Q3 What is meant by group.Write the importance of group.Write all the types of groups?

Group:
A group is a collection of individuals who have relations to one another that make them
interdependent to some significant degree. As so defined, the term group refers to a class of
social entities having in common the property of interdependence among their constituent
members.

Importance of Social Groups

From friendships to families to entire societies, humans naturally form social groups; in fact, this
tendency is essential to what it means to be human. A social group is any grouping of two or
more interacting people who recognize their relationship with each other as a distinct social unit.
Social groups play an important role in daily life and help humans make meaning of the world
around them.

A Sense of Belonging
Social groups fulfill one of the basic psychological needs for survival: a sense of belonging.
Feeling needed and wanted motivates humans to persist and affects mental health. For this
reason, belonging is an important element of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In this model, humans
must first meet their physiological needs for survival, including shelter, food and basic bodily
functions. Once they meet these needs, they must meet less tangible needs like safety and a sense
of belonging. Only humans who meet these needs have the ability to self-actualize, or make
meaning in their lives.

Family and Friendship

One of the first social groups that an infant human connects with is a family. Families play
crucial roles in meeting survival needs. These include both physiological needs like shelter and
access to food but also psychological needs like security and belonging.

Friendship is another vital social group that most individuals begin to establish early in life.
Further, friendships may form within any social group. Spending a lot of time with people builds
relationships and alliances within the group. Since social groups form due to each member
recognizing the other relationships as an important social unit, the members of a group share
commonalities, which makes it more likely for deeper bonds like friendship to form.

Communication in Social Groups

An important feature of social groups is the way these groups allow friends and peers to
communicate in order to meet needs. Communication itself plays an essential role in life, and
individuals who are unable to communicate or lack social groups may suffer from social
isolation and depression. Many social groups use common terms or in-group language, including
slang or linguistic dialects. Sharing language in this way strengthens the associations within the
group and fosters a sense of shared identity.

Support and Society

Social groups act as a great support system when needed. Groups can identify problems and
unify to help solve them or increase the members' quality of life. The importance of this feature
is why many social services organizations like addiction rehabilitations programs promote group
counseling or support groups. This allows members with a common experience to help each
other and may be especially important if other social groups (like family or friendships) have
been compromised or are not sufficient for support.

Social groups also impact society by allowing like-minded people to accomplish a unified goal.
Examples of this phenomenon include group protests or the formation of unions to improve the
daily lives of individuals living in a shared society. Social groups may be especially important
for disenfranchised members of society since they provide a sense of safety and belonging. The
formation of social groups to support members and work toward societal change is how
marginalized people can respond to that disenfranchisement.

Groups Help Social Survival Also:

Not only from the point of view of survival but also from the viewpoint of leading a successful
life has man depended on groves. By engaging himself in constant relations with others he learns
things and mends his ways.

He keeps his eyes wide open, lends his ears to what others say, and tries to keep his memory ever
fresh to remember the good things of the past and to refrain from repeating the blunders of the
past. In brief, from birth to death, man is engaged in the process of socialisation. Socialisation or
the process of humanisation helps man to develop a personality of his own.

Groups Contribute to the Development of Personality:

Personality is the product of the group life. The ‘self that every individual develops, though’.
Unique, is it a product of the group? No ‘self arises in isolation. Groups provide scope for the
individuals to express their real nature, their talents and abilities.

Hidden potentialities can find their expression only in the context of social groups. What is latent
in man becomes manifest only in groups. The groups shape man’s attributes, his beliefs, his
morals and his ideals.

Emotional developments, intellectual maturity, satisfaction of physical and social needs are
unthinkable without groups. Group is a part of our mental equipment and we are a part of group.
Types of Groups
Primary groups

According to Cooley, primary groups play the most critical role in our lives. The primary group
is usually fairly small and is made up of individuals who generally engage face-to-face in long-
term emotional ways. This group serves emotional needs: expressive functions rather than
pragmatic ones. The primary group is usually made up of significant others, those individuals
who have the most impact on our socialization. The best example of a primary group is the
family.

Secondary groups

Secondary groups are often larger and impersonal. They may also be task-focused and time-
limited. These groups serve an instrumental function rather than an expressive one, meaning that
their role is more goal- or task-oriented than emotional. A classroom or office can be an example
of a secondary group. Neither primary nor secondary groups are bound by strict definitions or set
limits. In fact, people can move from one group to another. A graduate seminar, for example, can
start as a secondary group focused on the class at hand, but as the students work together
throughout their program, they may find common interests and strong ties that transform them
into a primary group.

In-Groups and Out-Groups

Sociologist William Sumner (1840–1910) developed the concepts of in-group and out-group to
explain this phenomenon (Sumner 1906). In short, an in-group is the group that an individual
feels she belongs to, and she believes it to be an integral part of who she is. An out-group,
conversely, is a group someone doesn’t belong to; often we may feel disdain or competition in
relationship to an out-group. Sports teams, unions, and sororities are examples of in-groups and
out-groups; people may belong to, or be an outsider to, any of these. Primary groups consist of
both in-groups and out-groups, as do secondary groups.

While group affiliations can be neutral or even positive, such as the case of a team sport
competition, the concept of in-groups and out-groups can also explain some negative human
behavior, such as white supremacist movements like the Ku Klux Klan, or the bullying of gay or
lesbian students. By defining others as “not like us” and inferior, in-groups can end up practicing
ethnocentrism, racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism manners of judging others negatively
based on their culture, race, sex, age, or sexuality

The Formal Group and the Informal Group:

Some sociologists notice a factor that characterizes groups as formal and informal ones,
according to the ‘rules of behaviour’ that govern them. In an ‘informal group’, the rules of
behaviour or the codes that determine the relationship of individuals comprising it are not fixed
or determined by any process of deliberation.

Friends, lovers and married couples easily fall into the informal group, for these persons can
determine the pattern of their relationship by mutual adjustment, though such adjustments must
be made within the norms set by society. ‘Formal groups’ are, on the other hand, based on rules
that are more or less rigid and, once set down by society, the scope for variations is very limited.

Formality and impersonality determine the basis of the relationship, as in the cases of the
employer and the employee working together under a formal understanding, or the judge
administering justice in a court of law with the help of the arguments made by the advocates of
the parties.

The local Group and the temporary Group:

Members of a family do not belong to a group out of any deliberate choice made by them; when
a child is born in a family, from his own side and also from the side of others in the family his
inclusion in it is a matter-of-fact affair, upon which no deliberate decision can be taken.
Similarly, if a person is born a Bengali or a Punjabi, in the natural course of things he belongs to
the Bengali or the Punjabi community and there arises no question of making a choice in this
regard.

The gathering and the community to which one belongs for short time is a temporary group, the
membership of which is automatic and beyond arguments. A local group, on the other hand, is
one which is constituted with a pre-meditated and a deliberate objective. Political parties, labour
unions, sports clubs and even social clubs are voluntary groups, and no individual is required
compulsorily to enter these bodies.

Reference Groups

A reference group is a group that people compare themselves to it provides a standard of

measurement. In U.S. society, peer groups are common reference groups. Kids and adults pay
attention to what their peers wear, what music they like, what they do with their free time—and
they compare themselves to what they see. Most people have more than one reference group, so
a middle school boy might look not just at his classmates but also at his older brother’s friends
and see a different set of norms. And he might observe the antics of his favorite athletes for yet
another set of behaviors.