• 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.

• 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

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

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..

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