Structural Functionalist Approach To Symbolic Interaction Theory

Typically, an eating disorder can be defined as the act of starving one’s self in order to attain the image of being thin. This process occurs in unhealthy ways such as not eating or making oneself throw up after eating (Disordered Eating 2011). Most people might consider an eating disorder to be an individual problem, meaning that a person may have been triggered by an internal source rather than and external source. However, that is not necessarily the case. People generally relate thinness and how skinny a person is, to how attractive they are. When we think of someone attractive, an image of an overweight person rarely comes to mind. This then creates a social stigma of how people should look and it creates standards that people need to
It looks at why society functions the way is does by analyzing the relationships between social institutions that make up society. The idea of roles, norms and social systems are all central to the theory of structural functionalism. Parsons, one of the main contributor to structural functionalism, said that individuals hold expectations, both for their own and others actions. These expectations develop from society’s accepted norms (Segre 2014). He stated that individuals are to take on specific roles in society and conform to what society sees as the norm for that role. In today’s society the media portrays very thin attractive women as being the ideal body type that all women should have. This body type is considered the norm of attractive women which is why women of all ages turn to eating disorders in an effort to conform to this norm (Bradley 2016). As another structural functionalism theorist, Merton, stated that some structures may be dysfunctional in society because of the unwanted consequences. He also developed the theory of deviance, which states that deviance occurs when the values of a society are not in line with the means accessible to accomplish them (Segre 2014). The types of adaptations he gives are rebellion, retreatism, ritualism, innovation and conformity (Segre 2014). Some of these adaptations can be applies to eating disorders as well. Women suffer from eating disorders in an effort to conform to the norms, hence they are a conformity type of deviance. Eating disorders can also be an innovation type of adaptation because women attempt to achieve the cultural goal of being thin and attractive, however they use unaccepted approaches to do so. Such approaches would be starvation, binging and purging, or malnutrition. Thirdly, they could be viewed as a form of ritualism because the