Chapter 1: Society, Sociology and Sociological Research

What Is Sociology?

Sociology places the individual and her/his behaviours, values and norms into a larger set of relations that is, crudely saying, known as “social”. It also look into particular aspects of society to point out a general patterns. Thus, it can be said that the discipline of sociology is primarily interested to look at society in order to understand and give a meaning to individuals’ behaviours, values and norms whereas it also focuses on individuals to provide various explanations and patterns about diverse issues in society.

Sociological thinking makes people comprehend that things are not always the same as they think; and that the world that they think they know may actually be different than what they think. This enables us to understand our and other people’s problems better. Thus we see that all people confront similar obstacles and disappointments with us. Thus, we respect their right to choose and perform the life style they choose. In other words, sociological thinking creates a solidarity based on mutual understanding and respect.

The areas that sociologists investigate are parts of our everyday lives. Sociologists talk about families, groups, politics, economy, factories, religion, authority, etc. In everyday life, people do think and talk about these issues depending on their own experiences, in other words, with common sense.

Sociology does not aim to replace our incorrect information with unquestionable true information. It helps us to question and criticize the facts that are accepted true without questioning. In this regard, it is not an ideology or a political view. But, it is a systematic way of inquiry to analyse and understand various views of people, motives that steer human beings to act and think in a particular way.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills used the concept of “sociological imagination” to define the awareness of the relationship between personal, private experience and the wider society. Sociological imagination means to comprehend the history, the biography, and their relationship in the society. To understand the connection between biography and history is to understand the connection between the individual and the society, between the world and us. A divorce of a married couple is an individual problem, but if nearly half of the married couples in a society divorced in the last decade, the divorce itself is a social problem. It is an individual problem for a person to be unemployed, but if one-third of the population is unemployed, the unemployment itself is a social problem. This shows that problems do not arise from individual characteristics, they are social problems and have to be examined and analysed at the societal level. Besides being a perspective, sociology is also a branch of social sciences. In this manner, sociology can be defined in many ways. A famous living sociologist of our era, Anthony Giddens, defines sociology as the scientific study of the social life of human beings, human groups and societies. For another definition, sociology is the systematic and planned study of human groups and social life in modern societies. Sociology can also be defined as scientific examination and research of human societies and the human behaviours in the social groups. Thus, we can define sociology as the scientific investigation of the society, the social interaction, the relation between the individual and the society, the structures of the social institutions and their relations with each other.

Briefly saying, we can define sociology as a discipline of social science in which the aim is to understand the structure of society and changes in it. It examines contemporary human societies through scientific inquiry.

The Society and Types of Society

Society consists of the interactions among people who share a culture or a number of social institutions. In other words, the society is not the sum of gathered people. Yet, it is mutual relationships among a community of people who share a specific territory, a specific culture and common social institutions. What makes a society is not people themselves. Rather, it is the totality of the relationships among the people.

Societies are not political units; they are not administered by the politicians. Societies administer themselves, they can subsist on their own and they do not need any agency. For example, although few in number, there are still hunter-gatherer tribes today. These tribes are not nations, but they are societies. Every nation is a society, but not every society is a nation.

Sociologists classify the types of societies depending mainly on their characteristics of production. Therefore, although human groups have established many types of societies through the history, sociologists usually refer to six types of society. These are:

• Hunting and Gathering Societies
• Pastoral Societies
• Agrarian Societies
• Traditional States
• Industrial (Modern) Societies
• Post-Industrial Societies

The Fundamental Concepts in Sociology

There are a number of concepts in sociology, which are essential in explaining, understanding and studying society and social behaviour.

• Social Action: Social action is an action which is oriented towards the past, present or future actions of the other people.
• Social Structure: Social structure is the perpetual, continuous and organized relations among the groups and social institutions that consist the society.
• Social Institution: A social institution is a socially organized social behaviour pattern that reflects the established appearance of the society, which are continuously repeated, maintained and approved by the social norms.
• Social Facts: In social life, there are phenomena different than physical sciences examine. These phenomena are known as social facts or social reality. Social facts are created collectively by society.
• Group: Social groups are the main blocks of the society. The group is a set of people who are in mutual interaction, who share specific expectations and who take into consideration the other’s behaviours.
• Self: Self is the totality of the perceptions and thoughts related to our identity and our qualifications. In other words, self is a relatively stable set of perceptions and thoughts of who we are in relation to the others and ourselves.
• Status: A status is the rank, the position that one holds in the society.
• Roles: Society expects specific behaviours from people who hold specific statuses and these expected behaviours are called “roles”.
• Value: Social values are the standards that we consult to know what is wrong and what is right. In other words, values are the ideals and faiths that a society or a group considers important.
• Norm: Norms are the rules resultant of values; they are binding expectations of behaviours. In other words, norms are the visible and invisible rules of conduct.
• Sanctions: Sanctions are the anticipated consequence of violating the rules and the norms. They are used to make members of the society follow the norms. Thus, sanctions are mechanisms of social control.
• Socialization: Socialization is the interaction process in which the individuals learn the language, values, norms, attitudes, knowledge and skills, in short, the culture of the society they live in.

The Origins and the Birth of Sociology as a Social Science

Sociology as a social science discipline exists only for 200 years. In the Western world, the structure of the society began to change beginning from the 1600s. The Enlightenment period, impacted by the Renaissance, Reform and Scientific Revolution, changed the way of thinking about natural and social life in the 17th and 18th centuries. With the Industrial Revolution, unanimated sources of energy began to be used in the production. Thus, factories began to be established and machine production began. A new social class –the industrial working class- has emerged, and specialization occurred in the division of labour. Large numbers of people migrated to urban areas in order to work in the factories. The expansion of industrial cities created problems related to crowd and pollution. Although it became possible to produce more and faster with less labour in the factories, the wealth was not shared equally in the society. Members of the new industrial working class were working almost all day in bad conditions and living in poverty. This created conflict between the classes and paved the way for major labour movements. These developments led to appearance of scholars who tried to understand impact of such changes on society and social relations among people and groups.

The early sociologists tried to answer to explain what changed, how the change occurred, and to estimate how the social structure will be in the future. Sociology arose from the attempts to find out answers for these questions with the utilization of scientific methods of inquiry.

In time, sociology has quite significantly developed and deepened its perspective and evaluation. While doing this, it has also started to develop collaborative works with other disciplines in social sciences such as history, philosophy and economics. Today, sociology both makes use of other disciplines, and is used by other disciplines.

Science and Method

The concept of science derives from the Latin word “scire” (to know) and refers to the known things or the knowledge. This is not an accidental knowledge; it consists of related information which constitutes a body. Thus, in the most general sense, science can be defined as a cluster of systematic knowledge. The two main elements in the definition of science are what we call as knowledge and method. Knowledge refers to the theories which are developed in order to explain the relations between the facts, and method refers to the ways used to generate knowledge. It should be, however, noted that not every knowledge is scientific. Scientific knowledge is rational, empirical, factual, logical, objective, explicit, consistent, systematic, generalizable, valid, reliable and critical knowledge which is generated through scientific methods of inquiry.

The sciences, in the most general sense, are divided into two; the mathematic sciences and positive sciences. Mathematical sciences are divided into mathematic and logic. Positive sciences are divided into physical sciences and social sciences. Physical sciences are the sciences which study animated and unanimated substances and material facts. Some of the physical sciences are astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and zoology.

Social sciences are the sciences which study social world and the relations among people. Sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics and political science are some of the social sciences. The differences between the physical and social sciences indicate that social scientists cannot follow exactly the same research procedures with physical sciences. Social scientists also cannot make measurements or predictions as precisely physical scientists do. However, as long as they meet the scientific research principles, social science researches are certainly scientific. These principles can be summarised as follows:

• Value Freedom
• Objectivity
• The Use of Evidence
• The Use of Scientific Research Methods
• The Capacity for Being

Scientific Research Process

Scientific method refers to the following of scientific rules, procedures and phases in order to reach scientific knowledge. In a general sense, scientific method means the process of hypothetic-deduction, which is the method of logical positivism. Hypothetic-deduction is the process in which the scientists first hypothesize through deduction, and then test these hypotheses through empirical ways such as observation or experiment.

Scientific research is conducted in order to gain scientific knowledge. Scientific research is the process of the gathering, grouping, analysing, synthesizing, explaining, interpreting and evaluating the data in an intentional, planned and systematic way, in order to transform the findings into a meaningful body of knowledge and to find reliable solutions to problems. The procedure of scientific research concretizes in the phases of research. The phases of research are as follows:

• Choosing a research topic and formulating the research problem
• The selection of the appropriate method, techniques and type of research
• Sampling
• Preparing measurement instruments
• Gathering data
• Analysing data
• Interpreting the results and reporting the findings

Main Methodological Approaches in Sociological Research

In every social research, the researcher adopts a methodological approach. The selection of the method is very important because it shapes and limits the research design and techniques. There are three main methodological approaches in social sciences. These are the Positivist, the Interpretive and the Critical approaches. In addition to these, there are also Feminist and Postmodern approaches which are less used than main methodological approaches.

Positivist approach depends on the assertion that science has only one logic and for an intellectual activity to be considered as scientific, it has to match this logic. Positivism claims that there are social laws regulating social world, and these laws and social reality itself exist independent of humans. According to positivism, as the law of gravity is not dependent on human activity and existed before people discovered it, so are the social laws, they exist independent of human activities and wait to be discovered. For this reason, positivist approach advocates that social sciences should use the method of physical sciences, and should aim to discover universal laws which will enable social scientists to predict human behaviour.

Interpretive approach depends on the thoughts of Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber. This approach grounds on the theory of Hermeneutic which emerged in the 19th century, a theory which is used in many areas such as philosophy, art history, linguistics and literature. The Interpretive approach claims that unlike the physical world, which exist independent of human activity, the social world is established through the cultural relations, the meaningful and intentional actions of people. According to Interpretive approach, social facts are not fixed and stable, they constantly continue to be established. Besides, although a particular cultural system may have specific rules, these rules cannot be generalized to other cultural systems, because every cultural system has a different process of generating meaning. Social research should not have the purpose of making generalizations, because it cannot reach universal social laws as in the physical sciences. Depending on these notions, interpretive approach argues that social reality cannot be investigated with the methods physical scientists use to investigate the physical realities.

Critical approach depends on the thoughts of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. This approach has some characteristics of both Positivist and Interpretive approaches. It claims that social reality exists outside and independent of human actions as put forward by Positivism. However, unlike Positivism, the Critical approach argues that social reality is shaped by social, political, economic and cultural factors. According to Critical approach, social reality changes in time, it is not possible to understand it only by looking at its superficial appearance. The Critical approach focuses on the conflict and change in society, especially on the conflicts and contradictions in the organization modes of society. This conflict and change are not always in an observable situation, the social world may be full of illusions, myths and distortions of social reality. According to Critical approach, the purpose of social science is to criticize and transform social relations. This transformation will be possible by revealing the underlying mechanisms of social relations and thus by providing power to powerless people. Thus the empowered people will have the capacity to change the world they live in.

Feminist approach is the approach based on feminist theories and adopted by researchers who have a feminist consciousness. The purpose of feminist research is to reveal how gender and power relations are penetrated in every aspect of social life and to empower powerless women in patriarchal societies. Feminist approach criticizes Positivist approach for maintaining the dominant male-oriented perspective in social sciences and tries to correct it. According to the Feminist Approach, as a consequence of both the dominant patriarchal cultural values and beliefs and outnumber of male researchers, the majority of the non-feminist researches are sexist. These sexist researches generalize male experiences to all people, focus on only male problems and accept gender roles as they are.

Postmodern approach is philosophically based on existentialism, nihilism, anarchism and the thoughts of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sartre and Wittgenstein. According to Postmodern approach, there is no difference between social science and art or literature. This approach argues that research cannot have a function other than describing, and all descriptions are the same in terms of their value. The description of a scientist is not more valuable or more valid than the description of ordinary people.

Research Design and Techniques in Sociological Research

Researchers choose the design of their research considering the aim of their study, the knowledge level they want to learn and their material and human resources. There are two research designs in social research. These are the quantitative and qualitative designs. Researchers may prefer quantitative or qualitative research design according to their personal skills, experiences or interests.

Quantitative design depends on the positivist approach, which advocates that the method of physical sciences should be used in social research. The aim of quantitative researches is to explore the social laws through revealing the casualty relations between social facts. Quantitative researches, with the principle of deduction, begin with theories and hypotheses. Concepts are transformed into measurable variables, the measurement instruments are developed elaborately, and data are gathered with precise measurements. The gathered data are analysed through statistical methods. The statistical relationships between the variables are explained and the hypotheses of the research are tested. The measurement instruments, which are the tools used to gather data, are standardized. Because quantitative researches aim to generalize their findings to the population, their samples are large and representative samples which are selected through probability sampling techniques. Data gathering techniques used in quantitative research design are structured (controlled) observation, structured (controlled) interview, questionnaire, experiment, quasi-experiment and survey.

Qualitative research design, on the other hand, is based on interpretive approach, which claims that social reality can be explained only after it is understood and interpreted. The researcher does not aim to explain the casualty relations between facts, s/he aims to understand and interpret the perspectives of the social actors and the reasons and motivations of social actions. In qualitative researches, social facts are evaluated inside their own social contexts. Unlike quantitative researches, qualitative researches do not begin with hypotheses. The qualitative research process is more flexible than the quantitative research process. The qualitative research problems are not as precise as in quantitative research, and data are gathered with non-standardized measurement tools. After gathering the data with the principle of induction, researchers are free to make changes in the research problem under the light of their data. In qualitative research, researchers study the social world as a whole. This means they do not disassembly it to variables such as dissembling a puzzle into pieces. Instead of variables, they use themes, motives or classifications. Because qualitative research requires seeing the facts from the perspectives of the people who live them, the researchers form close interactions with the participants. This is why standardized measurement instruments are not used in qualitative research. In qualitative research design, data are gathered through unstructured (not controlled, in-depth) interview, focus group interview, unstructured (not controlled) observation, semi-structured observation, life story interview, oral history, case study and document analysis.

Both quantitative and qualitative designs have strengths and weaknesses. The quantitative approach enables us to explore the general structures and patterns in the society through generalizable findings; this is the strength of this design. The main weakness of this design is that it extracts human behaviour from its own social context and degrades it to numbers and abstract formulas. The strength of the qualitative design is that it provides us rich and detailed data, which enables us to understand human actions and the process of social change in their own context and in a holistic manner. The main weakness of this design is that it overlooks the structural influences that are beyond the information of individuals.