Sociological Perspective

The Sociological perspective stresses the social context in which people live. In other words it’s why we do the things that we do, such as our beliefs, attitudes, and guidelines we live by. It examines how these contexts influence people’s lives. It can also be defined as understanding human behavior by placing it within its broader social context. At the center of the sociological perspective is the question of how groups influence people, especially how people are influenced by society. A society is a group of people who share a culture and a territory. Sociology is similar to the other social sciences; it is also different as well. The other social sciences include anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology. Like sociology, anthropology studies the culture within. It also studies a group structure, belief systems, and deals with communication. Economics is similar to sociology because if refers to how societies goods and services are distributed, and how that distribution results in inequality. With political science you study how people govern one another, and how those in power affect people’s lives. Last but not least there’s psychology. Like sociology, psychology studies how people adjust to the difficulties of life. With similarities come all kinds of differences in most cases. Sociologists focus primarily on industrialized societies unlike anthropology which focus on tribal people. Economists and political science focus on more than one social institution, sociology focus on a single institution. Unlike psychologists, sociologists stress factors external to the individual to determine what influences people and how they adjust to life. Psychologists focus on the internal parts of your life. Most of the questions on the common sense quiz were a little shocking. Half of them were really shocking to me. One that surprises me was number two. One thing that really surprises me is the fact that women’s earnings have only gone up slightly. You would think that in the world we live today it would be equal well, to me it should be. It’s been many years since women have not been treated equally. I like to treat everyone equally, that should be the way of life. The fact that crime rate outside of fast-food restaurants is higher than crime rates outside of topless bars is very surprising and somewhat funny. I can see why though, sort of, like it said; topless bars hire security so I guess that’s the reason why the crime rates higher at a place that doesn’t have any security at all. It’s funny because there’s usually a lot of people outside of a fast-food restaurant and what are they going to do run through the drive threw and steal your food. Extensive testing of Islamic terrorist’s shows that they’re more normal then mentally ill. Get out of here, someone that wants to kill their own race and sacrifice themselves is most certainly mentally ill. Ok, there doing it because they think that that’s what there god wants. I just think that someone that wants to sacrifice themselves to their gods is mentally ill; to me it’s just not the way of life. Another one that was shocking to me was that bicyclists today that wear helmets are more likely to have a head injury than the bicyclists that don’t wear a helmet. I can see that the reason why is because the ones that wear the helmet are more likely to do something crazy than the ones without. It just really surprises me cause you think the ones not wearing a helmet would cause more head injuries. I’m terrified to do something crazy on a bike therefore I don’t need a helmet but you should always wear one. In conclusion sociology is a lot more interesting to me than any other science. It studies why we do the things that we do, and why different cultures have different ways of life. I know I’m really going to enjoy the rest of this class and will learn many new things that I never thought of before.