As noted in "Introduction", sociology is the scientific study of humans in groups. But let’s go a little further and think about what makes sociology a unique discipline. There are several key insights that make sociology unique, and keeping these in mind will help you frame your research interest in a way that is sociological. First, sociologists recognize that who a person is and what he or she thinks and does is affected by the groups of which that person is a member. Second, sociologists accept that interaction takes place in a way that is patterned. Finally, sociologists acknowledge that while patterns are important, inconsistencies in patterns are equally important. By considering each of these key insights in a little more detail, we can begin to get a better grasp of what makes sociology unique and what makes the topics that sociologists study sociological.
As noted, sociologists recognize that who a person is and what he or she thinks and does is affected by the groups of which that person is a member. In particular, sociologists pay attention to how people’s experiences may differ depending on aspects of their identities. To help yourself think sociologically, look around you as you are out and about. Do you see people of different racial or ethnic identities from you? Different genders? Different class statuses? How might their experiences differ from yours? How might the very experience you are having at that moment differ for you if you were different somehow? What if you weighed twice as much as you do right now? What if you had green hair instead of brown? Sociologists study what such identities and characteristics mean, how and by whom they are given meaning, how they work together with other meanings, and what the consequences are of those meanings. In other words, sociologists study how people’s social locations shape their experiences and their place in society.
Sociologists also accept that social interaction is patterned. In fact, patterns exist even though the people involved in creating them may not have any conception of their contribution. Because sociologists are interested in aggregates, the individuals who collectively create patterns may be separated by many years or miles. As sociologists, however, we are trained to look for consistencies in social patterns across time and space. For example, societies all over the world have for many years created rules, socialized their members, and produced and distributed goods. It is the consistencies across such processes that sociologists aim to understand.
Of course, inconsistencies are just as important as patterns. When, for example, women began to enter the paid labor force in increasing numbers, sociologists became interested in what forces drove this change and what consequences individuals, families, employers, and societies might see as a result (Wolfbein & Jaffe, 1946). 1 Questions about how gender and work are intertwined are now so common in sociology that many campuses today offer gender and work courses, and the scholarly journal Gender, Work, & Organization was established in 1994 to distribute research on this topic alone. 2 Similarly, when mating and dating patterns shifted to include online match services, sociologists did not ignore this new way that humans had found to partner. Instead, they took note of it and considered how it worked, who utilized this new method of matching, and its impact on dating patterns more generally. In fact, according to Sociological Abstracts, a database that indexes published sociological research (and which you’ll read more about later on in this chapter), 31 peer-reviewed articles on online dating had been published as of August 2010. As recently as 2004, however, there were no sociological articles on online dating indexed by this database. The increase in publications focusing on online dating very likely had something to do with the changing social landscape. In this case, societal changes, or inconsistencies, drove the sociological research. 3
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