Socialization refers to the individual's contact with his environment. Depending on the stage in which it occurs, there is talk of primary or secondary socialization. Primary socialization is that period of the individual's life, in which he has the first contact with his environment. During this stage, people create and build themselves based on what they have learned from outside contact in the first years of life..
On the contrary, secondary socialization refers to the stage of the life of the being in which it learns how to act in society. Having the basic knowledge acquired in primary socialization, at this stage the individual learns how to behave and what actions to take in response.
The main institution where primary socialization is taught is the family. In it, the basic concepts of coexistence or values such as love, trust, respect and honesty are learned..
The type of relationship that develops in those early years usually determines the development of the individual's social characteristics. The other institution that is consolidated throughout the world and from which a determining influence is exerted on primary socialization is the school.
Another agent that can influence primary socialization is the formation of a group of friends with whom a trust can be applied that respect for home is not allowed. The media also play a big role. A child or adolescent may be attracted and persuaded by the content they broadcast.
Secondary socialization is usually located in the transition period from adolescence to adulthood. The values acquired from home undergo a transformation because the individual needs to relate to different areas such as academic or work, from an autonomous point of view and without the protection of the family.
As entities that generate the first contacts with the individual, we can identify as agents of primary socialization mainly three institutions or groups.
The first of these is the family, with an emphasis on the nuclear family. The family satisfies the nutritional and economic needs that children have even without knowing it.
In addition to that, the composition of the family group determines the development of the person in the future, because children often unconsciously imitate actions carried out by their parents.
In addition to the family, the other great agent is the school, where the infant is inserted from an early age. Although there is the possibility of having siblings in the family group, at school the other is known and the existence of more people with whom there are similarities and differences is assimilated.
The knowledge inherently acquired in the teacher-student relationship, which begins to define the institutional hierarchy, cannot be set aside..
Finally, the influence that the media has on the primary development of the individual cannot be ignored..
Children are constantly exposed to television or radio content directed at their audience, but this has been further democratized with the mass use of smart phones, which have allowed infants to choose the content with which they want to be entertained..
The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in his theorizing about personality separated the state of mind into three components: identity, the ego, and the superego..
The first thing that is constituted in being is identity, followed by the superego that develops in childhood and adolescence and that begins to form the consciousness of being..
Between adolescence and adulthood, the ego develops, more related to secondary socialization, which allows the individual to make rational and mature decisions (Journal Psyche, n.d.).
Another important psychologist in this area was Jean Piaget, who theorized about cognitive development and divided it into four parts in what would be all human growth, in which it goes from the knowledge and learning of the senses to the development of logical thinking , abstract and symbolic (Fischer, 1980).
It takes place in the final stage of growth, that is, in the twilight of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood. With secondary socialization, what is learned at home is managed but it is acted out outside the home.
The knowledge that is acquired is what the individual sees about how to act and behave in the different environments with which, over time, they must interact. The school, especially the secondary and in many cases the university are fields where secondary socialization is fully developed.
Various studies are constantly being carried out applying the various approaches related to primary or secondary socialization. Most of them aim to try to glimpse or demonstrate the influence that the first years of life and growth had on the later development of adult life.
A study by Callary, Trudel and Werthner (2011) analyzes the lives of five Canadian women and the influence that primary and secondary socialization had on their choice of professional life.
There are other applications related to language learning, such as the one developed by Mangubhai in 1977. These classifications of socialization can be applied to a population group or to an entire society..
This is the case of the study carried out by Jaspers, Lubbers and Ultee (2009), which analyzes the impact of primary and secondary socialization on the vision of marriage between two people of the same sex, two years after it was approved in the Netherlands..
The study focuses on the primary position, conceptualized from home, and the secondary position, which generally varied with the contact made in schools and due to the influence of the media in which the different political positions were reflected..
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