Demystifying Sociology: What it is and why you should know

• Sociology is the study of society and everything in it.
• Sociology is less about what is studied and more about how.
• As a discipline, sociology is unmatched in its breadth as well as depth of scholarship.

Introduction

Just about everyone has heard of sociology. But when I tell people I’m a sociologist, their faces often go blank, and they stammer something like, “Oh, cool. … So, what is that, exactly?”

It’s hard to explain precisely because it’s such a broad field. But to a great extent: if it’s happening out there, there’s probably a sociologist studying it.

Read on to learn more about sociology, its data, methods, and theories, and why, in my completely biased opinion, these intellectual badasses should have far more influence on our public discourse.

What is Sociology?

Let’s start with some terrifically vague and unhelpful definitions:

• Wikipedia asserts that sociology is “a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life.”
• The American Sociological Association insists, “Sociology is the study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior. Sociologists investigate the structure of groups, organizations, and societies and how people interact within these contexts.”
• The introductory textbook I plucked off my bookshelf states, “Sociology is, very simply, the scientific study of social behavior and human groups. It focuses on social relationships; how those relationships influence people’s behavior; and how societies, the sum total of those relationships, develop and change.”

We can sum up the above word salads as follows:

• Sociology is a field of scientific study.
• Its primary focus is human behavior.
• It’s really, really concerned with the social. (The three definitions above use the word “social” ten times!)
• It’s also very concerned with society (the aggregation of all that social behavior).
• There are also multiple mentions of social relationships and processes of social change.
• Culture, groups, and organizations also receive shoutouts.

I believe it’s better to define sociology not by what we study–because that content is too broad to be crammed into a neat sentence or two–but rather by how. I argue sociology can best described by answering three questions:

1. What are its data and methods? (Examples: questionnaires, interviews, ethnographies)
2. What are its theories? (Examples: intersectionalities, Bourdieusian, Foucauldian)
3. What are its unit(s) of analysis? (Examples: social networks, subcultures, religious institutions)

Let’s examine each in turn:

1) Sociology’s Data and Methods

When we set out to study “society” or “the social,” we quickly run into a significant problem: The experiment, the gold standard of the scientific method, doesn’t work very well.

What sociologists study just isn’t as static, objective, manipulable, or replicable as what physical scientists study. Let’s look at each of these in turn:

• The laws of nature are mostly static. By contrast, the social world is dynamic, constantly in flux. Even if you take an accurate measurement of a social phenomenon at one time and place, there’s no guarantee it will be the same if you measure again, or try to find the same phenomenon elsewhere.
• Some things about society and social behavior are objective. But others are quite hard to define. For example, how do you measure “social support” in a consistent, comprehensive way that takes into account all the ways people can be supported across nations and cultures?
• Experiments require manipulable variables. They require a control group and an experimental group identical in every way, except the experimental group receives a treatment the control group does not. It’s difficult to make this work in practice in sociological studies. It may not be possible or desirable to divide subjects into two groups. People may change their behavior if they know they’re being experimented on. Depending on what’s being studied, experimenting on human subjects may even be unethical.
• Because it’s so hard to generalize findings to different times and places, it’s also hard to replicate results. With very little equipment, I can confirm experimentally that the earth’s gravity accelerates at 9.8 m/s/s. But I will never do a two-year observational study in a California high school or interview political dissidents in Myanmar. Sociologists simply have to trust each other’s results in a way other scientists do not.

As a result, sociology can’t afford to be too methodologically picky. Sure, we need to insist that those methods are as systematic and rigorous as possible, just as any good scientists would. But often, sociologists are dealing with suboptimal data with unclear generalizability.

That means sociologists must be skilled at understanding the limitations of their data, cleverly put puzzle pieces together even when some of the pieces are missing, and take great care not to overstate their conclusions. This is just how science has to be when you’re studying something as enormous, complicated, messy, and resistant to experimental methods as society.

Quantitative Methods

Sociologists tend to focus on either (1) quantitative methods, or (2) qualitative methods.

Quantitative methods deal primarily with questionnaires and other forms of numerical data.

• Surveys are the most common form of data collection, and there is a whole science of survey methods dealing with how to ask questions, order questions, and deal with other potential obstacles that can taint data quality.
• It’s not required for sociologists to create their own surveys; often, the surveys and results of others are available for analysis. The General Social Survey, for example, is an annual survey administered by the University of Chicago for the past forty years. With hundreds of variables, it is an excellent dataset for anyone who wants to track social trends in American life over several decades.

Nowadays, many good data sources and advanced statistical analyses can be performed to extract maximum value from the data. For example, in this study I reviewed, the researcher took data from the Florida Highway Patrol’s traffic stops between 2012 and 2020 and found that racial bias existed among White Republican and White Democratic officers, even when controlling for other variables that may have explained why more Black drivers were stopped (like the crime rate in the county where the stop occurred, for instance).

In short, quantitative sociologists do a lot of unglamorous data cleaning, organizing, and analyzing. But the results they generate and conclusions they draw are immeasurably important glimpses into the society in which we live.

Qualitative Methods

Qualitative methods are used less frequently but are no less essential than quantitative methods, which often are unable to capture the thick, detailed, messy, complex reality of everyday life.

Most sociologists recognize that qualitative methods need to complement quantitative methods; each approach has its own limitations that align with the strengths of the other approach. For example, an exploratory, qualitative study can be used to generate hypotheses and research questions, which can then be tested on a larger scale using quantitative methods.

Common forms of qualitative methods include:

• Ethnography, or systematic observation of a specific social or cultural setting.
• Interviews, a way to conduct surveys with more opportunities for open-ended answers.
• Content analysis, in which books, articles, or other media are systematically coded and analyzed.
• “Natural” experiments, in which real life happily provides a case study that can be analyzed much like an experiment.

Ten Top Sociologists

Here are the five sociologists generally considered to be among the first modern sociologists–along with five more contemporary scholars who have played a major role in reinvigorating the discipline since the demise of functionalism in the 1960s:

Classical Sociologists

• Karl Marx (1818-1883): As insightful a socioeconomic critic as he was a lousy political theorist, many of Marx’s critiques of capitalism and its effects on social life stand up today.
• Emile Durkheim (1858-1917): His 1897 study of suicide in Europe is considered the first empirical work of modern sociology. Had a profound effect on the functionalist school.
• W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963): The first to articulate a sociology of race. Produced the first empirical work of modern sociology by an American (The Philadelphia Negro in 1899).
• Georg Simmel (1858-1918): The first micro-sociologist, especially interested in how space influences social interactions. Known primarily for The Philosophy of Money (1900) and The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903).
• Max Weber (1864-1920): A non-Marxist conflict theorist, his magnum opus, Economy and Society (1922), is widely considered the most influential book in the history of sociology.

Contemporary Sociologists

• Erving Goffman (1922-1982): The greatest microsociologist of the 20th century. Major works include The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Stigma (1963), and Frame Analysis (1974).
• Jurgen Habermas (1929-): Originally published in German in the early 1960s, his dissertation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, became the most acclaimed history of the rise of our modern, mass-media culture when it was finally translated into English in 1989.
• Michel Foucault (1926-1984): A philosopher and historian, his works include Discipline and Punish (1975) and The Birth of Biopolitics (2004) and have had an enormous influence on the study of power, knowledge, the economy, and sexuality.
• Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002): Perhaps the most influential modern theorist, he explored education, social inequality, cultural capital, and the dynamics of power. His masterpiece is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979).
• Patricia Hill Collins (1948-): One of several scholars who have revolutionized the study of race, gender, and social inequalities, popularizing the concept of intersectionalities. Her most famous work is Black Feminist Thought (1990).

2) Sociology’s Theories

It’s not possible to study every social context to the same degree that sociologists will study a neighborhood, workplace, or school in an ethnography. For this reason, sociology is more dependent than most scientific disciplines on theory.

A good theory is simply the best possible explanation that explains the evidence we’re seeing. By contrast, a law is something that can be proven. The reason evolution is considered a theory is not because it is less correct than one of the laws of nature. It’s called a theory because there’s no way to prove it the same way we can prove the laws of gravity.

Sociologists need theories because we can’t study every neighborhood, workplace, or school in the world. We have to take the social situations we’ve studied, and deduce which phenomena are generalizable to other social situations and which are not. By coming up with theories that explain what we see, sociologists can directly address the underlying dynamics and processes that are likely to manifest in the many places we can’t study directly.

Sociology textbooks have an annoying–and inaccurate–tendency to present three major schools of sociological theory:

• Symbolic interactionism is the theory that deals with small-scale social interactions and their dynamics.
• Functionalism is large-scale theory that looks at how the different elements of society work cooperatively together.
• Conversely, conflict theory is large-scale theory that looks at how groups struggle for power and status with one another.

In truth, this is not what sociology looks like today at all:

• Today, all macro theory is conflict theory. Functionalism has been dead and buried since the 1960s. (Consensus and cooperation do happen in society, of course. But there is not enough of it to credibly pretend that society is in any way a harmonious whole.)
• Nor can all micro theory be collapsed into symbolic interactionism–there are, in fact, many micro approaches besides symbolic interactionism.

In truth, there are only slightly fewer sociological theories as there are sociologists out there. Many theories are quite obscure or are only known to those studying in a particular subfield. Every sociologist needs one or more theories to inform their work. But in my opinion, it’s a fool’s errand to attempt to define sociology by its theories. They are simply too numerous and diverse to be of use in classifying types of sociologists.

Theory and Data: Example

In sociology, theory and data have a reciprocal relationship. New theories generate data to test or refine the theory. Conversely, new data gives rise to new theories or refinements to explain what the researcher observed.

For example, in her book Unequal Childhoods, Annette Lareau spent several years studying the parenting and household styles of people of different race and class levels. She had anticipated that the White wealthy and middle classes would use their financial advantages to try to give their children an advantage over other children. This was a hypothesis she developed from the existing field of Bourdieusian theory (named after Pierre Bourdieu, the first to systematically study this tendency in the 1970s).

As her study unfolded and the data confirmed her hypothesis, she began to articulate her own theory about what was happening in these suburban homes.

• She called the practices of affluent White parents, “concerted cultivation,” to capture the effort invested in developing their children’s talents and shuttling them among many enrichment activities.
• The “natural growth” paradigm of parenting, still practiced by Black and poorer families, by contrast, was not nearly so demanding.

This disparity in parenting styles still proliferates today, and Lareau’s theory has become one of the most influential of the early 21st century.

3) Sociology’s Units of Analyses

There are 8 billion individuals living on earth. Between every one of us and the totality of our global society lies a huge spectrum of affiliations, associations, and organizations. Sociology studies all of it.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of units of analysis you might find in a sociology journal article:

• Interactions: Even walking down the street and nodding to a stranger is an interaction. We have thousands each day. Sociologists study them.
• Networks: We have more or less durable relationships or social ties, ranging from close family and friends to the barest of acquaintances. Through our interactions with them, we communicate lots of information and meet each other’s social and emotional needs. Sociologists study them.
• Groups: This can range from race and gender to nationality and locality to all sorts of affiliations that allow us to feel kinship with others–even people we’ve never met. Groups have norms, roles, factions, and pressures. Sociologists study them.
• Cultures, or ways of life, can be big and small, mainstream or marginalized, applicable to a whole country or just a single workplace. They clash constantly. Sociologists study them.
• Institutions are our formal, collective efforts to accomplish tasks, often imbued with a lot of power, authority, and legitimacy. They can be governments, businesses, nonprofits, schools, media organizations. Sociologists study them.

This range reveals how silly it is to try to collapse sociology into a handful of theoretical schools. It drives home the point I’ve already mentioned multiple times, but which perhaps isn’t really sinking in until now: sociology really does study all of it. From the bottom-up, top-down, inside-out, and outside-in. Down to the individual, up to our global society, and everything in between.

You can understand now why so many definitions fall back on societal or social vagaries. But those very vagaries, by trying to capture the incredible breadth of sociology, fail to capture its depth, thus making sociology seem a field of empty abstractions when it is anything but.

Summary

Following these three dimensions, here’s a better definition of what sociology is:

1. Sociology is a systematic, mixed-method, scientific discipline that studies society, social processes, and social behaviors.
2. Sociology ranges in scope from the study of individuals, interactions, and social networks to larger collectives such as groups, cultures, and institutions.
3. Sociology relies heavily upon theory to supplement its data collection.

Beyond these few parameters, the sky is the limit. Few disciplines allow for so much customization and personalization in what is studied. To illustrate, here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of the dissertations written by colleagues in my doctoral program:

• A Flash of Green, a Slip of the Dress, and a Mother’s Embrace: The Commercialized Gendered Aesthetic in the 2009 Iranian Green Movement
• A Right-to-Work Model: The Unionization of Fairfax County Government Workers
• An Institutional Analysis of the United States’ Administrative Efforts to Operationalize Humanitarian Intervention
• Baseball: The (Inter) National Pastime
• Belonging in Refuge: Cultural Logics of Refugee Incorporation in Contemporary Germany
• Contesting Open Government: Discourse, Development, and Democracy
• Conversion to Islam and Impact on Racial Identity
• Culture, Carbon, and Climate Change: A Class Analysis of Climate Change Belief, Lifestyle Lock-in, and Personal Carbon Footprints
• Defining Bullying: A Split-Ballot Survey Experiment
• Deliberating Diversity: Race and Gender in FCC Ownership Debates, 2007-2011
• Duty and Responsibility: Understanding Work-Family Conflict for Multigenerational Households
• Exploring Factors that Influence Perceived Community HIV/AIDS Stigma amongst Black, White, and Hispanic Men Who Have Sex with Men
• Gender and Diaspora in the Making of Pious Subjectivity
• Gender, Group Solidarity, Group Conflict, and the Civic Engagement of Iranian Americans
• Generating Solidarity: The Playful Politics of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
• Guayaquil Antiguo and Cacao Capitalism during the Long 19th Century: On the Peripheral Origins of Planetary Urbanization
• Hardware, Software, and “Peopleware”: Educational Technology and Embedded Struggles in U.S. High Schools
• The Jeito of the Brazilian Mulata: Race, Identity, and Distinction in a Racial Democracy
• Let Them Give: Philanthropic Infrastructure and Industry in the United States
• Making #BlackLivesMatter: A Social Media Ethnography of Cultural Trauma
• Mapping Discourse in the Intellectual Dark Web: A Critical Computational Sociology
• “Meet Them Where They Are”: Social Movement Communication in a Culture of Personal Politics
• Missing Voices: Participants’ Narratives of the National Park Service’s Summer in the Parks Program
• Policing and Communities of Color: A Multilevel Intersectional Examination of Police Fatal Encounters
• Popular Power, Agency and Communes in Venezuela
• Racialized Microaggressions, Internalized and Intersecting Oppressions, and Identity Negotiation among Students of Color at a Predominately White University in the US Southeast
• Reluctant Radicals: from Democratic Aspiration to Violent Conspiration in the Wake of Egypt’s Arab Spring
• The Role of Schools in Occupational Attainment in Japan: School Mediated Job-search Systems and High School Vocational Education
• School Reform, Care Work, and Social Reproduction in Two Public Elementary Schools
• Stewards of the Kingdom: Christianity and Neoliberalism
• The Transformation of “Capacity” in International Development: USAID and the Rise of Transnational Militancy in Afghanistan and Pakistan (1977-2017)
• The Transformation of Ethnic Conflict and Identity in Syria
• “Vetting” The American Dream: Nostalgia, Social Capital and Corvette Communities

From baseball to Black Lives Matter, and Brazil to Syria, these are all sociology. And these are just what is being studied in one doctoral program out of hundreds across the country, and thousands internationally.

Do you agree or disagree with this definition of sociology? What do you believe to be sociology’s greatest virtues and/or shortcomings? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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