1. As often stated, and as we have already explained elsewhere, the business of sociology is to study the human society. The main thrust of sociology lies on understanding the human behaviour in relation to a group setting. This means that for the benefit of sociology to accrue, it is essential that human beings interact with each other; and, above all, their behaviour must have some influence or effect on each other. In other words, sociology embraces the human activities of individuals with regard to the kinds of social groups’ relationships that are formed among the members.
2. Sociology is involved in studying social institutions such as family education, religion, economy, and politics in order to determine the value, roles or functions of such institutions in the society. The society is dependent on these social institutions for the fulfillment of its needs, for example the rearing and socialization or education of the children. The failure or success of any are of these social institutions in their work often ends up weakening or strengthening the society in many ways.
3. Another important area of study addressed by sociology is the culture of a society. As you will learn later in these lectures, culture is defined as the way of life of a society. This means that a society’s knowledge, technology, beliefs, patterns of education, morals, art, laws, customs, ideas, material goods and other forms of wealth are included within culture. It is often said that cultures distinguish societies from each other and that a society cannot exist as a society if it does not have culture. Accordingly, sociology studies different cultures as they exist in different societies or groups to determine what values societies hold differently and how, to establish how culture contributes to or influences certain social functions such as burials, marriages, child rearing, work performance, problem solutions, responsibility sharing, interactions and many others. Sociology therefore, examines culture as the basis of the life of a society
4. Social class formation or social stratification is another subject area that sociology studies. In this concern, sociology looks particularly at certain forces such as educational level and occupation, which may influence the division of a society into specific layers – low, middle and upper – in which different individuals are fitted. Within these concerns, sociology has the task of examining the movement of individuals or either change from one stratum to another. This is normally called social mobility. Social power formation, the political process, the education process, the socialization process,, economic structure, human and industrial production, professions, and several other social phenomena are studied in this lecture of sociology in order to assess why and how they affect the life of a society.
5. Another area of great to the sociology student is the aspect of sociology pathology. Social patheology entails all the observable activities in a society that negatively affects the wellbeing of a society. It includes various forms of deviant behavior, or non-conformity to the reforms of a group. We shall define deviant behaviors or deviancy simply as that behavior which represents a departure from the socially agreed and accepted norms in a group of society. In these sense, sociology examines the kinds of deviant exhibited by individuals in a society with regard to why, how and to what extend such behaviors contribute to crimes of various kinds, for example, juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, social disobedience, greed and fraud, sex offenses, school truancy, dishonesty, robberies and assaults, suicides, prostitution, gangsterism and many others.
6. Sociology as the science of society, studies various more specific human structures and situations with a view to understanding how such structures and situations affect the individual and the society as a whole. Manufacturing organizations concerned with social welfare, community activity, health education and many more are of much interest to sociology. In particular, sociology examines how the formal and informal nature of such organizations could affect their services or functions, the workers or people they group and serve the extent of associations or interactions together with the power or authority flow within the organizations.
Thus as u can see, the scope concern of sociology is vast. We might correctly say that all human activities involving all levels of social relationships are included in the field of consideration and research explored by sociology and sociologists.
Wilfykil answered the question on March 2, 2019 at 07:44