Sociology is the “systematic, scientific study of human soci ety.” Human society is a pretty big topic.
Sociologists study dyads, groups and networks, orga nizations, communities, culture, society, and even global relations. In some senses it seems like you can study almost anything and call it sociology. I t isn’t what they study that makes someone a sociologist, h owever, but how they think about it and how they study it.
Imagine a friend of yours confides in you that she is pregnant and is not planning to marry the father
. At first you wonder if she was raped, but she tells yo u the father is someone she was dating, she agreed to have sex with him, and she turned down an invitatio n to marry him. You might wonder why her behavior is so different from what you think it sho uld be. If you were raised in this country, where we tend to be better amateur psychologists than we are amateur sociologists, you would probably conclude that your friend has mental problems, isn’t thinkin g very clearly, or is not a very good person. In o ther words, you would probably explain your friend’s beh avior in terms of what goes on inside of her and think that she has a personal problem
. In contrast, a sociologist would be curious abou t what life at home was like for your friend, whether people from her background respect mothers more than they respect women without children, and if the father o f her child was ready for the responsibility of a family. In other words, a sociologist would explain your fr iend’s pregnancy and decision to remain single in terms of the circumstances she is facing that ar e basically out of her control. Studying the immed iate social circumstances surrounding people and how it shapes their behavior and attitudes is the subject matter of micro-sociology .
To tell you the truth, some sociologists wouldn’t a ctually be that interested in your friend’s problem per se, but they would be interested in understanding w hy so many young women today have children without getting married. One out of three children born in the United States today has an unmarried mother. Back in the 1950’s, only one out of twenty children in the United States was born to an unwed mother. Do families no longer have control over th e behavior of their teenagers? Is it easier and therefore more attractive to be a single mother now than it was in the past? Are men less desirable a s mates than they were before? What is different now
? So someone with a sociological imagination would see unwed motherhood as a public issue
, rather than as a personal problem, and your frien d as an unknowing victim of a societal-level social forc es rather than as someone who was totally in contro l of her destiny. The study of large social phenomen a such as changes in the rates of births to unwed mothers is known as macro-sociology .
Today the large number of unwed mothers poses a pra ctical problem for society, and sociologists are conducting research to try to understand why it is happening. Practical problems like this appear, ar e solved, and disappear, however, and then new ones d evelop. It would be a pretty big waste of time to start from scratch to solve a problem each time a n ew one pops up. Instead, what sociologists do is keep track of what they learn each time they conduc t a research project, share it with other sociologi sts, and make a note of findings that repeat themselves in different situations. For example, let’s say one sociologist finds that married couples with a child are less likely to divorce than married couples wi thout a child. And another sociologist finds out that tr eaties among three countries are more likely to las t than treaties between two countries. Hmmm? Could i t be that three-person or three-country groups are more likely to survive than two-person or two-c ountry ones? Now you have a hypothesis that you can test in yet another circumstance, perhaps by st udying friendship networks or rock ‘n’ roll acts.
After
studying comparing a lot of three-entity and two-en tity groups, you might even be able to develop a theory to explain why the former is more likely to surviv e than the latter. Then you would have a tool that can be used the next time a relevant problem a rises or research findings need to be explained.
Theories are explanations of why things happen the way they do, but they are also lenses we wear when we view the world. Depending on what theoretical l enses we wear, we ask different types of questions, collect different types of data, and find different answers. In this course you will learn about thre e different theories of social life— functionalism , conflict theory
, and symbolic interactionism
. Depending on which set of these theoretical lenses you choose to wear, you would ask different questions about the increase in the rate of births to unwed mothers
. By the time you finish this unit, you should be able to figure out what those questions would be.
Of course, you can’t answer any theoretical questio ns without data. Just as sociologists study a wide variety of topics and view them through different t ypes of theoretical lenses, they also collect diffe rent types of information to develop theory and to solve practical problems. Sometimes they conduct surveys, other times they analyze documents, and st ill other times they observe people interacting.
Sometimes they summarize their findings by reportin g statistics and other times they summarize their findings in words. Whatever sort of research they do, however, sociologists want to know what the facts are and whether they are accurate. If they a re interested in theoretical development, they want to know if the existing theories stand up to empirical testing. If they are interested in solving a probl em, they want to know what solution the facts suggest.
Sociology developed during the time of the Industri al Revolution. The original sociologists were fascinated by the radical transformation of society that occurred as new industries and technologies developed, the population shifted from rural to urb an areas, and problems such as crowding, poverty, and crime grew more widespread. Most of the sociol ogical classics that have shaped our way of thinking about the effects of the Industrial Revolu tion were written by white men such as Durkheim,
Weber, and Marx. Although they haven’t received as much attention, women such as Addams and
Martineau and people of color such as Dubois and We lls-Barnett also contributed to our understanding of this major transformation. Today is a great tim e to start using your own sociological imagination, because society is going through another radical tr ansformation now that the Information Revolution has begun. Maybe when your great-great grandchildr en study sociology, they will consider your work a classic. But first you have to get started using y our sociological imagination.