What Is A Social Construction

Social constructions define meanings, notions, or connotations that are assigned to objects and events in the environment and to people’s notions of their relationships to and interactions with these objects. In the area of social constructionist thought, a social construct is an idea that appears to be natural and obvious to people who accept it but may or may not represent reality, so it remains largely an invention or trickery of a given society. Money, citizenship and newspapers are transparent social constructions because they obviously could not have existed without societies. Just as obviously, it would seem, anything that could have, or that did, exist independently of societies could not have been socially constructed. Social constructionism
People start to learn what is right and wrong, according to society, from the time they are born. If a boy is born in a family, the families immediately start buying monster trucks, race cars, and action hero type toys and makes comments like “what a big strong boy you are,” that encourage so called “male” behavior. As opposed to a girl being born, the family would then buy dolls, cute dresses, and stuffed bears. They would encourage her to be kind and sensitive like a female should behave. Parents would allow their sons to stay out late and be more liberal on them unlike their daughter where they would not allow her to stay out late and be a little more strict on them. The boys would be expected to help out in the yard while the girls would help clean the house. These characteristics are not unusual or out of the ordinary because this is how things have been for hundreds of years. The media contributes to social construction, as men and women are almost always portrayed in a stereotypical matter. The impact that media can apply varies form society to society, this is because each society has a different social
The framework draws on a social constructionist perspective that includes aspects of phenomenology and symbolic interactionism to define “landscape” as the symbolic environment created by a human act of conferring meaning on nature and the environment. This landscape reflects the self definitions of the people within a particular cultural context. Attention is directed to transformation of the physical environment into landscapes that reflect people's definitions of themselves and on how these landscapes are reconstructed in response to people's changing definitions of