Sociology is classified into several specialized fields, some of which are:
- Applied sociology
- Humanistic sociology
- Collective behavior
- Sociology of religion
- Comparative sociology
- Urban sociology
- Rural sociology
- Social psychology
- Social control
- Demography
- Deviant behavior
- Cultural sociology
- Sociology of literature
- Military sociology
- Sociology of language
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| Fields of Sociology |
Applied Sociology
'Applied
sociology' and 'sociological practice' (also referred to as political
sociology) have come to refer to interventions in an applied context using
sociological expertise. Applied sociologists operate in a wide variety of
contexts, including government, colleges, and private practice, applying
sociological approaches to help communities address daily issues, such as
enhancing community policing and crime prevention, assessing and improving drug
courts, evaluating the needs of inner-city neighborhoods or developing a school
system's potential.
Humanistic Sociology
It is an
approach that considers its research subjects and its students, i.e.
individuals, as composites of values and values systems. The concept is linked
to other sociological realms, such as antipositivism, in some contexts.
Humanistic sociology tries to shed light on topics such as, "What is the
relationship between a man of principle and a man of opportunism?"
This is the
humanistic sociology of conversation. It is a dialogue about concepts. As a
science, rather than plugging individuals into systems that do not recognize or
satisfy human needs, we need to develop and enforce support systems for people.
Collective Behavior
Individual
behavior, fads, trends, panics, crazes, communities, publics, and supporters
are all instances of collective behavior, as are more coordinated phenomena
like change and progressive social movements. The study of collective behavior
differs from the study of human behavior, in that it focuses on groups, but
examinations into the actions and motives of the individuals inside these
groups are also conducted. In that it consists of individuals acting together,
collective behavior is similar to organized group behavior; however, it is more
spontaneous than group behavior with well-defined norms and traditions that
explain their goals, membership, leadership, and method of operation, and thus
more volatile and unpredictable.
Sociology of Religion
The study of
religion's ideals, behaviors, and hierarchical structures using sociology's
tools and methods is known as sociology of religion. This objective research
might include both quantitative and qualitative methodologies (population,
surveys and census analyses). Religious sociology is distinct from religious
theory in that it does not set out to test the authenticity of religious views.
What Peter L. Berger described as "methodological atheism" inherent
can entail the method of comparing different competing dogmas.
Comparative Sociology
Comparative
sociology analyses social processes across nations or across societies of
various sorts, such as capitalism and socialism. Comparative sociology has two
primary approaches: others pursue balance through different countries and
societies, while some seek difference. Structural Marxists, for instance, have
attempted to use comparative methods to discover the general processes in
different societies that apparently underlie different social orderings. The
danger of this strategy is that in the search for supposed universal
structures, the various social contexts are ignored.
Urban Sociology
The goal of
urban sociology is to discover and explain the causal relationships that exist
between the constituent parts of a city and the variables that cause them. This
method allows for a better understanding of the dynamic and profound character
of all urban realities, particularly the territorial stability of social life,
and the creation of a structure and community that symbolizes land, and the
history and evolution of human settlements. Ancient towns, cities in the Middle
Ages, new cities, cities of technical revolutions, and cities of the world as a
series of communities were all used to reproduce the institutional elements of
the earliest human colonies in historically different ways. The characteristics
of the 'financial city' tend to be the following: an aversion to the
geographical distribution of the development chain, dominance over increasingly
larger territory, a world-scale economy, and the production of icons and
structures that legitimize the planetary control of the cities that cannot be
offset by the political and legal orders of states.
Rural Sociology
Rural sociology
is a branch of sociology that studies social structures and conflicts in rural
regions, but it also covers topics such as food and agriculture, as well as
access to natural resources. It began in the United States in the 1910s with
strong ties to the national Department of Agriculture and agricultural
university institutions with land grants, and it is now an important academic
field in most of the world.
The
sociology of food and agriculture is one emphasis of rural sociology, and much
of the discipline is devoted to the economics of agricultural production. Other
areas of research include rural migration and other population trends,
environmental sociology, amenity-led development, public-land policies,
so-called "boomtown" development, social disruption, natural resource
sociology (including forestry, logging, fisheries, and other regions), rural
communities and identities, and rural health and education policies.
Social Psychology
Social
psychology is the scientific study of how real or perceived interactions with
others in a social environment shape people's beliefs, wants, values, goals,
and ambitions. As a result, it examines human behaviors as they are influenced
by others, as well as the circumstances in which social behavior and emotions
occur. According to Baron, Byrne, and Suls (1989), social psychology is
"the scientific area that tries to explain the nature and causes of
individual behavior in social contexts."
Social Control
Social
control theory defined inner techniques of social control. Individuals would
deliberately restrict aberrant conduct if moral norms are internalized and
individuals are integrated into broader communities, according to the theory,
which says that associations, duties, ideals, and beliefs encourage compliance.
Internal methods of influence, such as one's own conscience, ego, and right and
wrong sensitivities, are potent in reducing the chance of straying from society
standards, according to this perspective. External measures of regulation, on
the other hand, compel individuals to follow because an authority figure (such
as the state) threatens consequences if they do not.
The
philosophy of social regulation aims to explain how to reduce deviation to the
bare minimum. Finally, the Hobbesian theory of social regulation holds that all
decisions are influenced by social interactions and agreements between parties.
Supporters of the social control hypothesis, like Hobbes, believe that morality
is established within a social order by imposing costs and consequences on behaviors
labelled as wicked, false, immoral, or deviant.
Demography
Demography,
social research and population sciences can be conceived as consisting of two
facets. The former is concerned only with the study of population size and
distribution and variance and transition components; the latter is concerned
only with population interrelationships and other vector structures of which
one collection is sociological. Population analysis offers the sociologist with
the ability to deal with quantified variables that offer some context for
dealing with other sets of variables. Demography, while a multi-science
discipline, may contribute to sociology's core interests and, in return, learn
from researching the interrelationships between demographic and sociological variables.
Deviant Behavior
Deviant
behavior is any conduct which is contradictory to society's prevailing norms.
There are numerous hypotheses that explain how and why individuals participate
in deviant behavior, including biological, psychological, and societal causes.
There are
two sorts of activities that constitute deviance. The first, a criminal
offence, is formal deviation, which is the violation of formally approved
legislation. Formal deviance manifests itself in robbery, robbery, rape,
homicide, and abuse. Informal deviance is the second type of deviant conduct
that involves breaches of implicit social standards. Casual deviance is defined
as picking one's nose, belching excessively, or standing needlessly near to
another human.
Cultural Sociology
The systemic
study of identity, which is typically regarded as the set of symbolic codes
that a member of a group employs as exhibited in society, is the focus of
cultural sociology and related cultural sociology. Culture, according to Georg
Simmel, is "the development of persons via the agency of external forms
that have been objectified over time." Culture is examined in the
sociological discipline as the methods of thinking and describing, behaving,
and the tangible objects that together make up a community's way of life.
The approach
of contemporary sociologists to society is frequently split into
"sociology of culture" and "cultural sociology" The
concepts are identical, but not synonymous. The sociology of culture is an
older term, and certain subjects and objects are considered more or less
"cultural" than others. Jeffrey C. Alexander, by contrast, invented
the term cultural sociology, an approach that at some degree sees all, or most,
social events as essentially cultural.
Sociology of Literature
A subfield
of the sociology of culture is the sociology of literature. It explores
literature's social development and its social consequences. It focuses its
attention upon the relation between a literary work and the social structure in
which it is created. It reveals that the existence of a literary creation has
the determined social situations.
Military Sociology
It closely
coincides with C. The appeal by Wright Mills to connect the human world to
larger social systems. The goal of military sociology is to systematically
study the army as a social entity rather than as a military institution. This
highly specialized sub-discipline explores military personnel problems as a
discrete category of coerced collective activity focused on common goals linked
to vocational and fighting security, with priorities and ideals that are more
established and limited than in civil society. Civil-military ties and
relationships with other organizations or federal bodies are often associated
with military sociology.
It also
looks at topics such as military training, military representation by race and
ethnicity, fighting, military families, military social organization, war and
peace, and the health of the military.
Sociology of Language
The analysis
of the connections between language and culture is the sociology of language.
The field of sociolinguistics, which focuses on the influence of culture on
language, is closely related to it. It reflects on the full spectrum of
subjects related to language behavior's social organization, including not only
the use of language per se, but also language attitudes and open practices
towards language and language users.
The field
starts with the premise that language is a social good and pursues research
into language in interaction between social classes, especially phenomena such
as tensions between languages and multilingualism.
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