A social group (community) is a really existing, empirically fixed set of people, which is characterized by integrity and acts as an independent subject of social and historical action.
The emergence of various social groups is primarily associated with such phenomena as the social division of labor and specialization of activities, and secondly, with historically formed living conditions, social values and norms, culture.
So, one or another set of people can be considered a social group if its participants possess:
1. The similarity of living conditions.
2. The presence of jointly implemented activities.
3. Common needs.
4. Own culture.
5. Self-attribution to a given community.
Social groups and their types and forms are distinguished by an extraordinary variety. So, they can vary both in quantitative composition (small and numerous), and in the duration of their existence (short-term - from several minutes, and stable, existing for thousands of years), and in the degree of connection between the participants (stable and random, amorphous formations).
Types of social groups depending on the size
1. Small. They are characterized by a small number of participants (from 2 to 30 people) who are perfectly familiar with each other and are engaged in some common business. Relations in this group are direct. This includes such types of elementary cells of society as a family, a group of friends, a school class, an airplane crew, etc.
2. Large. They represent numerous collections of people who occupy the same position in the social structure and have common interests in this regard. Types of large social groups: stratum, class, nation, etc. Moreover, the connections in such aggregates are increasingly indirect, since their number is huge.
Types of social groups depending on the nature of the interaction
1. Primary, in which the interaction of participants with each other is interpersonal, direct, supportive in nature. Examples: a group of peers, friends, neighbors on the porch.
2. Secondary, the interaction in which is due to the achievement of a common goal and is formal. Examples: trade unions, manufacturing organizations, political parties.
Types of social groups depending on the fact of existence
1. Nominal, representing an artificially constructed set of people who are specially allocated for statistical accounting. Examples: commuters, customers of a particular brand of washing powder.
2. Real groups, the criterion for the existence of which are real signs (income, gender, age, profession, nationality, place of residence). Examples: women, men, children, Russians, citizens, villagers, teachers, doctors.
Types of social groups depending on the organization
1. Formal groups that are created and exist only within the framework of officially recognized organizations. Examples: class at school, Dynamo football club.
2. Informal, usually arising and existing on the basis of personal interests of participants, which either coincide or diverge from the goals of formal groups. Examples: a circle of lovers of poetry, a club of fans of bard songs.
In addition to such a concept as a social group, there are so-called "quasigroups". They are unstable informal populations of people who, as a rule, have an uncertain structure, norms and values. Examples: audience (concert hall, theater performance), fan clubs, crowd (rally, flash mob).
Thus, we can say that the real subjects of relations in society are not real people, individual individuals, but a combination of different social groups that interact with each other and whose goals and interests intersect, one way or another.