The article highlights that the participants from the Chicago Department of Sociology in the twenties did not have the intention of creating a new sociological approach.The concept of Symbolic Interacionism has never been used to assign the works that were being accomplished by the participants. Therefore, the empirical research and the thought used inside that Department related to the process of interaction between individual and society have opened the way for a new explanation of social life in a later moment. Only at the end of the decade, 1930, the sociological work that had been accomplished in that Department was codified in a corpus of theoretical principles and nominated symbolic interactionism.
Chicago Department of Sociology; Empirical Research and Theory; Relation Individual and Society; Symbolic Interactionism