Ostracism In The Classroom

In the last written vignette (Assignment #7), the professor’s feedback on the script made me reconsider one of the assertions that I made following the process of coding and analysis. My assertion was generally similar to the one proposed by the professor, both of them fall under the same category of human emotions identified in this case, but hers was more accurate in terms of naming the exact description. I arrived to this conclusion based on surfing and reading some of the relevant literature in social psychology.
The interviewee was responding to a question about how he feels as a Muslim student interacting with the environment in various situations including the one that takes place in the classroom. Using his own words, he voiced what …show more content…
Richman and Leary (2009) for instance, argue that part of the consequences of social rejection which manifest itself in myriad forms including ostracism is the tendency to avoid and withdraw in certain situations. Assuming that the individual will be excluded due to facets relevant to his/her identity might produce several reactions including avoidance to expose or express aspects of the identity. What further supports ostracism as a more appropriate term for the assertion here is that the participant demands societal acceptance for the Muslim community at a later point during the interview. The need for individual or group acceptance is a concept that connects well with the sense of being excluded or ostracized as well. On the other hand the term loneliness used to describe the participant’s feeling might have been conflated with feeling alone as a symptom of not having the ideational group support. Although it could be said that the participant was indeed feeling alone, but it does not necessarily mean that this description falls under the category of loneliness which is more related to connectedness in its complex emotional details and …show more content…
It also helped to fine tune my interpretation not only of that part of the interview but also the following parts because identifying the dots that cut across the different components of the whole text is quite essential in understanding the primary and secondary data meaning. Moreover, the competing explanation motivated me to go further and search for the scientific basis of the interpretation which was largely situated in both cases within the framework of social psychology. Upon reading the relevant literature, I found that scholars in the field have diagnosed and explained in an integrated way the case I was trying to understand. Useful lessons that were derived from this experience are to carefully consider the rivalry interpretation of the data, seek out help preferably from experts who have knowledge about the pertinent field, and to track the every possible leads during the analysis, interpretation and explanation of the