Building Interpersonal Relationships

Series Summary

In the contexts of sociology and popular culture, the concept of interpersonal relationships involves social associations, connections or affiliations between two or more people. Such persons may interact overtly, covertly, face-to-face or may remain effectively unknown to each other, as in a virtual community whose members maintain anonymity and do not socialize outside of a chat room. The discovery or establishment of common ground between people provides a fundamental component for enduring interpersonal relationships. Loss of common ground, which may happen over time, may tend to end interpersonal relationships. Whether a relationship is a romantic one, based on friendship, work or school, the fact remains that building a strong relationship takes some work and emotional involvement. In this free video series, an expert on interpersonal communication will teach you how to build relationships, from establishing the rules to knowing when the rules can be broken. You'll learn about the contact stage, the involvement stage and the intimacy stage and what comprises these stages. With these tips and lessons on interpersonal communication, you'll be well on your way to building stronger relationships.

Video Transcript

"Hey there, Tracy Goodwin and I am the red sweater lady. I'm going to talk today about interpersonal relationships. How to build them or maybe even how to improve them a little bit. There are lots of different stages that we go through as we develop relationships and there's lots of information that's really important as we set out to develop new relationships. Now you know some of you might think, well so you meet and you like each other or you don't or whatever and here we go. Well that's all fine and good but I think I can give you some tips today that might help you as you come along with your relationships and just some pointers about things that might make the communication better, which ultimately will make the relationship stronger. So we're going to take a look at some of the theories and some of the tips and things that you want to look for as well as a couple of things that you might want to look out for because ultimately you start relationships and you have it in your mind that you want them to work and we don't want to have to talk about deterioration at this point do we. So let's build some relationships."