Ch 1 - The Sociological Perspective

• Sociology: is the study of society and human behaviour
• Sociological perspective: stresses the social contexts in which people live.

→ Discusses how groups influence people, especially how people are influenced by their society.

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• Society: group of people who share culture and territory
• Social location: group memberships that people have because of their location in history and society Sociologists look at how jobs, income, education, gender, race/ethnicity, and age affect people’s ideas and behaviour

→ Sociological imagination (perspective) enables us to make a connection between history and biography

• History: each society is located in a broad stream of events
• Biography: experiences within the historical settings

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Sociology enables us to analyse both parts of our current reality:

1- we are part of a global network

2- we have unique experiences in our smaller corners of life

• Science: the application of systematic methods to obtain knowledge + the knowledge by those methods

• Natural sciences: intellectual and academic disciplines designed to comprehend , explain, and predict events in our natural environments.

  → physics, biology, chemistry

• Social science: intellectual and academic disciplines designed to comprehend the social world objectively by means of controlled and repeated observations

  → Politics, law, psychology, economics, history

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Social Science:

1. Anthropology: traditionally focuses on tribal people

→ Main concern is to understand culture, the people’s total way of life

→ Examples: artifacts (weapons/tools)

→ structure: patterns determining how its members interact w/ each other

→ forms of communication: language

2. Economics: production and distribution of material goods and services in a society

→ Concentrates on a single social institution

3. Political science: focuses on politics and government

→ Examines how governments are made, how they are formed, and how they relate to other institutions in their society.

4. Psychology: focuses on processes that occur within the individual’s emotions, perceptions, memory, sleep, dreams, etc..

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%%Similarities between sociology and other sciences:%%

1. Anthropologists and sociology study culture. They research group structure and belief systems as well as how people communicate with each other
2. Economists and sociology research how a society’s goods and services are distributed (esp how that distribution results in inequality)
3. Political science and sociology: both study how people govern one another (esp how those in power affect people’s lives)
4. Psychologists and sociology both study how people adjust to the difficulties of life

%%Differences between sociology and other sciences%%:

1. Anthropologists are different from sociologists since socio mainly focus on industrialised and post-industrialised societies.
2. Unlike economics and political scientists, sociologists do not concentrate on a single social institution
3. Unlike psychologists, sociologists focus on how external life affects people rather than mental

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