Community Interaction
Community Interaction focuses on how people behave in groups and institutions: group types, social stratification, social control, prejudice and discrimination, and social change. CSEC questions ask you to classify groups, explain social ranking, and evaluate responses to conflict or inequality.
Core concepts
- Social groups: primary groups are small, intimate and face-to-face, such as family and close friends; secondary groups are larger and more impersonal, such as a school or political party. Formal groups have written rules; informal groups rely on custom.
- Institutions are established patterns of behaviour organised around basic needs: family, education, religion, economy, government and health.
- Social stratification is the ranking of people into layers by wealth, status, power or occupation. Social mobility is movement between those layers; it can be upward, downward, intergenerational or intragenerational.
- Social control is how society enforces norms: informally through gossip, ridicule and approval, and formally through police, courts and laws.
- Prejudice is a preconceived attitude; discrimination is unequal treatment; a stereotype is a generalised belief about a group.
- Conflict and cooperation both occur in communities; conflict can expose injustice, while cooperation builds shared goals.
Worked example
A community youth group starts a football league that mixes young people from two neighbourhoods that distrust each other. Explain how this might reduce prejudice. Reasoning: prejudice is an attitude, so change requires sustained contact, not one-off events. The league creates shared goals, equal status among players and cooperative activity under agreed rules. These conditions reduce stereotypes because members see each other as teammates rather than labels. Success is not automatic: poor organisation, favouritism or outside agitation can reinforce hostility. The explanation must link the activity to the attitude, not just say they will become friends.
Traps that cost marks
- Do not use prejudice as a synonym for discrimination; one is an attitude, the other is behaviour.
- Do not confuse primary and secondary groups; size and intimacy matter.
- Do not treat all conflict as destructive; it can lead to change.
- Do not confuse stratification, which is ranking, with mobility, which is movement.
- Do not ignore informal social control when the question asks how norms are enforced.