Group Dynamics in a Post-Secondary Environment

Introduction

In an academic environment, it is an excellent setting for many individual to come together and form new groups, whether it is for social or task oriented. It provides a great chance for individuals to develop and change over time with other people, while going through the hardships of post-secondary. This paper will focus on a group called “The Lifesavers” and it will examine the behavior of each group members and how they develop throughout the course of Psych 3340 by Dr.Peter K. Papadogiannis. The group initially started with 5 members and it had become a very diverse group since each member of the group is different in terms of age, sex, ethnic background, and their major at York University. Member A is 26/ South Korean / Psychology major, Member B is 25/ Scottish-English/ Psychology, Member C is 21/ Italian / Criminology, Member D is 20/ Chinese-Viet/ Psychology, and information about the last member (E) was unknown since only the name and contact information was given.

Norm Development

The group “The Lifesavers” is very unique in terms of its formation and structure. Norms were already being developed on the first day of lecture when all members joined together by a list that constructed our group by the first letter of our surnames. When asked about personal information and contact information, each group members were hesitant and gave out little information about themselves and shared only their email address to contact other group members. One of the few norms that was developed by group members was to come together for group assignment/discussion at the end of each lecture and share the responsibility of getting the group task done on time. Many of these norms that emerge from the group were developed so ...

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... process and behavior of individuals who partake in these virtual communities and the model consist of; information system, social influence, and use and gratifications. Chung explains that many individual will join these virtual communities and continue to use them because of their social influence which is broken down to 3 parts, compliance (subjective norms), internalization (group norms), and identification (social identity)(Chung and Lee, 2009). The results of the study has shown that members of the group continue to use ------------------------------------------------------------------------

The study relates to Lifesavers because of how the group typically interact with each other. As soon as a group task has been assigned, all group members typically discuss for 5 minutes then goes home which is where all the interaction happens, over social media networks.