Social Process Theories: Theories Explained Transcript

Major Principles

Frank Williams
Professor, University of Houston – Downtown

My approach to social process theories is pretty simple. It is – it’s mostly a suyggestion that process means how people come to be deviant, delinquent, or whatever act you ma be talking about. So social process suggests that we’re going to focus on the social aspects of that – the coming deviant, delinquent, whatever we might do in criminology in particular. So we would be talking about things that affect individuals rather than things that affect large groups of people or society in general. They’re not interested in pieces of social structure and how they influence people. So it’s going to be, in one sense, pretty simple things, simple things like attachments one has to another person, so social relationships. And in fact that’s where, if we want to go to social processes in its beginning, that’s where we really start. So relationships with people, relationships with family, which of course if a form of people, too, even relationships you may have in school, those kinds of things. Mostly though it’s – in terms of social we’re going to be talking about language, what gets communicated, um, how people see people and reactions to that and so forth.

Intro to Chicago School

Frank Williams
Professor, University of Houston – Downtown

One of the things maybe to begin with would be the work of what we call the old Chicago school. And that’s a period of time about 1900 to about 1920 maybe through the thirties in a sense. And the people there would be people who are working on things we might today called symbolic interactionism. But they weren’t quite sure that was the term yet. But, uh – so it would be people like Park and Burgess who began the work of that school in a sense. A guy by the name of W.I. Thomas who has a real