communicate, as well as the effects of symbol usage on individual, relational, and collective processes and outcomes; or (2) how groups and group dynamics themselves are products of this symbolic activity.

People (therefore, peers) may possess a basic need for symbols, which is said to distinguish them from animals. Even a cursory review of the underlying concepts behind the S-I Perspective demonstrates its applicability to peer groups. Frey has acknowledged the intellectual-philosophical-historical contributions to the S-I Perspective on group life. Symbols allow people to share meaning and to participate in collective action.⁵

Burke asserted that human beings were basically the “symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal.”⁶ MacIntyre claimed that people are “essentially a story-telling animal.”⁷ Fisher offered an entire narrative theory of communication, based on understanding humans as homo narrans who organize experience into stories with plots, central characters, and action sequences that carry implicit and explicit lessons.⁸ Furthermore, collectively, humans create and construct their realities. As people interact in social groups, new truths, perspectives, and “facts” emerge for the members of those groups. Social constructionism, therefore, is a basis for the S-I Perspective. Social constructionism has brought us concepts such as transactive memory (shared systems for encoding, storing, and retrieving information),⁹ shared mental models (mental processes in which people create descriptions of how things function and predict future events), ¹⁰ and negotiated order (when group interaction does not proceed smoothly and individual behaviors do not mesh, individuals must adjust, through explicit or implicit negotiation).¹¹

As a perspective, S-I makes certain assumptions about groups:¹²

1. Any group is, in reality, a concept socially constructed by its members and outside others, rather than an entity in an objective sense.
2. Groups are not fixed containers with static boundaries. They do not exist apart from their environments.
3. Groups are dynamic products resulting from the symbolic activities of their members, which are the primary means by which members create shared reality and groupness.
4. Studying the social construction of any group requires methods that focus on the use and interpretation of symbols.

Frey and SunWolf offered a visual model that articulated the symbolic nature of group dynamics and the constructs of interest to this perspective, reproduced as Figure 1.1.¹³

As portrayed in this model, an S-I Perspective on groups focuses on three aspects of symbolic activities that occur within a group, each of which contains specific constructs of interest:

1. symbolic predispositions,
2. symbolic practices, and
3. symbolic processes and products.

Symbolic predispositions are the tendencies a person may have to do something (that is, to act in a certain way), so symbolic predispositions include the ways in which people are initially inclined toward other people. As group members interact, the S-I Perspective suggests that they engage in symbolic practices (specific communication such as humor, metaphors, rituals, or stories). During symbolic practices, members create symbolic processes and products, which refer to both macrolevel group dynamics (group identity and culture) and the specific outcomes of group symbolic activity (strategies, activities, or decisions). Frey noted that the linking together of processes and products, as opposed to treating them as separate entities, highlights their recursive and reflexive relationship, arguing that group culture is both a process and a product that results from and influences symbolic practices.¹⁴

Figure 1.1 Symbolic-Interpretive Model of Group Predispositions, Practices, Processes, and Products

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Source: Frey, L. R., & Sunwolf. (2005). The symbolic-interpretive perspective on group life. In M. S. Poole & A. Hollingshead (Eds.), Theories of small groups: Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 185–239, Figure 1). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Reproduced with permission.

The S-I model demonstrates that these domains are not mutually exclusive (as visually indicated by overlapping circles) and that they influence one another (as indicated by bidirectional arrows between circles). For example, ethnic diversity in a group (a symbolic predisposition) may create dialectical tensions in the group (symbolic processes and products) that need to be managed through particular rituals (symbolic practices) that subsequently affect how the diversity of new and current members is perceived and interpreted.¹⁵ Symbolic predispositions, practices, processes, and products emerge and merge continually during group formation and, in fact, throughout the c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 Peer Group Lenses
• Chapter 2 Peer Groups in Childhood: Learning the Rules of Peer Play
• Chapter 3 Peer Groups in Adolescence: The Power of Rejection
• Chapter 4 Peer Groups in Neighborhoods: Hoodies, Homies, and Gansta Girls
• Chapter 5 Peer Groups That Super-Task: Hot Groups
• Chapter 6 Peer Groups as Decision Makers: Juries
• Epilogue
• Gratitudes
• Appendix: Social Science Theories That Help Explain Communication Events in Peer Groups
• Chapter Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author