Introduction to Sociology

Catalog description

Sociology is the academic discipline concerned with the systematic investigation and understanding of human action and interaction. This broad definition includes everything from the actions, attitudes and beliefs of individual persons to the structures and cultures of entire societies and global regions. Sociologists study all manner of topics, from race relations to sports to religious rituals to immigration patterns (and many other things as well), and they do so through large-scale surveys, interviews, participant observation, documentary analysis and other means of measurement. What unites such a diverse set of interests, methods and units of analysis is a common perspective. In the simplest terms, sociology is concerned with the contextual understanding of human behavior, where the context is relational, cultural, institutional, historical, or (most commonly) some combination of these.