Interpersonal Communication: groups

What is a group?

It may seem pretty obvious what a group is, but it's worth giving it some thought anyway. Most of us spend much of every day as part of some kind of group - a group of Communication Studies students co-operating on some research in the library; the group of students in the library; the group of people in the library, including the librarian and other administrators; our family group; a group of people in the pub; a group of friends travelling to college on the bus; the group of passengers on the bus. Are these groups in any way different? I think we sense immediately that the group of Communication students co-operating on research in the library is somehow different from the much bigger group of people in the library. After all, if we're going to say that all the people in the library constitute a group, then why not all the people in the college, the town, the county and so on? But just what is this difference we're aware of?

You would say that the people working in a factory form a group because, in the context of their occupation, they interact with one another more than they interact with other people, so far as their occupation goes. Within the factory, men or women co-operating in a special job form a group - a subgroup with respect to the factory as a whole - for the same reason.

Sprott (1958)

Primary and secondary groups

One way of characterizing the distinction is to distinguish between primary and secondary groups.

Primary groups

A fairly typical definition is given by Schein (1980), namely any number of people who

• interact with one another
• are psychologically aware of one another
• perceive themselves to be a group

(cited in Blackler and Shimmin (1984))

Primary groups generally tend to be seen by social psychologists as

• involving regular contact between members of the group, including direct face-to-face interaction (though I suspect that modern technology may well decrease that latter requirement)
• fairly small (maybe up to 20 or so members)
• involving co-operation
• sharing some common goals
• knowing who all the members of the group are
• having a rough idea of what other people's rôles are in the group

This would clearly distinguish the group of Communication students from the others in the library.

Secondary groups

The larger, more impersonal, group of people in the library would be considered to constitute a secondary group. One may perhaps also wish to distinguish a third type of group, which is sometimes called a reference group. I am a member of a family group, a member of a group of friends, a member of a group of lecturers teaching a particular subject. Beyond that, things to tend to break up - I meet the other lecturers in my faculty pretty infrequently, don't even know the names of some of them or what they teach; I am a member of a trade union and am active in the group of people who run the local branch, as well as in meetings of the regional group, but beyond that membership involves my being a member of a group of people dispersed across the whole country, whom I have never met and perhaps have little in common. If we look at a more dispersed group than that, then I belong to the group of middle-aged people, the group of English people and so on. Such groups are certainly of interest to advertisers and marketers and, of course, are important to us in that we, like advertisers, have certain expectations of the members of those groups - bus drivers are like this, Tories are like that and so on. However, they are not really our concern in this section, where we will be dealing with the more focused primary groups.

For an exploration of the relationship between inidividual and group, click here.

Related articles:

Group goals

Group cohesion

Group dynamics

Group leadership

Group norms and social influence

Management theory