What is the difference between social theory and sociological theory?

What is the difference between the gender schema theory and the social cognitive theory?

• I am doing some reading on these theories and I really cannot tell that there is much of a difference. Can any help explain this to me in layman's terms. I understand that gender schema is when the child gathers a concept of gender by learning from their environment and that the social cognitive theory is basically where the child learns their gender from observing and putting it together with their views already. But I am not clear that this is correct. Can anyone help me out?

• Answer:

  Gender schema - is part of the cognitive theory - children develop schemas by associating different things to their gender for example, young girls will watch their mothers cooking over a period of time and build up the association that cooking is a feminine behaviour. Therefore, young girls will be more interested in cooking after experiencing this than young boys, as they see the activity as a feminine one. A study was done where young girls and boys were shown a variety of gender neutral objects but were told that some were "girl toys" and some were "boy toys". The girls spend more time playing with the neutral objects labelled "girl toys" and vice versa. Social cognitive - not entirely sure on the exact definition of this term but it most probably is a link between the cognitive theory and SLT, which says that children learn from observing and imitating role models in thier environment; these role models can be live (parents, etc) or vicarious (TV characters, etc). If the child identifies with their model then the imitation is stronger. This is why young boys often follow the ways of thier father more, because they identify more with him, and vice versa. Hope it helped x