This article articulated the field of sociology so well. Sociology is indeed a science, however very different from sciences such as chemistry or biology. Society changes and adapts so often, for this reason many of the methods and theories have to adapt or be further elaborated on as well.
Theories such a structural-functionalism can introduce these topics, but not necessarily fully explain due to the lack of representation of these communities historically speaking when these theories were first developed. These types of things were ignored, non-existent or just happened less frequently in the past. Now that the world is seeing a shift in gender roles, heteronormativity, and family types, sociology allows for "ample room for future development" to be able to explain whats happening in society today.
The world will always be diverse and changing, but as the article mentioned contemporary theories set the framework and modern theory can be applied and further developed to better define what is going on in the modern world. I definitely appreciate how sociology is diverse and multidimensional.
As stated in the entry, sociology does have a great potential to evolve and grow. Sociologists are not only studying the past but also looking forward and researching modern politics, technology, social media among other topics of interest.
For example, a topic like systematic racism is so complex that sociologists have to look at culture, group dynamics, and the power of institutions and even work with other areas of study, such as anthropology and psychology, to continue discussions on why it exists and how it can be addressed in the future. I agree with the author of this blog. The ability to conduct a scientific inquiry in varied ways strengthens sociology.
I would imagine that each method can be likened to a vantage point, allowing you to see why things unfold the way that they do from where you stand. Having alternative methods of testing hypothesis would enlighten the sociological world as to other contributing factors that the original form of inquiry did not perceive. The ability to have varied methods of research allows for more robust findings. I also agree that diversity is an advantage that can help shed light in many areas that have been ignored for too long.
With a diverse group of sociologists, the interests will vary, and what they choose to study will demonstrate what they feel is important. This might mean doing genuinely original research that may seem daunting, yet it is comforting to know that there are different methods to conduct the study.
Also, it seems that if we had to stick to one method of inquiry, we could be susceptible to the shortcomings of that particular method. After reading Sociology as a social science discipline, I can feel more comfortable in what I believe sociology to be.
Sociology to me is something we can use to look at a specific topic using different many fields in sociology which is also talked about in the article. Taking a sociological point of view in a topic of your choosing helps to look at different fields in sociology to find what other factors play a part or role in shaping the outcome of topics of interest.
Great article! I completely agree. As diverse and complex as society is, we need to utilize many different theories and methods as possible in efforts to gain as much knowledge and understanding available. I believe that the study of sociology is truly a study of science simply because we use empirical evidence to support our evidence, in the same way a scientist would after conducting an experiment or research on a topic of natural science. This seems to be a popular post. As an undergrad as many of those above may be I reflected that Weber's call for expertise and the demand of "rationalization" of increased specificity was contradicted somewhat by his own practice.
I already had heard that men have a higher suicide rate than women. Maybe our social backgrounds do influence us in ways I had not realized, but what beyond that does sociology have to tell me? Students often feel this way because sociology deals with matters already familiar to them.
Just about everyone has grown up in a family, so we all know something about it. We read a lot in the media about topics like divorce and health care, so we all already know something about these, too. All this leads some students to wonder if they will learn anything in their introduction to sociology course that they do not already know. Although personal experiences are very important, not everyone has the same personal experience.
This fact casts some doubt on the degree to which our personal experiences can help us understand everything about a topic and the degree to which we can draw conclusions from them that necessarily apply to other people. If you relied on your personal experience to calculate how many people of color live in the country, you would conclude that almost everyone in the United States is also white, which certainly is not true.
As another example, say you grew up in a family where your parents had the proverbial perfect marriage, as they loved each other deeply and rarely argued. Many other examples could be cited here, but the basic point should be clear: although personal experience is better than nothing, it often offers only a very limited understanding of social reality other than our own. If personal experience does not help that much when it comes to making predictions, what about common sense?
Although common sense can be very helpful, it can also contradict itself. For example, which makes more sense, haste makes waste or he or she who hesitates is lost? How about birds of a feather flock together versus opposites attract? Or two heads are better than one versus too many cooks spoil the broth? Each of these common sayings makes sense, but if sayings that are opposite of each other both make sense, where does the truth lie?
Can common sense always be counted on to help us understand social life? If that bit of common sense lessness were still with us, many of the women reading this book would not be in college. During the late 19th century, a common belief was that women should not go to college because the stress of higher education would disrupt their menstrual cycles. This example shows that common sense is often incorrect. Still, perhaps there are some things that make so much sense they just have to be true; if sociology then tells us that they are true, what have we learned?
Here is an example of such an argument. We all know that older people—those 65 or older—have many more problems than younger people. First, their health is generally worse. Second, physical infirmities make it difficult for many elders to walk or otherwise move around. Third, many have seen their spouses and close friends pass away and thus live lonelier lives than younger people.
Finally, many are on fixed incomes and face financial difficulties. All of these problems indicate that older people should be less happy than younger people. Its subject matter ranges from the micro level to the macro level. Microsociology involves the study of people in face-to-face interactions.
Macrosociology involves the study of widespread social processes. Sociology is a broad discipline in terms of both methodology and subject matter. The traditional focuses of sociology have included social relations, social stratification, social interaction, culture, and deviance, and the approaches of sociology have included both qualitative and quantitative research techniques.
Much of what human activity falls under the category of social structure or social activity; because of this, sociology has gradually expanded its focus to such far-flung subjects as the study of economic activity, health disparities, and even the role of social activity in the creation of scientific knowledge. The range of social scientific methods has also been broadly expanded. Conversely, the same decades saw the rise of new mathematically rigorous approaches, such as social network analysis.
The sociological imagination is the ability to situate personal troubles within an informed framework of larger social processes. Discuss C. Early sociological theorists, like Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, were concerned with the phenomena they believed to be driving social change in their time. Naturally, in pursuing answers to these large questions, they received intellectual stimulation.
These founders of sociology were some of the earliest individuals to employ what C. Wright Mills a prominent mid th century American sociologist would later call the sociological imagination: the ability to situate personal troubles and life trajectories within an informed framework of larger social processes.
The term sociological imagination describes the type of insight offered by the discipline of sociology. Karl Marx : Karl Marx, another one of the founders of sociology, used his sociological imagination to understand and critique industrial society. In describing the sociological imagination, Mills asserted the following. The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals.
As Mills saw it, the sociological imagination helped individuals cope with the social world by enabling them to step outside their own, personal, self-centered view of the world. By employing the sociological imagination, individual people are forced to perceive, from an objective position, events and social structures that influence behavior, attitudes, and culture. In the decades after Mills, other scholars have employed the term to describe the sociological approach in a more general way.
Another way of defining the sociological imagination is the understanding that social outcomes are shaped by social context, actors, and actions. Early sociological studies were thought to be similar to the natural sciences due to their use of empiricism and the scientific method. Early sociological studies considered the field of sociology to be similar to the natural sciences, like physics or biology.
As a result, many researchers argued that the methodology used in the natural sciences was perfectly suited for use in the social sciences. The effect of employing the scientific method and stressing empiricism was the distinction of sociology from theology, philosophy, and metaphysics. This also resulted in sociology being recognized as an empirical science.
This early sociological approach, supported by August Comte, led to positivism, an idea that data derived from sensory experience and that logical and mathematical treatments of such data are together the exclusive source of all authentic knowledge. The goal of positivism, like the natural sciences, is prediction.
The goal of predicting human behavior was quickly realized to be a bit lofty. Scientists like Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert argued that the natural world differs from the social world; human society has culture, unlike the societies of most other animals.
They study social patterns that are stable and also those that are changing. The sociology program provides students with critical thinking skills and a knowledge of society, groups, and social relationships to prepare them to be better informed individuals and to take advantage of employment opportunities where analytic knowledge of the social world is valued.
Because sociologists must be able to recognize social trends and patterns, while being skillful writers, speakers, and researchers, members of the sociology faculty are strongly committed to teaching students how to do sociology and how to think sociologically about the world. Sociology majors are given the opportunity and encouragement to develop their own ideas about society and to express them verbally and in writing.
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