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The family creates well-integrated members of society and teaches culture to the new members of society.
The family provides important ascribed statuses such as social class and ethnicity to new members.
The family regulates sexual activity.
Family is responsible for social replacement by reproducing new members, to replace its dying members.
Family gives individuals property rights and also affords the assignment and maintenance of kinship order.
Families offer material and emotional security and provides care and support for the individuals who need to be taken care of.
Enhances the operation and stability of society by systematically teaching certain cognitive skills and knowledge, and transmitting these skills and knowledge from one generation to the next generation.
Education has several manifest and latent functions for society.
Cultural transmission passes culture from one generation to the next and established social values are taught thoroughly.
EducationUH also serves to enhance social and cultural integration in society by bringing together people from diverse social backgrounds so that they share widespread social experiences and thus acquire commonly held societal HUnormsUH, attitudes and beliefs.
Religion (along with the family and law) serves to legitimate (make acceptable) the social structure of any given society.
Religion (along with the family and law) helps to maintain social stability and balance by binding people to the normative aspects of their society.
Religion (along with law) provides a system of behavioral guidelines for society.
Symbolic Interactionism describes society as small groups of individuals interacting based on the various ways that people interpret their various cultural symbols such as spoken, written, and non-verbal language. Our behavior with and among other people (our interaction) is the result of our shared understanding of cultural symbols. This is a micro-level paradigm that describes small-scale processes and small-scale social systems; it is interested in individual behavior.
The most important aspect of the Symbolic Interactionist paradigm is not so much that it is interested in small groups—although that is of great importance—as its interest in the interpretation of cultural symbols. For Symbolic Interactionism, everything in society is based on how we interpret our cultural symbols—media images, language, stereotypes, perceptions, and belief systems. In the US, we have a long history of creating a social mythology that leads many of us to believe that the poor, the minorities, women, non-white, non-Christian people are somehow not as American as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), and are somehow not as deserving of social approval as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). This social mythology is reinforced by the media's portrayal of non-white, non-middle class, non-Christian, etc. Americans as being disease-ridden, criminally-inclined, dangerous, and altogether unacceptable or barely acceptable in American society. This social mythology creates negative symbols that impact the actual, daily lives of the not-well-off, not Christian, not white, not female, etc. citizens and residents in our country. These negative symbols engender fear, hatred, neglect, and deliberate ignorance concerning the lives of those people in our country who are, in some socially defined way, out of the "mainstream" of American society.
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