Social Constructions

What are they?

H. Russell Bernard (2002:3) discusses the differences in social science about the nature of our inquiry (also known as epistemology). He says that some believe "that reality is constructed uniquely by each person (the constructivist view) and those of us who start from the principle that external reality awaits our discovery through a series of increasingly good approximations to the truth (the positivist view).

While the perspectives on the nature of social science epistemology differ, the methods for gathering and analyzing data tend to be shared. The methods include both quantitative and qualitative techniques.

The premises of constructivism as an epistemology are:

1. Knowledge is constructed, not transmitted.
2. Prior knowledge impacts the learning process.
3. Initial understanding is local, not global.
4. Building useful knowledge structures requires effortful and purposeful activity.

For background go to the University of Massachusetts Physics Education Research Group

A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVIST VIEW OF COMMUNICATION

1. There are always multiple meanings for every word, symbol or event.
2. Meanings are constantly changing over time, across contexts.
3. Language creates meaning, maintains meaning, reproduces meaning.
4. At any one moment in time, a dominant, often taken for granted meaning exists.
5. Taken together, these meanings, form systems of meaning, which we call culture.
6. The health and well-being of every society depends fundamentally on its systems of cultural production.

Social constructions are found for:

Social Construction Examples

• The Paul Robeson video Paul Robeson: Here I Stand (1999) shows the change in how he was socially constructed by the media in his support of the US fight against facism and in his opposition to US postwar slowness in dismanteling racism.
• The categories San, Bushman as quintessential aboriginal hunters and gathers, foragers, which "function to illuminate and legitimize . . . Euraomaerica's symbolic reconstruction of its own ontology" (Wilmsen 1989:3-4).
• The social constructions of Samoan culture in Mead-Freeman debate.
• What does it mean to be a fisherman's wife. See The Lives of Fishermen's Wives.

References

• Bernard, H. Russell. 2002. Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods, Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
• Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1990. The social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Anchor Books, New York, NY.
• Searle, John R. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality, Free Press, New York N.Y.