Philippine E-Journals

Age, Power, and Extroversion as Social Interaction Correlates

Rolando Dizon

Discipline: Education, Ethnography

 

Abstract:

Scattered rather unobtrusively all over the world are religious communities of men who voluntarily live together and share a common task, that of education. One such group was studied by this "mini-ethnographer" (Textor, 1976). How do the members of this group perceive each other? What common values, beliefs and attitudes do they share? How do they interact with each other? What factors differentiate the interaction patterns within the group?

 

These are the main questions the author tried to answer when he did his mini-ethnography of the group. In this paper he shall attempt to describe the following:

(a) Reference group theory as the main theoretical framework of study;

(b) The school and religious community which comprised the setting of the study;

(c) How fieldwork was conducted, or the methodology of the study; and

(d) The elements of a causal model that could help explain the findings.

 

Inasmuch as the main aim of this paper is to demonstrate the use of ethnographic methods, the bulk of this paper will be devoted to describing the various methods employed in the field.