Introduction to Sociology

What Is Sociology?

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

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  Describe sociology and some of its central concepts
  
  

Figure 1. Sociologists learn about society as a whole while studying one-to-one and group interactions.
(Photo courtesy of Gareth Williams/flickr)

What Are Central Concepts in Sociology?

Sociology is the study of groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions. A group is any collection of at least two people who interact with some frequency and who share some sense of aligned identity. A group of people who live in a defined geographic area, who interact with one another, and who share a common culture is what sociologists call a society.
Sociologists study all aspects and levels of society. Sociologists working from the micro-level study small groups and individual interactions, while those using macro-level analysis look at trends among and between large groups and societies. For example, a micro-level study might look at the accepted rules of conversation in various groups such as among teenagers or business professionals. In contrast, a macro-level analysis might research the ways that language use has changed over time or in social media outlets.
The term culture refers to the group’s shared practices, values, and beliefs. Culture encompasses a group’s way of life, from routine, everyday interactions to the most important parts of group members’ lives. It includes everything produced by a society, including all of the social rules. Sociologists often study culture using the sociological imagination, which pioneer sociologist C. Wright Mills described as an awareness of the relationship between a person’s behavior and experience and the wider culture that shaped the person’s choices and perceptions. It is a way of seeing our own and other people’s behavior in relation to history and social structure (1959).
One illustration of this is a person’s decision to marry. In the United States, this choice is heavily influenced by individual feelings; however, the social acceptability of marriage relative to the person’s circumstances also plays a part. It is important to remember that culture is produced by the people in a society, and therefore sociologists take care not to treat the concept of “culture” as though it were alive in its own right. Reification is the term used to describe this mistaken tendency, where one treats an abstract concept as though it has a real, material existence (Sahn 2013).