I learned that Sociology is the scientific study of society and human behavior, and Sociological Perspective stresses the social contexts in which people live. It examines how these contexts influence people’s lives. At the center is the question of how groups influence people, and how people are influenced by their society. To find out why people do what they do, sociologists look at social location, the corners in life that people occupy because of where they are located n a society, i.e., jobs, income, education, gender, age, and race, are significant. Sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959): “The sociological perspective enables us to grasp the connection between history and biography.” History being, each society is located in a broad stream of events. Because of this, each society has specific characteristics, such as ideas about proper roles for men and women. Biography is the individual’s specific experiences. Our experiences and external influences become part of our thinking and motivations. We don’t do what we do because of inherited internal mechanisms, such as instincts. The societies in which we grew up, and our particular corners in the society, lie at the corner stone of what we do and how we think. Something is the society within us. Why are hamburgers delicious? Because something tells us they are delicious – the society we live in. I learned Sciences are divided in natural science; to comprehend, explain, and predict events in the natural environment. And social science, which seek to understand the social world objectively by means of controlled and repeated observations. Natural Sciences: are the intellectual and academic disciplines designed to comprehend, explain, and predict the events in our natural environment. Specialized fields of natural science according to subject matter include: biology, geology, chemistry, and physics. Read more…
Definite laws that dictate everything govern the natural world of such things as physics, chemistry and geology. These laws are observed through experimentation and study, which allows us to understand these ‘positive facts’. Many argue that the search for a collection of facts and laws should not be limited to the natural world, but extended to human society. One such person was French mathematician, Auguste Comte. In the nineteenth century he foresaw a science of society that would discover the laws that govern us. This has led to the creation of positivist sociology, the belief that laws of behaviour govern human society. But to what extent is this true?
Positivist sociology seeks to create a research programme that parallel’s that of the natural sciences and aims to find either direct evidence of linked occurrences in society or at least strong correlations. For instance, a sociologist may investigate a possible link between the attendance at parents’ evening and the child’s educational attainment. Many think this is unrealistic and naive. The work on suicide by one of the most famous positivist sociologists, Durkheim, is often used to argue this case. He found that the cause for suicide is not family, religion or politics, but something immeasurable, the extent of integration and moral regulation in society. This however, could also suggest that sociology can correspond to the narrow definition of science as general and concerned with identifying clearly observable causes and correlations. Despite the problems in doing so, the idea of a science for society is appealing to many, and began to emerge fully in the nineteenth century. Marx wrote, ‘the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science’. He also believed that his view of how socialism would emerge from capitalism was not merely utopian, but based on scientific analysis of historical development.
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