Joe the King and Role Theory Essay

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Role theory holds that the way in which people act is a result of the awareness of roles and the duties associated with them. For Joe Henry, the role players in his life perform their duties with such neglect and ambivalence that he is forced to compensate for their shortcomings and juggle multiple roles that he is unsuited for. As a result, he finds himself in over his head and struggles to maintain a balance. He embarks on illegality (thieving) to pay his father’s debts and restore his mother’s records. In the end, he is arrested, which is actually the best thing that could have happened for him as it takes him out of the environment he is in and allows him to resume the role of just being a child. He needs time to develop and mature and grow into the role of adult, and being taken into custody by the state is a good opportunity for that to happen. Hopefully, he will obtain a counselor who is more apt than the one he is assigned through school.

The strengths of role theory are that it provides an explanation for how roles are conceived, perceived and adopted by persons in a social group. In a healthy family, roles are divided among individuals, typically a father, a mother, and children. In Joe Henry’s family, the roles of the parents are negligible and confusing for Joe. He is assaulted for his father’s debts, put in the position of being comforter to his mother instead of receiving nurturing from her, and placed into a position of having to be bread winner for the family, which takes him away from his devotion to school.

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Role theory can help the social worker understand the behaviors of a delinquent child like Joe and give context for why he is always late for class, why he is stealing, and why he needs help growing up. Thus, the strengths of role theory are found in its basic premise, which is that social groups define roles (Koenig, Eagly, 2014).

The weakness of role theory is found its limited scope. It views the subject primarily through the lens of role player, when as is evident even in Joe Henry’s case it is not always simple for one to assess what role is being played. Oftentimes roles are ill-defined or not understood even by the actor. To assume that Joe is attempting to manage a diversity of roles that are beyond his ability and comprehension allows for a sympathetic approach to the subject, but it may not fully reflect the reality of the situation. It could also be the case that Joe’s actions, behaviors, attitudes, thoughts and expressions can be explained by other theories as well—for example by social learning theory, in which behavior is learned by observation, by mimicking others in one’s social environment (Miller, Morris, 2014). Strain theory and social control theory are two others that could help explain Joe’s behavior and….....

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