Definitions status and role and distinguish between them:
1. The concept of status and role have a growing significance in the social sciences. We want to define them and to distinguish between them.
Status: The social honour or prestige which a particular group is accorded by other members of a society. Status groups normally involve distinct styles of life-patterns of behaviour which the members of a group follow. Status privilege may be positive or negative.
Role: A role is the dynamic or the behavioural aspect of status. It is a combination of rights and duties. Every individual has to play various roles of different roles, more than one. Some roles are not prominent but one role may be a master role.
1. A distinction between status and role is simplified by Ralph Linton when he said, "you occupy a status, but you play a role'. Every position or status in society carries with it a set of expected behaviour patterns.
2. Status and role are two sides of the same coin', says Linton. Although all statuses and roles derived from social patterns are integral parts of patterns, they have an independent function with relation to the individual who occupies. particular statuses and exercise their roles.
3. The concepts of status and role are the initial tools for the analysis of social structure. A status is simply a position in society or in a group. Every society and every group has many such positions and every individual occupies as many positions as there are groups to which he belongs.
Thus each person holds a number of positions in society known as statuses. A woman might be a musician, a teacher, a wife and a mother. Each of these social positions, with the rights and duties it entails, is a status. Although a person may hold a number of statuses, one of them, which we might call a master status, defines the person socially.
4. With the development of modern anthropology and sociology, the concept of status has been broadened to encompass all culturally prescribed rights and duties inherent in social positions.
5. Every status has one or more roles attached to it. Statuses are occupied, but roles are played. Role is the expected behaviour pattern attached to a status, carrying certain specific rights and obligations. A role is the manner in which a given individual fulfills the obligation and enjoys its privileges and prerogatives. A role is what an individual does in the status he occupies. It is obvious that different individuals do different things in the same statuses, and it is the concept of role that enables us to take account of these differences.
