The social environment, social context, sociocultural context, or milieu, refers to the immediate physical and social setting in which people live or in which something happens or develops. It includes the culture that the individual was educated or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom they interact.
The interaction may be in person or through communication media, even anonymous or one-way, and may not imply equality of social status. Therefore the social environment is a broader concept than that of social class or social circle.
Read more about Social Environment: Solidarity, Natural/artificial Environment, Milieu/social Structure, Phenomenology, Social Surgery
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or environment:
“Family ... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.”
—J. August Strindberg (1849–1912)
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)