Symbolic interactionism - Essay Example

Our group known as the ‘The Saviour’ came up with the project of collecting clothes. Our strategy was to use all methods possible to collect many clothes to help the poor people in Senegal. To be effective in the meeting of our target, we divided the group into two. My team was given the task of placing donation boxes at various strategic points, giving out flyers to students in various colleges, and placing of posters to public notices. The posters had our contacts and activity. After two weeks of the activity the whole group came together to discuss on the progress.

We all found out that the turnout was far below our expectations. According to symbolic interactionism theory, I expected my neighbors to appreciate my efforts to assist the poor through donations. However, that was not the case; the neighbors were seemingly getting a different symbolism from my efforts. I decided to meet with my team and discuss the way forward on how we could increase the awareness of our project in all our strategic places. We decided not to rule out possibility of miscommunication in our awareness efforts.

As a team, we decided to purchase t-shirts printed with information regarding the project. At interval times, a person had to be at the strategic points we had placed the boxes and always carry with them a small mapping board with the group banner. Since our donation boxes were placed the bus terminal, the garden, school gates and the market place, the person was to talk to people around and create a good rapport about the group’s activity. In the next two weeks, we experienced a tremendous improvement in donations.

This was perhaps possible because we were able to communicate our idea and convince people that we were a genuine group of youths dedicated to helping the poor in the developing countries. Language is an important concept of symbolic interaction. Therefore, we understood that different people perceive ideas differently. Our target was to collect several cargo tanks of clothes. We decided that each one of us would go from house to house in our respective neighborhood during our free time and weekends to distribute the remaining fliers.

I visited most of the families in my neighborhood during weekends for a month. The response was encouraging because most neighbors embraced the idea and were happy about our project. Most of them gave out dozens of clothes and even promised tell others. Their appreciation and promises of cooperation was in accordance with the theory of symbolism interactionism. Thoughts are a concept of symbolic interactionism. Thought modifies the way a person perceives and understands a symbolism. We found out that placing the posters would not yield much as expected probably because people had gotten used to posters being used by scam artists.

We decided to come up with alternative workable ideas of using posters. We placed the posters in each class notice board. We also visited some of the offices to allow us use their company’s staff notice board for a while. At first, most of the companies were afraid and thought we were a fake group but after we explained and defended our purpose, some of the companies permitted us. At the end of two weeks, we followed up and got a positive response from the employees, we collected several bunches of clothes from most companies.

When the whole group met, we found out that our new strategy worked out very well. We shared the strategies we had used with the other team and the