Marx believed that societies grew and changed due to struggles of different social classes. Durkheim believed in studying the “social facts,” which would help determine if a society was healthy or pathological. Weber’s focus on the structure of society included the elements of class, status and power. Each sociologist had a great influence in the field of sociology, but took different approaches to studying societies. Sociology enables us to understand how society functions and under which circumstances.
Sociology examines how our behavior individually and in groups is influenced by social processes and what that means. In fact once you start seeing things with a sociological perspective – things will never be the same. It’s knowing how and why we do what we do that engages us with the world around us and makes us more effective agents for social change. However, sociologist C. Wright Mills describes sociology as “the intersection of biography and history?” A lot of you may wonder what he mean: well from my studying and perspectives; The reason why he say sociology is the interception of biography and history is because, Biography: happens to individuals and History: happens to society. For example, every
Sarita Brown Chapter 1 Sociology explores and analyzes the ultimate issues of our personal lives, of society and the world. It's the science dealing with social forces that shape our lives, interests, and personalities. Sociologist dig deeper into the social life and the principles to explain human behavior as a whole. It also helps us to understand why we behave as we do. This is a necessary understanding because it brings about social change.
The most basic definition of sociology is that it’s the scientific study of society and of people and their behavior. Getting a little more in depth, it is the study of society and human in groups and how they interact with one another. Sociology like to go or get behind the scenes of what seems to be happening and comes up with a much convincing explanation. Hence sociology deals with the use of scientific method and analysis to observe and measure something objectively. However not every sociological findings is revolutionary.
Social policy is government principles and legislation designed to deal with social problems like crime and poverty. However opinions from sociologists all vary on this matter because some believe that their research should feed into policy; whereas others are in the opinion that sociologists must find out what is happening, why it is happening and what can be done to solve the problem. There are many things that influence sociology on policy for example globalisation and policy preferences of the government at the time. This essay is going to examine the relationship between sociology and social policy. Positivists and functionalists such as Durkheim and Comte view sociology as a science and they argue that sociology can discover all the social problems.
This is done instead of having findings that are objective. Social psychology has a high number of main ideas but some of them are: 1) how the attitudes of people, biology, social influences, and personalities shape a person’s behavior; 2) how social reality is constructed individual; 3) a person’s social intuition; and 4) how the principles of social psychology is able to be used in everyday life (Myers, 2010). Social reality is constructed with materialistic assumption which understands that a subjective interpretation of the world is separate from an objective world. However, viewing reality can only happen by looking through a lens of a person’s individual beliefs and values. Even more, social intuition is the power being having a snap judgment about a person and it also becomes dangerous after reasoned
Compte argues that sociology should be based on the methodology of the natural sciences and that it would result in 'invariable laws' within society. The patterns that are observed whether they are in nature or in society can all be explained the same way through finding facts that cause them. According to Compte sociology is therefore a science as like science it consists of gathering information about the social world, analysing data and making conclusions on the social laws which govern society. Durkheim although a positivist criticised Compte, he argued that in sociology could only be considered a natural science if it was studied objectively and so social facts were studied as objects. Though this is often difficult as social facts tend to be unnoticeable therefore sociologists must avoid being bias when developing their theories and concepts.
Instead of looking at social systems at a larger-scale, such as the entire population of a country or third world countries, interactionism focuses on smaller-scale social interactions, such as the interactions between individuals or small social groups (Interactionism in Sociology: Definition, Examples & Quiz). Interactionism focuses on the way that we act, or make conscious choices regarding our behaviour that proceed from how we interpret situations (Germov, 2009). In other words, it is how people gives meaning, interpret and construct behaviours through interactions with others and how these interactions affect the same people in the society. “Functionalism is one of the major theoretical perspectives in sociology. It interprets each part of society in terms of how it contributes to the stability of the whole society” (Crossman, A, 2011).
It was a term coined by one of the founding fathers of classical sociology Comte and it involves: “Knowledge that is disciplined, empirical and scientific free from religious or political bias.” On the other hand as society and the early science of sociology evolved a different approach was seen by many to be the way forward. This anti-positivist thinking or interpretist approach believes that society cannot be studied as a science; this methodological anti-positivism proposed the theory of the human in society as an individual and thus research be directed to human cultural norms, values and symbols. The interpretist will take a more subjective approach were as the positivist tries to look at society objectively. Let us now look to compare and contrast positivism with an interpretist approach. Positivists are of the opinion that society can be studied using a scientific approach comparable to the way scientists study the natural world.
4). In a more descriptive definition social psychology is a scientific study that focuses on understanding and explaining how humans think about, influence and/or affect, and relate to one another. Social psychology can be summed up and simply defined as the scientific study of social thinking, social influence, and social relations (Myers, 2010). Although there are many different views, experiments, outcomes, and theories that make up social psychology these ideas can be boiled down to just a few central ideas referred to as social psychology's big lessons (Myers, 2010). These big ideas can be categorized under social thinking, social influence, or social relations.