The Positive Change in Behavior of an Individual - Essay Example

Healthy deviance is the positive change in behavior or social acts of an individual or individuals. 

The plan to deviate from this behavior for the whole of the last weekend without going swimming with my friends was my temporarily adopted change in behavior.

Campus weekend days are very pleasant with a lot of leisure spend with my friends while other students also choose to go swimming to relax after a busy week.  It is the norm on the campus that on weekends the swimming pools are congested with students everyone enjoying the cold breeze of the pool water. Failure to go swimming makes it look odd and unusual against the norm or culture of the school. Last weekend I went out swimming but did not get into the water as I normally do. Instead, I decided to sit in a corner seat and freshen up with soft drinks and watch my friends swim. Everyone weirdly their faces read a lot of questions. My friends came to me thinking that I was not feeling well. They were confused why I chose not to do swimming that weekend or maybe was stressed up. I felt it was quite different too because swimming made me feel relaxed, but I could not disclose why was doing that. They pressured me to speak, but I told them to have some pneumonia and, therefore, the cold water could not be the best pleasuring thing for me that weekend.

On Monday during lunch break, I asked my friends how they felt and what they thought was wrong with me during that weekend. Almost half of my friends admitted the thought and feeling that I was sick because it was not normal for me to fail to do swimming.  Their feelings compared to mine are exactly similar because I felt very different and odd of me to sit and watch my friends swim yet I was like their trainer.

Felt Stigma is the social experience of shame, blame for oneself or others or neglect that one feels after deviation from a usual norm.  Enacted stigma is the people’s perception of one's deviation from a norm. I blamed myself for not spending my weekend in a happy mood by swimming, but rather making all my friends sympathize thinking something was wrong with me. I felt ashamed after making them realize later that Monday I was okay.

Healthy deviance resonates with my experience in the sense that, though it was a positive change from my usual swimming activity so that I could learn about health deviance, the experience of shame and blame was because I found out that my friends care much about me than I earlier thought of them.

The deviance theory proposed by Durkheim has two concepts. At times, people deviate from swimming and find pleasure in other things like drinking alcohol.