24 |
Part I: The Basic Basics |
Figuring Out What Sociology Is
A student-written university course guide once jokingly defined sociology as the study of “everything in the whole wide world.” That definition isn’t entirely untrue; sociologists study just about everything people do. And how sociologists study just about everything people do defines sociology.
Defining sociology
The definition of sociology, after you’ve learned it, is easy to remember because the definition is right there in its name: soci for “society” and ology for “the study of.” Sociology is the study of society.
Social sciences take a systematic approach to the analysis of human lives and interactions. And sociology, which is considered a social science, is generally grouped with the following areas of study:
Psychology
Anthropology
Economics
Political science
Ethnic studies (for example, African-American studies or Latino studies)
Area studies (for example, Asian studies or European studies)
Gender studies (for example, women’s studies)
Cultural studies
Sociology shares a general approach with all these fields, and sociologists often read work by or collaborate with experts in these disciplines. But sociologists insist on reserving the right to study any of those topics. Politics, economics, culture, race, gender . . . sociologists believe that these all interact with one another, and if you try to study just one of those areas in isolation, you risk missing important information about how a social group or situation works. So, you can study just about anything having to do with humans’ social life and call it sociology — but only if you study it in a scientific, systematic way.
Chapter 2: What Is Sociology, and Why Should I Care? 25
Studying society scientifically
If you’ve ever participated in a science fair, you know how the scientific method works. You:
1.Ask a question.
2.Set up an experiment or a study that can provide an answer to that question.
3.Make very careful observations.
4.Analyze your observations to see what answer they might provide.
Scientists believe the scientific method is the best way to study the natural world, and social scientists believe that’s the best way to study the social world, too. However, one of the hardest things to understand about sociology is also one of the most important: Sociologists have asked many important questions about society, but the most important contribution of sociology is not the answers to those questions. It’s the fact that they were asked at all.
What makes studying society in a scientific manner so difficult, but ultimately so rewarding, is that to do so you have to set aside your own biases and preconceptions about how society “should” work. If you’re going to study social norms objectively, you’re going to have to understand that your own norms and values aren’t the only ones that exist, and you’re going to have to put aside any question of whether your own norms and values are the “best.”
Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology (more about him in Chapter 3) used what has been called an “organic metaphor” for society. Not everyone agrees that his model is the right way to understand how society works, but it’s a good way to start understanding what society is.
Durkheim said society is like a human body — one big thing made up of many smaller parts. Your body is made of many different systems (nervous system, respiratory system, digestive system) that are themselves made up of organs (brain, lungs, stomach), and the organs are made of billions of cells of all different types. In this way, you are your cells because there’s nothing in your body that’s not made of cells; however, your cells aren’t you. It’s only when your cells all work together that they make you who you are. There’s not any one cell that is “you” — you are all of your cells, working together in organs and systems to make up the total person who is sitting there, breathing and thinking and holding this book.
26 |
Part I: The Basic Basics |
Society is like that — but much bigger and even more complicated. A society is made up of many people acting together in groups and systems, all of which act together (even if they don’t always cooperate, they at least affect each other). Your country is a society, but no one person — not even the president or the prime minister — is the society. The society is all the people in your country interacting together. Just like a body is, in a sense, what happens when a lot of different cells interact together, a society is what happens when a lot of people interact together.
Just as you need to look at an entire body to understand how the body works, sociologists believe that you need to look at an entire society to understand how society works. You can’t understand how a liver works unless you understand its place in the body, and sociologists believe that you can’t understand how any part of society (a company, an ethnic group, a small town) works unless you understand its place in society.
Asking and answering sociological questions
To study society scientifically means asking scientific questions about society. A scientific, sociological question is a question about how society works — not about how it should work, but about how it does work. Of course, asking and answering such questions takes some finesse. So the following two sections give you more detailed info on how scientific, sociological questions should be formed as well as answered.
Putting together empirical questions
Sociological questions are in the general category of questions known as empirical questions. An empirical question is a question that can be answered by gathering facts. To best understand how to construct an empirical question for sociological study, you may find it helpful to consider the differences among the following types of questions:
Theoretical question: A question about ideas, which can be answered with other ideas. If I ask, “What is racism?” I’m asking a theoreti-
cal question — I’m looking for a general definition of what is called “racism.”
Moral question: A question about how things “should” or “should not” be. If I ask, “Should there be racism?” I’m asking a moral question — I’m asking you to make a value judgment about whether it is right to judge someone by the color of his or her skin.
Chapter 2: What Is Sociology, and Why Should I Care? 27
Empirical question: A question that can be answered by gathering facts. If I ask, “Does racism exist in this society?” I’m asking an empirical question — I’m looking for information about the world that can be determined by making observations.
In this case, if I want to fight racism, I can do so more effectively if I have accurate information about how, where, and why people act in a racist manner. Sociologists are strong believers in the value of seeing society as it actually is, not as they want it to be.
How I became a sociologist
The story of how I became a sociologist may help you to understand what’s unique about the sociological perspective, and to think about how sociology can cause you to think differently about your job and your life.
When I was in high school and looking for a job, I quickly decided that being a babysitter was a lot more fun than being a golf caddy. So I ended up babysitting for many different families. Doing that work, I temporarily took the place of many different parents with many different views on child-rearing: TV, or no TV? Strict bedtime, or whenever the kids get tired? Organized activities, or free play? Needless to say, every set of parents thought theirs was the “right” way to raise children. They might check out a stack of parenting books from the library, but they would usually end up sticking with the one that told them to do whatever it was that they were going to do anyway.
I went on to study education in college, but my favorite course was one on the history of education, where we learned about the many changes in people’s views of children and how they learn. Again, I was struck by how in every time and place, people were convinced that they had it all figured out. What made us so sure that we finally had it “right”?
Eventually, I realized that I was interested not in the education of children, but rather in the sociology of childhood — the study of different ideas about what children should do, and what those changing ideas have to do with changes in other areas of society. For my doctoral dissertation in sociology I studied the history of children’s books and media: how changes in technology and child-rearing have affected what we value in our children’s reading material. I systematically gathered articles about children’s books and media and analyzed them to test my hypothesis that, in our concern that kids aren’t reading enough, we have become much more open-minded about what we consider “good” reading material for children. I called the dissertation From Captains Courageous to Captain Underpants.
Becoming a sociologist allowed me to pursue questions that I felt needed to be answered: How do we decide what’s right and wrong whether it comes to kids’ books, or anything else? How do our society’s norms and values come to be? Why do the people in one neighborhood have completely different ideas about child-rearing than the people in the next neighborhood? Those are fundamentally sociological questions.