The Six Components of Social Interactions: Actor, Partner, Relation, Activities, Context, and Evaluation

Abstract

Social interactions are essential aspects of social relationships. Despite their centrality, there is a lack of a standardized approach to systematize social interactions. The present research developed (Study 1) and tested (Study 2) a taxonomy of social interactions. In Study 1 (5,676 descriptions of social interactions from N = 708 participants, age range 18-83 years), we combined a bottom-up approach based on the grounded theory with a top-down approach integrating existing empirical and theoretical literature to develop the taxonomy. The resulting taxonomy (APRACE) comprises the components Actor, Partner, Relation, Activities, Context, and Evaluation, each specified by features on three levels of abstraction. A social situation can be described by a combination of the components and their features on the respective abstraction level. Study 2 tested the APRACE using another dataset (N = 303, age range 18-88 years) with 1,899 descriptions of social interactions. The index scores of the six components, the frequencies of the features on the most abstract level, and their correlations were largely consistent across both studies, which supports the generalizability of the APRACE. The APRACE offers a generalizable tool for the comprehensive, parsimonious, and systematic description of social interactions and, thus, enables networked research on social interactions and application in a number of practical fields.

Keywords: bottom-up approach; feature level; grounded theory; hierarchical taxonomy; situation description; social situation; top-down approach.