introduction to sociology essay questions

📜 Sociology EPQ Ideas

🧐 sociological questions to ask, 🖊️sociology topics to write about in 2024.

Domestic violence in American and other cultures .
Does segregation exist in the contemporary US?
The anti-vaccination movement in social networks.
Gun control: Does it reduce or increase crime ?
Gender pay gap and its impact on women.
Is environmentalism possible in a consumer society?
Challenges that multicultural children face in the US .
The impact of government policies on the family structure.
Gender disparities in the criminal justice system.
Effects of domestic violence on children: The cycle of violence .
Neighborhood crime and violence.
The importance of memes in the digital world.
Marijuana legalization in the United States .
Exploring the social dimension of climate change.
War on drugs: Implication for the criminal justice system .

🔬 Sociology Questions. Introduction

Sociology is very flexible, and at the same time, requires all of your attention and accuracy.

There is even a joke among sociologists: add ‘sociology of’ before any issue, and you are ready to find your research topic—sociology of Christmas, sociology of ballet, sociology of Italian mafia, etc.

Not only are there endless variations for your research focus, but also many approaches and instruments.

Let’s introduce you to the main fields that sociologists study. Keep in mind that you are never limited to one sphere; multidisciplinarity is always welcomed. However, if you are a beginner, better concentrate and work with one issue.

🌆 Research Perspectives for Sociology Paper Topics

Sociological studies can be conducted on macro and micro levels. The difference between these two stages is in research focus, methods of analysis, and conclusions derived from the study.

Macrosociology examines large-scale processes and trends concerning the general social systems and populations.
Microsociology examines small-scale patterns concerning individuals and groups in their face-to-face interactions.
Macrosociology methods include historical, archival research, statistical analysis (large-scale).
Microsociology methods are interviews, questionaries, focus groups, observations, statistical analysis (smaller-scale).

N.B.; This is not an ultimate division of research methods. They can vary and be a part of a mixed-method strategy.

Macrosociological conclusions cover causes and effects, functioning and interaction of social systems, institutions, phenomena, etc.
Microsociological conclusions cover social institutions and systems’ interactions with individuals, groups, etc.: how they affect and shape their lives.

Once again.

Besides the apparent contrast, this division is fluctuating. Some sociological research questions can be at the junction of two perspectives. To a great extent, they complement each other.

📗 Sociology Questions from Macro-Perspective

Below you can find interesting sociology topics from or related to the macrosociological perspective. The examples include fundamental questions about social institutions, social systems, and global processes. Try to understand society as a whole, greater than just a set of individuals.

⚜️ Sociology Essay Topics on Social Institutions

Studies about social institutions examine complicated forms of social order that focus on meeting social needs. Such patterns are government, religion, education, family, etc. Focus in this area is usually on the ways institutions work, interact with other social forms, and change.

Distinguish social institutions from simpler social units (rules, social norms , rituals, etc.) and more complex social forms ( culture , society, etc.). Use as many examples as you can; it is also possible to depict that one social form is a component of other social structures.
The burden of labor: Is work a necessity? Why do people have to work: is it an inevitable social institution, a duty , or a natural predisposition? While most individuals have to work to ensure their living, others claim that labor is a burden that negatively impacts a person, leaving no time for rest and creation.
Institutional culture. What is the system of informal, unwritten rules of an institution? Use an example of a particular social institution (e.g., religion ) to comprehensively describe its ‘culture’. Focus on how this informal set of norms complements the determined structure of rules.
Education as a social institution. Discuss either the internal or external system of relations of this social institution. You can choose to outline different educational system agents or other related institutions and structures.
Structure of roles in ___ institution. Analyze the structure of differentiated roles in a specific institution: interdependence, hierarchy, functions , and rights . Try to depict the structure entirely.
How do definitions of some social institutions can change over time? As an example, you can use family as a social institution and provide details that have changed this notion’s understanding.
How we make friends: friendship as a social institution. Think about the role friendship plays in social relations . Conduct sociological research to focus on revealing the benefits and drawbacks friendship may provide.
Mafia as a social institution. Discuss why we can call any mafia clan a social institution: go through a set of rules, norms, differentiation of roles, and behaviors.
How does a global crisis affect specific social institutions? For instance, the influence of war on education institutions, the pandemic’s impact on the family institution, etc.
Language as a social institution. Discuss whether or not we can define language as a social institution. What is the structure and boundaries of it?
Mother’s and father’s roles in the family .
Internet and social media technology in the family context .
The role of government in the U.S. healthcare system .
Family, cultural legacies, and identity formation .
The functions and role of education .
Impact of culture on the American family system and structure .

📉 Sociology Essay Topics on Social Change

This area studies major shifts in society, such as transformations in behavior, social institutions, social structure, etc. Researchers in this field study how and why specific mechanisms appear and make significant changes.

Innovations that resulted in negative consequences and didn’t bring any global benefit. Nuclear weapons , for example? You can discuss changes in states’ military equipment, policies, and regulations .
Compare technological progress today and centuries ago. People need less time to get used to innovations nowadays. Each innovation may have significant lasting social consequences .
How do economic developments improve other parts of life? For example, economic prosperity can stimulate tolerance towards the LGBT+ community . Try to crack this causal puzzle.
Was the individualistic ethic of Calvinism the only reason for economic growth in the West? Research other causes and compare them with other cases.
Overpopulation in China led to the one-child-per-family policy . Discuss how demographical change can affect different spheres of life.
Public policy to enact social change: Legalization of marijuana .
Revolutionary changes result mainly from the state’s inability to perform essential legal functions and protect a territory’s integrity.
Post-Civil War political, economic, and social changes .
Was the Black Death one of the reasons for feudalism to be disrupted in Europe in the 14th century?
Does population growth stimulate the economic prosperity of a state or increase poverty?
Impact of technology on social change .
What is the causal path from climate change to changes in everyday life?
How does social decline affect morality ?
Reasons for changes in race and gender hierarchy .

⚖️ Sociology Essay Topics on Political Science

Political sociology focuses on different sources of power and authority. Among these sources are wealth, class, race, etc. Individuals and groups being differentiated by any of these characteristics impact decision-making processes both in small organizations and the whole states.

Therefore, sociologists analyze how these decisions affect people, groups, and societies in terms of their legal rights and resources.

Is not taking a shower an acceptable and effective method of political protest ? Individual protests, hunger strikes, and the rejection of taking a shower – all this refers to sociological research studies that explain human behavior .
The notion of a nation-state . How do the characteristics prescribed to particular nations influence individuals’ self-understanding? You can also discuss the corresponding country’s political culture .
Is it possible for democracy and capitalism to work together successfully? Discuss the interaction of these two systems and whether they can cohabit in one society.
Formation of a modern ___ state . Choose one state as an example and analyze the processes of formation of its political and social institutions.
The role of political elites in countries with different levels of development . Compare progressive and underdeveloped states concerning the functioning of political elites there.
Sociology of war . Analyze any conflict as a result of an individual’s or group of individuals’ decision-making.
Illegal immigration in the US and its causes .
What effects do social movements and public opinion have on state politics?
The US immigration policy: History and current issues .
Does the process of globalization weaken national governments?
Crime and its influence on gun control laws .
How do increasing forces of technologies reorganize political institutions?
Is gun control strict enough in the US?
Is counterrevolution an obligatory response to any revolution ?
Labor immigration in the US: History, visas, and compensation .

📘 Sociology Questions from Micro-Perspective

Here are the topics from the microsociological perspective. The primary focus of these sociology paper topics is social life, individual behavior, and local processes. Interpersonal levels of interaction and peculiarities of specific categories/groups are the core of these topics.

🕊️ Sociology Essay Topics on Race and Ethnicity

Researchers investigate how societies construct race and ethnicity notions, how people identify themselves with one or another. Study focus also includes whether and how racial and ethnic characteristics correlate with other social features. Among the most popular topics are immigration policies, discrimination, and inter-group relations.

Cultural appropriation is a manifestation of racism. Compare this issue to police brutality , for example. Are they equally inappropriate?
Ethnical minorities establish their communities and, as a result, shape the dominant culture. Describe a process of integrating new norms/tastes/traditions from other cultures.
From race to ethnicity. Trace how sociologists have started to use the notion of ethnicity instead of race in their researches.
How does society (people and institutions) react to racially biased crimes ? Discuss public and authorities’ reactions: new policies, social movements, etc.
How does the modern anti-racism agenda affect the whole industry? As an example, you can use the Oscar ceremony.
Is female racism anyhow different from male racism? Use the definition of intersectionality .
Discrimination against African Americans in the US .
What are the mechanisms of movements like Black Lives Matter getting so popular and concern every other person worldwide?
The specifics of race relations in the US .
How do interracial experiences influence the overall mindset and tolerance level of a person?
Asian ethnicity representation and stereotypes .
The relation of the level of education and racial tolerance.
Stereotypes about African American women .
Is benevolent racism acceptable, or should it be eliminated?
The representation of African Americans in modern media .

♂️♀️ Sociology Essay Topics on Gender Studies

Sociological research emphasizes the social and cultural fundaments of gender. Besides, great attention is on the ubiquity of gender and its impact on both the private and public spheres.

Gender roles in psychological and biosocial theories .
Is the feminine form of a word better than the commonly used?
Remaining gender boundaries in clothing. Which pieces of clothes have still not become gender natural?
Race and gender: Social construction .
Gender stereotypes in a relationship: Is it okay for a boy to cry?
Did feminism contribute to the moral decline of America?
Gender differences in non-verbal and verbal communication .
Can it ever be acceptable for a man to hit a woman?
Are women less privileged in today’s society than men?
Gender inequality: A cutural or psychological issue?
Are working women better mothers?
Are only men to blame for the objectification of women’s bodies ?
Gender roles in music videos .
Are police less likely to suspect a female person of conducting a crime?
Should positive sexism be frowned upon like negative sexism?
Gender inequality and stereotypes in the society .

🐉 Sociology Essay Topics on Culture

This sociological area studies culture in its various forms: art, knowledge, language, beliefs, (collective) behavior, production, consumption, diffusion, etc. Sociologists examine cultural meaning by analyzing individual and group communication. While examining cultural meanings, researchers focus on social practices, ideologies, tastes, and norms. Culture also produces collective representations and inequalities.

Love profusion: Why is having one partner more socially acceptable than having multiple ones? For this social research paper, review this article published by Psychology Today and link lingering psychological effects on the number of socially acceptable partners.
Tabooing: What are the things you absolutely cannot talk about even with your closest friends? As noted by Freud , taboos arise where ambivalence of feelings is present. Their main goal is to protect our psyche from extremely negative experiences, like shame and guilt.
Clothes and identity : How the things you wear reflect who you are. Sometimes, to become a completely different person, it’s enough to change clothes.
Dark comedy: What things are inappropriate to laugh at? Among other attention-grabbing sociological themes, discover laughter as a protective mechanism when one laughs at their friend who accidentally fell. Interesting cultures to research and compare are American and Chinese.
The line between compliments and harassment: What comments on someone’s appearance are not reprehensible? Here, you can consider clothes, body, accessories, or any other specific features subjected to compliments and harassment .
Why art house movies are unpopular: A sociological perspective. Arthouse movies target specific populations and focuse on social realism, the director’s vision, and feelings. You can use the mass culture theory and explore the cultural capital of Pierre Bourdieu.
“Cool” and “uncool” hobbies: Why swimming or DJing is more socially acceptable and approved than collecting postmarks or knitting? Dig into leisure time theory, and analyze the issue from both social and individual aspects.
Modern pop music tells young people what they should do and be like . Review The Best Pop Songs of 2017 from Lana Del Rey to Lorde , prepared by Esquire to understand the topic better.
How memes appear and disappear: The role of memes in today’s popular culture . Among other social issues for a research paper, it seems relevant to explore how memes appear as a result of one or another event and what makes them vanish.
Celebrities as role models. Select several celebrities such as Miley Cyrus or Rihanna and discuss their role models.
Chinese culture and cross-cultural communication .
South Park: Absurdist humor or reflection of American culture?
Concepts of elite culture and popular culture .
Who is to blame for emerging beauty standards over time?
Middle Eastern history and culture: From Muhammad to 1800 .
Top 3 misconceptions kids get from TV ads.
Japanese and Chinese culture: Comparison and contrast .
Is altruism still a traditional virtue in modern American culture?
Peculiarities of Chinese culture and governmental policies in relation to the environment .
What is the role of mass media in shaping public opinion?
Views of Asian and Western cultures on death and dying .
Culture’s role in language development .

🛐 Sociology Essay Topics on Religion

Sociology of religion studies religious commitment and relations between religious organizations and people. Among other research questions are individual and group meanings of belonging to a particular religion or independent of it. Not trying to evaluate any religious beliefs, sociologists investigate relationships of faith with other social institutions, like the economy, politics, family, etc.

The role of the church /mosque/synagogue in the complex structure of a religion. Discuss how does a specific religious place shape the practices and rituals of believers.
How does the level of religiosity correlate with the levels of GDP per capita ? Deepen into the actual mechanisms of this relation. And try to build a chain of issues, or portray a specific context.
Religion as a social institution. Which spheres of life does faith (in that sense) affect, and how does it become a social institution rather than something very personal?
Sociology of religious experience. How does the connection of a person to “the divine” appear in everyday or regular practices?
Sociology of religious beliefs. How do certain ideas that people from different confessions adhere to appear in everyday life?
Sociology of religious rituals . How do rituals of different religions integrate into social life? For example, regular Namaz or celebrating Christmas, etc.
What can be described as a source of religion? Consider societal aspect: what bonds people, their mindsets, and behavior.
Islam after 9/11 . Discuss the influence of this event on different spheres of life: education, media, politics, economics, etc.
The role of a Church in a state. Debate on what is the influence of a church in different confessions (Protestantism, Catholicism , etc.)
The Flying Spaghetti Monster. What makes it a religion, and what distinguishes it from religion?
How do people of different religions express their values in social interactions? Use the interactionist approach for this topic.
Same-sex marriage as a religious issue .
Moses in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam .
Religious beliefs and political decisions .
Differences between Eastern and Western religions .
Religion in India: Hinduism and Buddhism .
The role of religion, morality, and worldview in the shaping of public policies .

🏚️ Sociology Essay Topics on Social Inequality

Distribution of goods (wealth, knowledge, power, status, etc.) among different society members according to their race, gender, age, social class, etc. Researchers question the causes and effects of inequality, how inequality can be shaped by geographical and cultural contexts, the intersection of several inequalities, etc.

Gender, class, and status: Sociological factors in attraction . Describe the way social factors influence the choice of the object of romantic and sexual interest.
Fashion and status: How important is it to be fashionable for a young person? Conduct a sociological analysis paper based on the images proposed by fashion media and Instagram accounts of young people.
How has the notion of social inequality changed over centuries? Earlier, this ‘equality’ was meant to be about white men. Other social characteristics are getting included over time.
What are the social characteristics of a person failing to understand that inequality is still a big problem in the modern world? Describe this ‘pink glasses’ barrier and how it emerges.
Inequalities that migrants face in receiving societies. Describe social institutions that provide limited services to migrants.
What are the main indices of inequality in modern sociology ? Ginni coefficient, 20:20 ratio, Palma ratio, etc. Discuss which indexes are used in which cases.
Effects of social inequality on health. Here you can compare 2 cases: two different countries, two different time periods, etc.
Gender inequality in the workplace .
The culture of poverty : Are the citizens of poor countries responsible for their own poverty?
Women in the Middle East: Problems and inequality .
Is intelligence more important than beauty for success in today’s society?
Social inequality of children in foster care .
Does wealth always make people less ethical?
Global gender equality issues .
Criminal justice system: Racial disparities and inequality .

🏥 Sociology Essay Topics on Health

Sociology of health concentrates on health as a characteristic resulting from the lifestyle and individual psychology. Researchers study how health is shaped by social systems and culture. The main topics of interest are specific illnesses among specific individuals and groups, accessibility of treatments, and other healthcare services, the quality of the healthcare system’s functioning.

Sociology of food: How is your diet related to your identity? This sociology issue has supreme importance in today’s world suffering from overweight and obesity.
Health-related stigma . Choose some health issue that shapes the perception of a person by other individuals—for instance, infertility, HIV, etc.
What kind of health inequalities occur in countries with different welfare regimes? You can also add an education variable and research how does educational level affect health inequalities.
Can we get any knowledge about an individual’s health according to their social practices? Here we are talking about lifestyle and some habits that determine a person’s everyday behavior.
Prison health. Research the prison healthcare system: what are the principles of healthcare in prisons, and what determines the prisoner’s health .
The United States, as the only Western developed country without universal health insurance . Discuss the reasons, consequences, and the current situation in general.
Sex work and related health stigmas. Discuss how women occupied in sex work are stigmatized due to their social status and the corresponding health issues.
Gender inequality and physical health problems .
What are the constraints and rewards of people who work as home care labor?
Class as a determinant of health .
Is technological progress always bad for people’s health?
Gender health inequalities: A link between gender and health .
Do we need a universal health care system?
The role of family and social network support in mental health .
The unique cultural issues: Impact on the US healthcare system .

🎓 Sociology Essay Topics on Education

Sociology of education focuses on teaching and learning processes and the formal institutions where these processes take place. Researchers study how society affects educational institutions and the corresponding processes. Great attention is paid to the effects of different types and levels of education on individuals’ lives.

Is Spencer’s principle of survival of the fittest a good description for the college admission process?
Standardized tests for enrollment at universities allow everyone equal access to higher education .
Education, inequality, and politics .
Single-sex education affects the process of children’s socialization.
Is the quality of education differentiated by the well-being of a town/city?
How does government legislation affect educational institutions ?
Parents’ educational level shapes the level of education of their children.
Is the level of education losing its importance when applying for a job? Discuss how soft skills take over professional education.
Women’s rights movement: Impact on education .
Will providing education to everyone in 3rd world countries erase poverty?
What are the pros and cons of homeschooling? Is studying at home more or less qualitative as going to school?
Challenges of African American in obtaining education .
Symbolic values of such educational institutions as Harvard, Oxford, Sorbonne, etc.
Socialization and assimilation when a person starts college.
How does food insecurity affect children’s education ?
The pros and cons of mainstream schools.

🛍️ Sociology Essay Topics on Consumption

Sociology of consumption examines consumerism in terms of social relations, conditions, and meanings. Researchers also study the relations between consumption patterns and identity, as well as inequalities.

Does buying a fake bag make other people believe you belong to a high class? Discuss the cult of buying fake brand items: why do people prefer to buy fake clothes and accessories rather than buying cheaper alternatives from the mass market or other places?
Production through consumption . How do consumption patterns of some people (e.g., social media influencers ) produce new trends and make some products (or certain brands) more popular and desirable than others?
The shopping mall as a leisure time place. Describe why for some people a visit to a shopping center is a way to spend free time. What practices do people do there?
People choose places for shopping according to their specific individualities.
Consumers’ travel behavior in the mature market in the US .
How does the growing popularity of online shopping influence the life-being of traditional offline shops?
Plastic consumption: Environmental public policy .
Are luxurious brands actually worth their price, or is it just a myth about their outstanding quality and design?
Consumer culture in China and its middle class .
Anti-consumerism as a civil position. Why do some people decide to lead a consuming-free lifestyle?
How do marketing and advertising trends change over time and throughout different societies?
Lifestyle in a consumer culture .
A visit to a supermarket: The effects of consumer culture on your choices.
How does the ecological situation affect the patterns of consumption?
Sustainable and non-sustainable consumer behavior in young adults .
Does a wider choice of goods make a person more likely to buy more?

🧠 Sociology Essay Topics on Social Psychology

Social psychology researchers focus on how individuals’ belonging to different categories (race, gender, class, etc.) impact their (social) behavior, emotions, decisions. Among other topics, sociologists also question different types of interactions, communications, and the development of social identities.

Do violent movies and video games decrease or increase real-life violence rates? Many studies prove that violent films and games may cause aggressiveness to others, while gamers are sure that it is just a virtual reality they are involved in to have some fun.
Trust and security: Would you leave your wallet on the table in a café when going to the restroom? There are several issues with writing a research paper. For example, consider morale and ethics inherent to a particular society.
Factors influencing the willingness of individuals to help strangers. What can contribute or intervene a person to provide any kind of help: carry a heavy suitcase on the stairs, help to find a route, etc.
What reaction does the violation of social norms cause in individuals? Here you can compare violations of different kinds of behavior models.
Social psychology: The concept of the self .
What kinds of cognitive techniques are used in modern advertisements?
Cognitive dissonance in social psychology .
What are the mechanisms of diffusion of responsibility to happen?
Cyberbullying in social psychology .
How can physical appearance affect various social situations? For example, the response of jurors in a court or a process of hiring for a new job.
Social psychology: African and Western perspectives .
Social awkwardness: Why some people are more easily embarrassed than others?
Affirmative action: More positive or negative effects?
Social psychology with respect to racism issue .
Virtual reality : Escapism has never been more effortless.

👩🏽‍🔬 Sociology Essay Topics by Academics

Only commenting on any of the following quotes can be an excellent topic for a sociology paper:

“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.” – Jean Baudrillard
“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” – Wright Mills
“Families are nothing more than the idolatry of duty.” – Ann Oakley
“If advertising is not an official or state art, it is nonetheless clearly art.” – Michael Schudson
“Man’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered.” – Georg Simmel
“Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.” – Charles Horton Cooley
“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.” – W.E.B. Du Bois
“There is no truth without responsibility following in its wake.” – Franklin Frazier
“White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners, and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually cause’ each other.” – Gunnar Myrdal
“It is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil.” – Max Weber

Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) is an independent research project completed by top-grade students in the UK. It allows students to develop and demonstrate project management skills and provides opportunities for extended writing. Check out some topics you can use for your project:

Ways to reverse stereotypes about alcohol use and misuse in society.
How does your gender impact your career development?
Eating disorders as a social phenomenon.
How have immigrants changed the modern US society?
The role of family dinners in strengthening social bonds.
Best methods to prevent industrial waste.
How has social media changed our minds since its inception?
The subculture of parkour and its role in society.
Factors contributing to abusive marriages.
The impact of social media on socialization.
How are community interactions connected to culinary trends?
The challenges and opportunities of globalization for social justice.
The ethical considerations of using social media for social activism.
The pitfalls of online communication among teenagers.
Is religious education useless in modern society?
The ethical dilemmas in daily life and ways to solve them.
The impact of same-sex parents on child development.
How do different models of socialization affect teenagers?
The ethical implications of data collection in the digital age.
Local street markets and their role in preserving cultural heritage.
The impact of neighborhood characteristics on police harassment encounters.
Internet-based job opportunities and their benefits.
Should women choose between family and career?
Negative health outcomes from a sedentary lifestyle.
The influence of social inequality on access to affordable housing.
The impact of neighborhood characteristics on voting behavior.
The sociological impact of AI on employment.
Tolerance as an essential social feature.
The role of human ideas and behavior in shaping the society.
How do social media platforms affect our sense of belonging and community?
Should public people share their private lives?
What are some practical solutions to population growth?
What is the role of privilege in American society?
Is it necessary for parents to take a parenting class before having children?
Should communities provide better care for their elderly residents?
What social problems exist among minorities?
How do social media influencers affect teenagers’ self-esteem?
What ethical values should be taught in schools?
Is online dating a reliable way to find love?
How do music genres impact the way people dress?
What social dynamics drive consumer behavior in retail spaces?
In what ways do Internet challenges influence social participation?
How does music influence teenagers’ socialization?
What social norms exist in the fashion world?
How can we better adjust to the pandemic’s changing conditions?
What should society do about addicts?
Do individuals with disabilities appreciate pity?
What are the social benefits and drawbacks of arranged weddings?
How has fast food affected society?
Is cancel culture an effective method of online social accountability?
Do eco-villages foster stronger social ties?
What are the advantages of keeping traditional gender roles in a family?
Should teenagers be allowed to use birth control without their parents’ permission?
Is mass media harassment still common?
Should politics be taught in schools?
How can language serve as a uniting factor?
Is physical punishment a beneficial way to discipline children?
What impact does racism have on global growth in general?
Should the topic of open sexuality be taken seriously in society?
Is it worth spending so much money to eat healthily?

📝 How to Write a Sociology Essay?

Sociology, as a comparatively new discipline, creates many challenges. Keep in mind that sociology is an empirical science, and all sociological papers (including your essay) should be based on thorough research and rigorous documentation!

Your task will be to interpret the facts you gather when researching your work. Remember that there are endless exciting cultures and issues to research, so the process will not be as burdening as it may sound.

Sociology differs from other social sciences because it relies on statistics, interpretive analysis, and the written word . College students who study sociology usually need to write several academic papers on different sociological research questions each semester.

If you want to know how to write a good research paper in sociology, take the following steps.

🏁 Get Prepared

Choose a sociology essay topic . You may find ideas related to sociology in books, scientific articles, and online news. The critical thing to keep in mind is that a good sociology essay starts with an original sociological question. Think carefully about the problem you will answer — whether it is an advanced sociology topic or a “why study sociology” essay. Avoid these mistakes!
Research the topic of your sociology essay. Visit the library and do some research online. Collect relevant evidence from recent studies. Remember that all sociological arguments must be supported by facts and documentation, even if it is just a sociology research paper proposal.
Read many sources for your academic essay . And always pay attention to the quality of a source: avoid Wikipedia and the like, use scientific articles and highly cited materials instead.
Take detailed notes. Include the essential pieces of information from each source. Sociology doesn’t like a superficial review of a subject: the deeper and the more thorough, the better!
Organize your materials and prepare your work area . Systematization of thoughts and materials is an inalienable part of the writing process. Use schemes and tables for more convenient organization of your work.

✍️ Writing Process

Create a strong thesis. If you fail to write a good thesis statement, the rest of your project is likely to be vague. Your thesis must be debatable and tightly focused so that you can easily support it with the gathered evidence.
Make a detailed outline for the rest of your sociology research paper . Make sure that each part of your sociology essay supports the thesis you have formulated. Indicate the topic for each paragraph or section. Include references to your sources.
Write your essay introduction and conclusion . Your introductory paragraph should be concise and focused. To make it more interesting, use a specific example in your introduction.
Write your body paragraphs. Use relevant data to support the main points in each part. Make sure you include clear transitions between the sections in your academic essay.

Researching and writing a good research paper on any topic is a process that takes time. You better spend a few days on the project. As a rule, the best sociology essays are rewritten, partially or entirely, several times. Very few first-draft college essays receive high grades.

You can use our sociology essay ideas as inspiration or choose one of the sociology essay topics from the list to write your perfect sociology essay. If you like these ideas for sociology essays and research papers, be sure to share them with your friends!

🔎 References

Social change | Definition, Types, Theories, Causes, & Examples
Understanding Social Change – Sociology; University of Minnesota
Social Institutions (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Introduction to Sociology – 1st Canadian Edition by Ron McGivern
Sociology | Subject Content – A-level | Topics in Sociology
Sociology, Macro–

Research Paper Analysis: How to Analyze a Research Article + Example

Film analysis: example, format, and outline + topics & prompts.

ReviseSociology

A level sociology revision – education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!

A Level Sociology Essays – How to Write Them

Use the Point – Explain – Expand – Criticise method (PEEC), demonstrate knowledge, application and evaluation skills, and use the item to make your points!

Table of Contents

Last Updated on November 10, 2022 by

This post offers some advice on how you might plan and write essays in the A level sociology exams.

Essays will either be 20 or 30 marks depending on the paper but the general advice for answering them remains the same:

Use the PEEC method for the main paragraphs: POINT – EXPLAIN – EXPAND – CRITICISE
Use the overall structure below – PEEC (3 to 5 times) framed by an introduction, then overall evaluations and conclusion towards the end.
Use the item provided – this must form the basis of your main points!

How to write an A-level sociology essay

Allow yourself enough time – 1.5 minutes per mark = 45 minutes for a 30 mark essay.
Read the Question and the item, what is it asking you to do?
Do a rough plan (5-10 mins) – initially this should be ‘arguments and evidence’ for and ‘against’ the views in the question, and a few thoughts on overall evaluations/ a conclusion. If you are being asked to look at two things, you’ll have to do this twice/ your conclusion should bring the two aspects of the essay together.
Write the essay (35 mins)– aim to make 3-5 points in total (depending on the essay, either 3 deep points, or 5 (or more) shallower points). Try to make one point at least stem from the item, ideally the first point.
Try to stick to the following structure in the picture above!
Overall evaluations – don’t repeat yourself, and don’t overdo this, but it’s useful t tag this in before a conclusion.
Conclusion (allow 2 mins minimum) – an easy way to do this is to refer to the item – do you agree with the view or not, or say which of the points you’ve made is the strongest/ weakest and on balance is the view in the question sensible or not?

Skills in the A Level Sociology Exam

The AQA wants you to demonstrate 3 sets of skills in the exam – below are a few suggestions about how you can do this in sociology essays.

AO1: Knowledge and Understanding

You can demonstrate these by:

Using sociological concepts
Using sociological perspectives
Using research studies
Showing knowledge of contemporary trends and news events
Knowledge can also be synoptic, or be taken from other topics.
NB – knowledge has to be relevant to the question to get marks!

AO2: Application

You can demonstrate application by…

Using the item – refer to the item!!!
Clearly showing how the material you have selected is relevant to the question, by using the words in the question
Making sure knowledge selected is relevant to the question.

AO3: Analysis and Evaluation

NB ‘Assess’ is basically the same as Evaluation

You can demonstrate analysis by….

Considering an argument from a range of perspectives – showing how one perspective might interpret the same evidence in a different way, for example.
Developing points – by showing why perspectives argue what they do, for example.
Comparing and contrasting ideas to show their differences and similarities
You can show how points relate to other points in the essay.

You can demonstrate evaluation by…

Discussing the strengths and limitations of a theory/ perspective or research method.
You should evaluate each point, but you can also do overall evaluations from other perspectives before your conclusion.
NB – Most people focus on weaknesses, but you should also focus on strengths.
Weighing up which points are the most useful in a conclusion.

Use the item

Every 30 mark question will ask you to refer to an ‘item’. This will be a very short piece of writing, consisting of about 8 lines of text. The item will typically refer to one aspect of the knowledge side of the question and one evaluation point. For example, if the question is asking you to ‘assess the Functionalist view of education’, the item is likely to refer to one point Functionalists make about education – such as role allocation, and one criticism.

All you need to do to use the item effectively is to make sure at least one of your points stems from the knowledge in the item, and develop it. It’s a good idea to make this your first point. To use the evaluation point from the item (there is usually some evaluation in there), then simply flag it up when you use it during the essay.

Signposting

For more exams advice please see my exams and essay advice page

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

Seven examples of sociology essays, and more advice…

For more information on ‘how to write sociology essays for the A level exam’ why not refer to my handy ‘how to write sociology essays guide’.

introduction to sociology essay questions

The contents are as follows:

Introductory Section

A quick look at the three sociology exam papers
A pared-down mark scheme for A Level sociology essays
Knowledge, application, analysis, evaluation, what are they, how to demonstrate them.
How to write sociology essays – the basics:

These appear first in template form, then with answers, with the skills employed shown in colour. Answers are ‘overkill’ versions designed to get full marks in the exam.

Assess the Functionalist View of the Role of Education in Society (30) – Quick plan
Assess the Marxist view of the role of education in society (30) – Detailed full essay
Assess the extent to which it is home background that is the main cause of differential education achievement by social class (30) – Detailed full essay
Assess the view that education policies since 1988 have improved equality of educational opportunity (30) – Quick plan
Assess the view that the main aim of education policies since 1988 has been to raise overall standards in education.’ (30) – Quick plan
Assess the claim that ‘ethnic difference in educational achievement are primarily the result of school factors’ (30) – Detailed full essay
Assess the view that in school processes, rather than external factors, are the most important in explaining differences in educational achievement (30) – detailed essay – Quick plan.

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Introduction to Sociology - 3e

(63 reviews)

Tonja R. Conerly, San Jacinto College

Kathleen Holmes, Northern Essex Community College

Asha Lal Tamang, Minneapolis Community and Technical College & North Hennepin Community College

ISBN 13: 9781711493978

Publisher: OpenStax

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Boniface Noyongoyo, Assistant Professor, Marshall University on 2/4/24

The chapters in this book are short and sweet. I should have said concise because there is no room for useless terms and word to understand sociology. read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

The chapters in this book are short and sweet. I should have said concise because there is no room for useless terms and word to understand sociology.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The authors used historical facts to make sure that the information provided in the book is correct. I like that they used other evidence to talk about for instance why DuBois is influential in the American Sociology as a historian. The laboratory in Atlanta shows how his influence as a researcher impacts the discipline. I think the content is not only error free but historically checked for accuracy. It is good to know that what we are providing to students is not only accurate but also real example.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

I like the authors have a section Sociology in the Real World to show that the discipline is not about he past but that things happening today are connected to past ones and that life is a flow between past and a continuity in the future.

Clarity rating: 5

Language is clear and simple. Sentences are straightforward and say what they meant. Reading is easy.

Consistency rating: 5

All the connections are clear as the parts of the chapters connect.

Modularity rating: 4

Going from one chapter to the next is clear and follows past patterns. I personally do not like that some parts are not connected. Family is part of family structure but it is also part of socialization. There is no one coming from a society without its influence.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The book's organization follows traditional organizations of all sociology books. It seems good but I think there should be a different way of talking about structures and socialization

Interface rating: 4

Pictures are clean and moving through chapters is not complicated.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I have not noticed anything wrong in terms of grammar.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

It is very American relevant. I do not think the book goes beyond what is happening in the Continental US.

I do not have anything about the book other than the fact that all the comments are the book I would like to see written.

Reviewed by LiYing Li, Professor, Metropolitan State University of Denver on 3/30/23

The book is quite comprehensive. It covers all the essential topics in an introductory sociology textbook. read more

The book is quite comprehensive. It covers all the essential topics in an introductory sociology textbook.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

The textbook was accurate at the time of writing. Since the book was published in 2017 (the 2nd edition), some info and facts are out of date. Therefore, it does affect its accuracy.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

Same as above, the content of this textbook was quite relevant, but given it was published at least five or six years ago, it does lose some relevance...

The textbook was well-written and easy to read.

The content of the textbook was consistent within or between chapters. The book was well-organized and structured.

Modularity rating: 3

Not sure about the modularity. The subject matter is sociology (which is about people in social groups and how they intersect with each other), when society changes, people and social groups change accordingly. For the last three years, the world has witnessed enormous changes due to COVID-19. Our post-COVID life would probably never be the same. Therefore, some chapters need some major updates, others need only minor changes. Therefore, tremendous social changes may impact its modularity.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

Very well-organized and structured. And the order of topics is well done.

Interface rating: 5

There were major interface issues.

It is largely free of any grammatical errors.

The book pays a lot of attention to any culturally sensitive issues or subjects. I appreciated the fact how it handled some difficult contemporary topics.

I reviewed the 2nd ed of this textbook. It is funny that the 2nd ed was published at a later date, 2017, instead of 2015.

Reviewed by Greg Cady, College Instructor, Minnesota State College Southeast Technical on 12/28/22

Consistent with other introduction level textbooks. read more

Consistent with other introduction level textbooks.

Appears to be valid content and written in an objective manner.

I like how recent the online version has been updated.

Great resources at the end of each chapter!

Nice flow and chapter sequence.

Modularity rating: 5

Chapters are a manageable read for weekly assignments.

Good flow. I would tailor the chapters to reflect a 16 week typical college semester which would mean multiple chapters on some college weeks which could confuse students

Written for entry level college student.

Well written!

I like how grey highlighted areas provide an overview, a different perspective.

I'm impresses with this textbook - I suspect I will adopt for Fall 2023.

Reviewed by Shirlene S., Associate Teaching Professor, Wichita State University on 10/7/21

The text will give Sociology students a comprehensive look into today's society and a good understanding of the various Sociological theories that make up how we view society. In addition, the text will also give readers a different outlook on... read more

The textbook does a very nice job of being unbiased. Especially, how the authors discuss and present the topics of health, race, and religion. The authors give the students a broad range of the topics and issues associated with and about sociology and the science of sociology.

The textbook uses various examples, which are interesting, pique curiosity, and can be easily recognizable for some students as well as can be used for a significant time frame for additional editions of the text. I do have issues with some of the text citations being slightly older than some of the examples that are used throughout the book.

The textbook provides students with a broad range of each of the topics and issues associated with and about sociology and the science of sociology. Each of the chapters provides a genuine introduction to each of the topics so that students can easily grasp the terminology, concepts, and theoretical perspectives, that can inspire and challenge a student’s thinking and ideas of society. However, there are areas for improvements including providing more updated citations that also correlate with the examples used as well as provide wider and diverse examples.

Consistency rating: 4

Each of the textbook chapters provides a good level of consistency by using various core sociological theories that tie into the chapter concepts. Although, I believe that this will help students easily navigate the content and facilitate both their critical thinking analytical skills. It would be nice if the text provided a deeper look into other sociological theories and how they may explain various sociological concepts.

The chapters are reasonable in length (18-22 pages) with each chapter providing a genuine introduction to each of the sociological topics that make it easy for students to understand the terminology, grasp the concepts, as well as challenge a student’s critical thinking of society's ideas, beliefs, values, and norms.

Similar to the modularity feedback. The overall organization of the textbook and each chapter are nicely organized and make sense to the student as well as easily navigated.

The text provides relevant images and charts that directly tie into the chapter topics and examples. The images and/or charts are also easily navigated with the use of citations that can provide the reader with further perspectives and information on each of the chapter topics.

The text does not present any grammatical, spelling, and/or punctuation errors. The book looks as it has been thoroughly reviewed for any errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 3

The images and case studies that are provided in the text are specifically focused on white middle and upper-middle-class individuals and their stories/examples along with white middle-class individuals being overwhelmingly represented in the images. There definitely needs to be an effort in subsequent editions to improve the diversity represented in images including racial and ethnic representation. The issues and difficulties associated with intersectionality, multiculturalism, and globalization examples that are used throughout the book also need to be addressed.

Being new to Open Educational Resources (OER), I must admit I was skeptical of the quality of knowledge this textbook could or would provide to students. I am very happy to say that not only is the text amazing, but it will give Sociology students a comprehensive look into today's society and a good understanding of the various Sociological theories that make up how we view society. In addition, the text will also give readers a different outlook on life and how it shapes our perspectives beliefs and values including the impact of the sociological imagination. Additionally, if this text is the book being used by Sociology classes, it will give students a broad range of the topics and issues associated with and about sociology and the science of sociology. I thoroughly enjoyed this book; the chapters are reasonable in length (18-22 pages) and each chapter provides a genuine introduction to each of the topics so that students can easily grasp the concepts, inspiring and challenging a student’s thinking and ideas of society!

Reviewed by Jodie Simon, Associate Teaching Professor, Wichita State University on 6/2/21

This textbook provides a good basic comprehensive overview of the key areas of sociological study and does so in concise and yet engaging language. read more

This textbook provides a good basic comprehensive overview of the key areas of sociological study and does so in concise and yet engaging language.

Typical of any Intro to Sociology textbook the content is constantly in need of update as we find advancements in our own sociological studies. One small issue was the references to official religions via countries. This can be updated easily.

Organization is pretty standard as it introduces the topics in the fairly standard format of most Introductory Sociology textbooks. I was pleased by the separate chapter devoted to Media & Technology as many textbooks have tried to simply lump this in and integrate it without giving full measure to this major sociological institution.

I found the wording to be easy to follow and not jargon heavy. I prefer intro textbooks that are engaging and not intimidating and yet still manage to impart the importance of sociological vocabulary. I felt that this textbook was able to do to this rather well.

I found no glaring oversights.

The chapters were pleasingly short and yet still managed to convey the major material. I am using it in conjunction with another textbook to give students the option to purchase or not and I have discovered that I was able to pair chapters together without too much difficulty.

Organization makes sense, moving through introduction into perspectives of socialization and into inequalities and then into institutions. This is a very familiar format to many other courses. I typically cover media alongside culture and as such did find that a little out of the norm in terms of placement for me.

I found the interface to be very basic and simple.

I found no grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

Check the Religion section a little closely as I did find some erroneous information there; however, I did not see issues with the major controversial sections: systems of inequality. I would remove references to "boys and girls" however.

I am using it this semester for the first time and will update my review once I've seen it in action.

Reviewed by Alex Olsen, Assistant Professor, Umpqua Community College on 5/21/21

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

The textbook does a great job of covering a wide range of sociological topics. One of my biggest critiques of this textbook is that it doesn't go in depth enough on topics such as race, gender, and class. I've found that I frequently have to supplement the content in this book with more contemporary examples and aspects of these topics that the book doesn't cover. It provides really great introductions and basic examples, but I find that this textbook is best used in conjunction with supplemental videos, readings, and content presented in my slides. I also think that the international content/international comparisons are lacking. It could also do a better job of discussing more contemporary theories such as feminist theory, critical race theory, immigration theories, etc.

Generally, I've found the content to be very accurate. Any inaccuracies are mainly related to the use of old data (2010 data), which may not reflect trends within the past 10 years. It also is not always up to date re: legal changes. Otherwise, the textbook does a good job presenting sociological concepts in a clear, accurate manner.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 3

Much of the data in the book is out of date, especially since much of it is based on the 2010 census. That being said, I think it would be very easy to update this data once it is available. I think that one of the biggest issues with an open-source textbook is that it doesn't always have the latest data. As such, I find myself as an instructor going to get the most recent data to supplement what is available in the textbook. It also doesn't account for legal changes that have happened re: gay marriage, legalization of marijuana etc. Some sections would need to be substantially added to to reflect these dynamics

The textbook uses very simple language when breaking down even more advanced sociological concepts. This is a great textbook to use at the community college level as it is very accessible, even to students who may normally struggle with reading comprehension or advanced vocabulary. They frequently define terms that students may not know and provide great examples to promote deeper understanding of more complex concepts.

I really appreciate that this book consistently presents the functionalist, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionist perspective for each of the topics covered. I think that this is a nice way to ensure that students have a deeper understanding of social theory, while also encouraging students to think about social issues in a variety of ways. Terminology used is also consistent and the textbook does a good job of defining unfamiliar terms.

The modularity of this textbook is one of its biggest benefits. I appreciate that the chapters are short, to the point, and broken up into clear subsections for the students to better understand the issues. I have found that because the textbook is more brief, more students are willing to do the reading. I also like that understanding one chapter is not dependent on another, which gives the instructor a lot of freedom about the order in which they'd like to present different topics.

This textbook is highly organized and easy to follow. It's organized similarly to many other introduction to sociology textbooks.

I have not encountered any issues with the interface.

There are no grammatical errors that I have been able to find in the textbook.

Similar to my critiques on the comprehensiveness, I think that this book could do more to consistently hit on inequalities by gender, race, sexual orientation, class, etc. in the more topical chapters i.e. health, media, education, government. While there is not any insensitive or offensive material, I think that they could do a better job of covering these topics more in depth.

I think this is a textbook that's a great basis for an Intro to Sociology course or Institutions and Social change. It does a good job presenting the basics, but I do think that it requires instructors to do additional work to add in contemporary examples, address issues that the textbook does not bring up, and give students a better sense of debates amongst sociologists (and society more broadly) about different social issues.

Reviewed by Nicole Jenkins, Adjunct Professor, Howard University on 1/19/21

The text is comprehensive overall in its organization as well as the content within each chapter. Students are given a Section Summary that enhances the comprehensiveness of the material covered in each section. The quizzes available at the end of each chapter additionally lend support to an overall comprehensive experience. The text introduces a complete experience of various sociological concepts and discusses them in an appropriate and effective way. The Key Terms feature at the end of each chapter is a great tool as well.

I am confident in the accuracy of the text and its chapters. Each chapter discusses a specific sociological phenomenon coupled with examples that support it and reiterate understanding. The text references real-world examples from various issues within society, resulting in concrete and accurate events that situate learners in an advantageous position to use their sociological imagination.

This text has selected relevant sociological concepts to introduce. I would like to see a section on the sociology of work or labor as well as an update in the Health and Medicine chapter that includes context concerning COVID-19. I understand that this takes time, but it is necessary and would be extremely beneficial to students and instructors to include the topic within the framework of a current pandemic. The language/ concept of a pandemic is not even introduced in the chapter and I have seen it explained in other introduction to sociology text pre-pandemic.

The text is written clearly and provides sufficient explanations for any jargon and sociological terminology introduced. Each chapter begins with explaining the major theme in detail, by defining terms and providing concrete and relevant examples to reiterate the meanings. Headings in each chapter enhance the clarity of the text and individual chapter content.

The text is consistent in its organization, terminology, and overall conceptualization. The organization of the text remains consistent throughout each chapter and subsection, making the text easy to navigate. The terminology is consistent throughout the text as well. The text is consistent in its conceptualization of social problems and issues within society throughout.

The subsections within each major chapter make the text easily divided into smaller sections of reading if necessary. Subsections are a sufficient length as to complete the topic being introduced and explained but not overwhelm with lengthy text. These short and concise sections are ideal for all learning styles and would be appreciated by students.

The organization of the text is perhaps one of my favorite features. The consistency throughout makes the text easy to navigate and provides an overall comprehensive experience. While the order of the topics is not so important, I found that the organization within each chapter creates a comprehensive flow that first introduces terminology and then provides concrete examples. This is an effective way to organize these concepts and will be advantageous to students as they read.

I was able to navigate the text easily and did not experience any interface issues, navigation problems, or display issues.

I did not note any grammatical errors within the text.

The text is culturally appropriate. I did not note any insensitive or offensive materials within this text. Examples were relevant and timely. I appreciate the emphasis on social justice and the deliberate inclusion of recent events used as examples throughout the text. Well done!

I look forward to updates on some of the most monumental events that have just recently occurred, such as the assault on the capital, and the context that includes the pandemic. I look forward to using this accessible and comprehensive text. I am a fan for sure!

Reviewed by Ting Jiang, Professor of Sociology, Metropolitan State University of Denver on 9/5/20

It covers all the topics in the mainstream leading intro textbooks. read more

It covers all the topics in the mainstream leading intro textbooks.

Overall, the definitions for concepts and theories are in consensus with leading intro textbooks.

The textbook remains current with the events and examples provided. The text is written in the way that future updates will be relatively easy and straightforward to implement.

Clarity rating: 4

The textbooks could elaborate on certain sections, for example, theoretical applications.

The text strives to be internally consistent in terms of terminology and framework.

Chapters and contents could easily be grouped into several thematic modules to work with either a semester or a quarter system.

Organization of the topics conforms to what's expected in the mainstream intro textbooks.

Charts and images are properly cited and provided with captions.

The text strives to be error free with grammar.

Overall the book remains objective with the examples provided to demonstrate concepts and theories.

Reviewed by Jerrod Yarosh, Assistant Professor, USC-Lancaster on 8/13/20

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

The text provides a substantial number of chapters covering a wide range of content. This provides a text that could be used by a wide range of educators given its scope. A caveat is that the chapters tend to be shorter and less detailed than texts with fewer chapters/topics, which would most likely need to be addressed with additional material from the educator. This text can provide a foundation and allow the educator to provide more detail and specifics as needed/necessary to flesh out ideas, concepts, and other aspects of the discipline that are absent or given less focus.

Overall the content seems accurate, the definitions of key terms could be expanded and provide a more complete understanding of the term(s). However, they do offer a very concise understanding and is a good first step to allow the instructor to then provide more specifics.

Examples and content are relevant and provide relatable information. Given the digital nature of the text it should be easy to update if needed.

The chapters are concise and have clear headings when moving to a new topic or section within the chapter. One improvement is when starting a new section within a chapter there is no heading on the content page itself and only at the top which could be easily overlooked given it is set off from where one is focusing. There are other times where sections are missing headings or some clarifying designation. For example Chapter 2 Section 2.2 starts out with just a paragraph of text and if one was clicking through from the previous section it appears to be part of the 'Interpretive Framework' however that is not the case. Could lead to confusion and misunderstandings.

Yes the text seems to be internally consistent with terminology from my brief review.

This I feel this is not a strength of this text. While the chapters are short and broken into sections. The content within each chapter is only designated by headings as a way to break it into small segments. The inclusion of additional numbering/designations in the chapter's particular sections would allow easier location of material and clarity if used in a modular fashion. Currently one would need to scroll through each chapter section to find the desired content.

The structure of the text follows the traditional format of starting with a general overview and history of the discipline then moving onto research methods and finally to more specific topical areas of interest. This is the standard and will not shock nor awe anyone.

The text adapted to all screen formats quickly and did not result in missing any content or difficulty in navigation.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

As with any textbook there are bound to be some issues, but none were found from my brief review.

It provides a wide array of examples from different cultural perspectives.

Reviewed by Christine Witkowski, Instructor, Midlands Technical College on 8/6/20

In general, this textbook is rather brief in terms of the comprehensiveness of its coverage as compared to other introductory level sociology textbooks. The lack of a definition for social structure is disappointing. The explanation of culture and social institutions was also insufficient. Given the import of the terms culture, social structures, and social institutions in an introductory sociology class, these deficiencies give me pause in considering this textbook. The application of the three major theoretical perspectives to the various aspects of the social world was rather brief; it would be insufficient, in my estimation, to help students gain confidence in understanding and applying the theoretical perspectives. The lack of data in the chapters on social stratification didn’t lend itself to a very complex understanding of stratification.

I found the information in the textbook to be accurate although the explanations were frequently too brief for students to develop a thorough understanding of the concepts and theories.

I found the content to be reasonably up-to-date and written in such a way that it will not become quickly obsolete. It is written and arranged in such a way that updates should be relatively easy and straightforward to implement.

Clarity rating: 3

The text is clear and concise, perhaps too concise for my liking. I found the explanations inadequate for delivering a complete understanding of concepts, theories, and an introductory-level sociological understanding of the world.

The textbook has a consistent voice and message.

This textbook is divided into modules which can be rearranged, allowing flexibility for the particular instructor/class. Reading sections are brief and certainly accessible to any college-level audience.

The organization of this textbook is fairly typical for an introductory textbook. Using the standard introductory sociology textbook as a basis of comparison, this textbook has a clear and sensible organization. I prefer a slightly different organizational structure to the typical organization of an introductory textbook, but given the modularity of this textbook, reorganization of the material would be straightforward.

Interface with this textbook is simple and straightforward.

The textbook is grammatically correct and easy to read.

The textbook is culturally sensitive for a diverse audience.

Reviewed by Kim Smith, Sociology Instructor, Portland Community College on 6/25/20

I am very impressed with the overall summary of the core history, theories, methods, and concepts of Sociology. The table of contents, index, and glossary offer clear topics and concepts for students to read and review. While the focused overview of the key lessons in each chapter do tend to capture our main learning objectives, there are some significant gaps. For example, the socialization theories cover only half of the theories that I use in class and the life course section is surprisingly brief, so I will have to supplement those. Each chapter is much more brief than a standard textbook, but I bet that current students will prefer reading these shorter summaries. Here are some general and specific recommendations: 1) I do wish that there were more examples of current trends and that there were more multi-cultural examples. 2) Please review your photos and examples, in light of the huge focus and critique of white supremacy right now, in addition to class stratification. 3) Also, the references in the Media and Technology chapter are from 2005. Definitely update those! 4) In the Stratification chapter, there is an odd disconnect between the Aaron Spelling mansion photo and the reference to "Eric". Who is Eric? Offer more of an introduction to the broader concept and case studies. Also, add in examples of "status inconsistency". 5) Global stratification theories are ridiculously scarce. Unpack the details of Dependency Theory (Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism) and add in World Systems Theory. 6) The Intergroup Relations section in the Race and Ethnicity chapter are out of order. 7) The statistics in the Race and Ethnicity in the US section are at least a decade old. As an on-line book, these should be easy to update. 8) Table 12.1, in the Sex and Sexuality section, has data from 1989!! Please update all of the statistics in this book - at least into the 21st Century. While later chapters on Institutions are brief, they tend to cover the main concepts and theories and I will be able to supplement the content with other materials.

Accurate enough, except many of the sections have outdated statistics, charts, and graphs. Please take some time and get those updated so students and instructors will respect the authenticity of the data.

In general, yes. There are a variety of meaningful and relevant case studies, although they trend toward images of white privilege. Please, just use one photo of the British royal family in this whole book. Life is changing quickly, so I acknowledge that it is challenging to keep books current, but it should at least be easier to update on-line books with cutting-edge examples. I always expect Sociology textbooks to be rather outdated and do my best to supplement with current stories and data, but the "Readers' Digest" style of this book requires a higher standard of currency and relevancy to be taken seriously.

Yes, most of the content is quite clear and succinct. Alas, to a detriment. Some sections are so brief that content that is left out feels palpable.

I appreciate the consistency in the use of the different core sociological theories. I think that this will help students navigate through the content and facilitate their analytical skills.

Each chapter is nicely organized by content and sub-headings. It will be easy to reference different sections in lecture notes.

Similar feedback to the modularity question. It is nicely organized and makes sense to the reader - including the instructor.

I hadn't even considered this. Everything appears to flow smoothly, without any distortions in photos or charts. The clarity of the images are also high, without any pixelation.

I did not notice any grammatical nor punctuation errors. I tend to pay close attention to this type of issue, so it is encouraging that nothing stood out.

The images and case studies lean heavily toward white middle and upper-middle class stories. Definitely work on deepening the complexities, intersectionality, multiculturalism, and globalization of examples throughout the book.

This is the first time that I have deeply delved into an OER book. Many of my colleagues use Openstax books. Some highly recommend them and others have chosen to stop using them. There is an important place in academia for these broad on-line overviews of disciplines, especially with students struggling with the high cost of textbooks, so I am glad that so many authors and publishers are trying to make them available. I will give this book a chance in the fall and see how students respond to it.

Reviewed by Fahri Ercem, Adjunct Professor, Bunker Hill Community College on 6/24/20

This textbook is comprehensive in that it provides a plethora of chapters relating to sociology, which leaves the reader with a comprehensive and encompassing introduction to sociology through an evaluation of the many subject areas within the... read more

The content within this textbook is accurate with a detailed emphasis on objectivity and supported evidence even on subjects that generally fall privy to bias such as religion.

As with any sociology textbook new research and phenomena is being researched and updated constantly, for example now in light of COVID 19 the areas in the textbook that discuss pandemic, epidemics, health can be updated. Furthermore, in light of the recent Black Lives Matter protests and renewed movements for police abolition Chapter 7 could also be updated to include these recent trends. Lastly, the use of the word transsexual is no longer relevant in my opinion.

Very palatable to an intro to sociology student, definitions of any concepts or terms are easily made available throughout the book. This book also seems to allow for more in depth lecture material to further engage and teach students.

Each chapter is formatted similarly, and the tone and scope of each chapter is consistent throughout. Furthermore, the visual aids, special sections, summaries, and quizzes are all aspects of this book that help keep it consistent throughout.

I believe that the modularity of this textbook is one of the best things that allows it to be used for an introduction to sociology course, because the professor can easily hand pick and assign certain chapters of this book and leave out others yet students will likely still feel that they are receiving a comprehensive learning experience without “missing” certain parts of the book. Furthermore, this book can be realistically taught in any order that professors deem more appropriate for their class and does not need to be read from front to back.

Organization within each chapter is presented in a logical and clear fashion, and I actually like that theory is introduced first within many chapters because certain professors want their students to first have a basic understanding of the underlying theory within each subject and to then move on to statistics, facts, examples, etc.

I did not have any issues navigating the interface of this online textbook, however I suggest downloading it into PDF format instead of using the online version as I found the PDF better quality. However, I wish there were more comprehensive PowerPoint presentations included, as well as an addition of true/false questions.

I did not see any major grammatical errors.

One complaint I do have is in the “creating the discipline” section much value is given to the white “founding fathers” of sociology who should definitely be credited for being pioneers of the discipline however I think it would be interesting to include all the men and women of color who have carried sociology into the discipline that it is today. Furthermore, in sections such as “crime and social class” there is an emphasis on the unequal application of the law that exists between social classes, but writing in a post-George Floyd world I think it would implore sociology texts to discuss race and the role of race when it comes to the application of law and order. Lastly the use of the word “transsexual” in chapter 12 should be removed.

It is nice to provide a text-book to my students which is available in various formats!

Reviewed by Nicole Lambert, Assistant Professor, Massachusetts Bay Community College on 6/23/20

This is a comprehensive textbook in terms of key concepts and terms that would be covered in an introductory course. read more

This is a comprehensive textbook in terms of key concepts and terms that would be covered in an introductory course.

Content Accuracy rating: 3

Overall, the book is accurate; however, it leans a bit too heavily toward certain theoretical perspectives (even though it summarizes each of the three key perspectives in each chapter). In chapter 10, the differences between world systems and dependency theory, in particular, are quite muddled. As with all textbooks, a new edition with updated statistics and current events would be great!

Although some of the specific examples may be several years old now, the themes and content that is covered continues to be relevant.

This text is quite clear. In fact, I would argue that in some ways, the writing might be a little too simplistic for a college-level text.

The text is quite consistent.

Text is appropriately divided into sections, with images, graphs, and sidebars throughout.

The organization is consistent with other introductory texts.

I have used this text in an online sociology course and have received no complaints from students regarding this item.

I have not noticed any (although, I did not thoroughly read for edits).

Overall, a good variety of examples.

I have used this book for an online Introduction to Sociology course. Overall, it is sufficient for an intro course, although it is a bit basic and may require some supplementation or additional information from faculty.

Reviewed by Amanda Miller, Associate Professor, University of Indianapolis on 5/19/20

On the whole, the book is quite comprehensive in its use of sociological terminology. There are a few more current topics, however, which would need supplementing (e.g. gay marriage, Black Lives Matter.) read more

The book does a very nice job of being unbiased. In particular, I really like how the authors treated the topic of religion, which is always a tricky one for some students. Being able to share that religion is not just a belief system but instead a social structure which can be analyzed from a sociological perspective.

Examples are interesting and ones that should be recognizable for quite some time. I do find it interesting that some of the citations are far older than the examples sprinkled throughout. I suspect those will age more quickly (or already have) than the cultural references.

One clear area for improvement for the book is in the inclusion of lots of examples to help make complex concepts come to life for students. For example, this book, like nearly all other SOC 101 books, covers the three major sociological theories. However, while the history of each theory and their criticisms are covered in great depth, there aren't clear examples provided right away for students to see how the theories actually apply to the social world. There are a few more in-depth applications of the theory in other chapters, but this isn't consistent throughout.

I wish the major theories continued throughout all of the chapters. Students rely heavily on repetition to understand them in my experience. But, the rest of the text is clear and consistent.

It's very nice how the book is subdivided into sections and even includes different background colors from some text boxes. It would be very simple to reorder or reorganize the way that students work through the book because the segments are a good length and chapters (minus the first one, of course) do not overly reference prior material. Since I typically tear apart a text and reorder it based on a particular theme for the course, this is very beneficial. I appreciate that there are more modules than many instructors may have a chance to get to because that does not force hard choices. For example, the book contains modules on aging, demography, global inequality, media, and work. I find that most texts only include two of those at most.

The flow of each chapter within the text is clear and easy to work through. I personally would reorder the chapters (perspective/theory/methods, social inequality, social institutions, social change) but it's quite easy to do that with the way the book is laid out.

The interface is clean and easy to use. There were no problems with navigation or confusing displays. If I had one suggestion, it would be that I wish photo captions were larger. Those can be a little hard to read.

Spelling, grammar, and jargon were all correct. The level of writing was appropriate for introductory students.

The text does a good job of including numerous examples from various groups throughout. In particular, I appreciate how many global examples are provided both in the text and in the images. That's something many introductory students don't get enough information about and should be embedded throughout the curriculum.

While I appreciate the inclusion of student tools, such as key terms and quizzes, virtually all quiz questions are at the level of "recall" and wouldn't actually be good exam preparation for my students. I wish more questions were included at the "application" or "analysis" level.

Reviewed by Christina Adkins, Graduate Assistant/ Teaching Assistant, Marshall University on 3/20/20

This text covers everything and more in an introductory sociology class. It covers material that is not always introduced due to not enough time in a semester. The only downfall may be that not all the information would be able to be thoroughly covered due to this. However, with the comprehensiveness comes a chance for people that might not have thought sociology was a subject of interest, to realize the variety the subject offers, possibly leading more students to major in this area. It has a slew of interesting, and appropriate examples. Ones I found kept my interest included "Parrotheads", The story of Megan Meier, and "hepcats". The very nice thing about OER resources is that there is a way to highlight, just like in a hardback. There is also a way if I chose to do so, for me to change out chapters with another book if I thought one was more appropriate than the other. Options are available with these teaching resources which I like. This was also very easy to use, and written clearly. I also liked that at each end of the chapter were just not multiple choice, but also short answer. Beyond that, there were even links at the end to click on if you wanted to learn more about a topic. In a hardback, even if that is given, it is unlikely one will look it up unless they need to. Here, you just click on a link and I think that will be far more used due to the immediacy, and the easy access it promotes.

Content all seemed accurate and relevant. With information, examples were pertinent to points and kept my interest while I was reading. With our society continually changing, the OER resources allows us to be able to keep literature up to date. Also, I saw very few grammatical errors. Information also came across as unbiased.

Once again, the one thing with OER is that information can be kept up to date, if a professor chooses they need to update an area. That is always a plus, especially since the professor can even choose what examples they wanted added and where. If they do not feel like a chapter examples is relevant, they can choose to replace or add a chapter. However, the examples given in this book we all pretty much up to date. They were interesting and went along to enforce the previous information. The text is arranged in an easy way to navigate whatever section you may be looking for.

The text is written in a very clear way. The information is adequate and easy interpreted. It is also supported by many examples, placing a meaning to the term. The terminology also is accurate, and laid out in a way that one term adds on to another, making it easily connected.

The book is consistent through its chapters. No chapters are excessive long or short. Each chapter holds an amount of three to five subsections in each chapter. They are consistently distributed. Also, each chapter has a multiple choice, a short answer, and an extended reference section that are all very nice to help the student understand the information, and emphasize and apply information given.

Each chapter holds three to five subsections. Each section under the chapter is titled due to what is specifically talked about, along with the multiple choice, the short answer and the reference section. Each chapter has a different expertise, and information in each chapter is pertinent to the chapter. It would be very easy to assign reading material for any section of any chapter, because the layout makes it very clear what you are clicking on. Each section is cut off appropriately, making an easy transition into the next chapter.

The text was presented in a clear cut way. Each chapter is lined out in a clear fashion, making it very easy to navigate. I had no problems going through each chapter, or looking ahead if I chose. The organization of the outline is very clear and takes you exactly where it says it is taking you.

I had no navigation problems, in fact it was very easily navigated. All pictures and charts were clear and pertinent to the information at hand. The images, and charts specifically, allowed application to the information allowing students to see first and application of information. There was no confusing examples to me. Once again, with OER resources, if I felt that an example needed to be changed, or a chapter for that matter, depending on the license of that book, I would have options to do so. Where each teacher has a different style, and way to teach, if the overall book is acceptable for them, they always have options to change what personally they feel needs needed. I think that is wonderful for personalized teaching techniques.

I did not see many grammatical errors. Once again with OER resources, there was a place to submit any grammatical issues with the book. The book can forever be changed to remain relevant in examples and pertinent to the time we live in.

I saw examples of all ethnicity and backgrounds. Some may have seemed somewhat redundant, but none were offensive or insensitive in any way.

I personally like a text book I can hold and read in my hands. I also like to highlight and write in them. I tend to lose focus when on the computer for long periods when having to read a long drawn out article. However, this OER kept my attention, allowed me to highlight and mark places I felt needed, and was easily navigated. I had never considered this as an option before, but may now.

Reviewed by Boniface Noyongoyo, Assistant Professor, Marshall University on 3/11/20

The book covers all the main topics that are needed for introduction to Sociology. It even goes beyond the "usual" material and presents some points that are internationally relevant because of globalization. From culture to political changes, the book present real examples through the boxes of applicability of the themes. The books also allows to review the chapter by providing not only the main points but also the definitions of the those points in a way that the learner does not have to go through the book to find answers. Convenient in the age of instant gratification!

Some things, such as definitions and concepts and research methods, do not change but the manner they are presented makes the difference. The book kept the tradition of being accurate about everything for it is for the sake of the discipline.

The book covers topic such as food security as well as network connections. It also brings forth cases that prove a point such as public sociology. Pictures are current and students could have seen them which could increase connectivity with the material at hand.

Easy to read! Short sentences and no jargon unless unavoidable like with definitions and concepts

I like that the book uses same font and color to present identical material at the end of each chapter. Example is the revision and definitions at the end of the chapter.

Some chapters such religion, education, and politics could be rearranged to form one big chapter. The ordering of the parts in chapters is possible for whoever had some chapters organized and would like the book to match prepared lessons.

I like how the topic covered in boxes or bold are current. Presentation is helpful to understand which topic is connected to which.

Interface is colorful and attention is drawn to points that deserve attention. The same colors have been used for the same purpose. "Making Connections" has been green throughout the book for instance or blue for multiple choice questions at the end of each chapter. That consistency is good and useful.

"Errare humanum est" is a say that is also true for this book. Nothing is perfect. Errors in the book are really minimal and cannot distract the reader. No two people write alike either: what someone might find grammatically wrong here could be nuances that are based on personal preferences on how to use some styles.

The book is for American audience and has nothing that would be offensive in my opinion. Examples that go beyond the American average perception are safe and present facts in a culturally sensitive manner. Examples are indeed inclusive of all backgrounds.

The book is really up to date with what a student in an introductory could should know and it is written in a style that catches attention. The book present main topics that are relevant to the current world with real examples and pictures that are reliable and on point. Highly recommend the book to anyone who would like to engage students in a traditional way with non-traditional fashion. I am adopting the book!!!

Reviewed by Mychel Estevez, Senior Instructor, Portland State University on 3/7/20

The book covers more subject areas than the typical introduction textbook (for example, there are more chapters dedicated to different institutions than usual). It also includes some topics that are often not included such as sexuality. There is an index with links back to the specific sections of the chapters and each chapter includes a glossary. The main downside that I see is that some of the topics covered are done so somewhat superficially.

There is no such thing as a completely unbiases textbook. One thing I appreciated about this textbook is that it didn't really candy-coat the problems in the U.S. and it explicitly showed some of the areas where the U.S. is deficient in comparison to other comparable countries. Other textbooks often give too much credence to the "American Dream" even when the evidence suggests otherwise; I didn't see that bias here. Other areas where this book is more accurate than the textbook I've been using is that it doesn't fall into what I call the "but Native American's have casinos" trap when discussing Native Americans or the "but the things are so much better for women now" trap when talking about gender and families. I did have a problem with Ch. 10. First, the title: why inequality instead of inequities or stratification? (Ch. 9 on U.S. Stratification was explicit about stratification.) Also, it seemed to be framed in a" the U.S. is better than the 'third world'" way.

Society moves at such a quick pace at this time that textbooks about society are practically obsolete at publication. For example, I'm writing this review as the coronavirus (COVID 19) hits the U.S. Obviously, the sections of the book on pandemics and epidemics and globalization need to be updated now. That being said, I don't think the need for updates takes away from this book; it'll be easy enough to supplement.

The book is clear, concise, well organized, and defines all jargon (that I noticed). That being said, I feel conflicted about it's writing; it's really basic and, I would argue, somewhat "dumbed down."

Each chapter is formated similarly and each contains global and U.S. centered information and explanations of theoretical applications once past the basic history, theory and methods chapters.

Most of the chapters can be removed or put in a different order without students being confused; most of the chapters do not rely on information from previous chapters to make their points. Some chapters that would usually go together in introductory textbooks are separated out which makes them more modular. For example, many books have one chapter on "Politics and Economics." This textbook has a chapter on Government and Politics and a separate chapter for Work and Economics.

Fairly standard organization of topic order.

Looking at the PDF and online versions, neither showed distortions and both were very easy to navigate and had easy to use (and useful) features like highlighting.

I didn't notice any grammatical errors.

Overall, it wasn't bad. Like I said, I appreciated the more honest look at Native Americans in the chapter on race. I also appreciated that Arab Americans were included in that chapter and that gender variation cross-culturally was brought up. On the negative side, I thought the repeated discussion of female genital cutting was overdone and I was a bit disappointed that different types of racism were mentioned as existing with no additional explanation or discussion. I was also unclear about why racism was framed as a form of prejudice rather than a form of prejudice and discrimination. Additionally, as mentioned previously, the chapter on Global Inequality came across as framed to make the U.S. look less bad.

I thought it was kind of boring. While I don't want it to lose any of its organization, consistency, or other attributes, I would like for it to be more visually engaging. Each "page" is basically a few squares of text and a picture and maybe a textbox telling a "real world" story. It wasn't until close to halfway through that there was even a chart for visual interest.

Reviewed by Lynda Cooksey, Adjunct Professor, J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College on 1/13/20

The textbook covers all the usual topics in an introductory text for Sociology. The order of coverage is also pretty standard, beginning with how sociology developed as a discipline, the founding fathers, the three major theories, and topics of concern in society . Each chapter is complete with a chapter summary and key terms, which allows students in an introductory class to become better acquainted with the chapter materials. The text is written in such a manner to make it easy to understand for those in an introductory course.

I feel the content is as accurate as possible, error-free, and unbiased. Often once a book is published or made available, there are changes/updates that need to be made. Society by its very nature is constantly in a state of fluctuation/change.

Content is relevant for today's student. Any updates can easily be added to the content or changed with the instructor's input with the implementation of class lecture material.

The text is very clear in its terminology and language and appropriate for an Introductory Sociology text. Each of the chapters have quizzes to test the student on their working knowledge of the chapter content. The text offers further research for students to explore the section topic as well as other related research topics to explore.

The text is consistent in terminology as well as the framework of the chapters. Each chapter is constructed in pretty much the same fashion throughout the entire text., which adds to the students ability to grasp the material content.

The text is written in such a fashion that with the subheadings, chapters can easily be divided into smaller reading segments without causing confusion to the reader.

The text is organized in such a manner that the material flows easily from Chapter 1-Chapter 21 making the transition from chapter to chapter logical. The organizational structure follows the same pattern of most introductory texts in Sociology.

The interface allows for smooth navigation. OpenStax makes this text available in two formats (either PDF or Online) which adds to the ease of accessibility. There were no distortions in images, charts, or any other display features.

No grammatical errors were noted.

The text is not culturally insensitive or offensive in any way. Examples used are unbiased/fair and all inclusive of the diverse world in which we live.

I found in reviewing the text that it is a very well written introductory text and representative of most introductory texts for Sociology. I find that it being offered free for students will make the possibility of mastering the course material less a burden financially for those who otherwise could not afford to buy the text.

Reviewed by Heidi Reynolds-Stenson, Assistant Professor, Colorado State University - Pueblo on 12/3/19

The textbook hits (almost) all the major topics an introduction to sociology text should. But be aware that it is more comprehensive in its breadth of topics than in its depth of discussion. Many sections felt short compared with other intro. texts I have used or considered. While some students might welcome the lighter reading, I worry that they may miss out on important knowledge (unless the professor is very deliberate about filling the gaps and digging deeper in lecture). There are a few specific oversights I noticed. For example, in the social movement theory section, it makes no mention of two of the major theoretical camps: grievance/classicial theories and political opportuntiies/process theories. It instead focuses a great deal on new social movement theory (in addition to resource mobilization and framing, as it should), which is relatively marginal in the study of social movements compared to these two that are not even mentioned. Another gap I noticed in the book overall is that there was no discussion of social networks.

I found no major inaccuracies. However, as a social movements scholar, I found the typology of social movements offered in 21.2 to be a little misleading. For example, I have seen MADD cited as an example of an alternative movement elsewhere, but here it is cited as a reform movement. And the term resistance movement is, as I am aware, never used by scholars of social movements the way the text is using it—these would be referred to as conservative or regressive movements, or sometimes countermovements, but not resistance movements.

The text could be improved with the updating of some facts (I noticed a table on page 263 displaying data from 1989, for example), but in general it was presented in a way that makes the material relevant for students.

I found the textbook to be clear and easy to read and understand.

I did not notice any glaring inconsistencies in language.

I think it could be broken up easily, however having a more in0depth standalone theory chapter, as opposed to a very general theory chapter and then theory sprinkled throughout the rest, would improve modularity.

I think the flow and order of topics are logical and intuitive. The chapter organization works well, although I would prefer if they were also organized into units.

It looked good and worked well, whether reading it online or downloading the PDF. The hyperlinked table of contents on the PDF is very helpful. Hyperlinking the index would a really nice touch as well.

I noticed no grammatical errors.

The textbook does a good job of covering diverse perspectives and experiences with sensitivity. It also includes an international perspective on many of the topics, which is not true of many U.S. sociology texts.

Overall, I think this is a very good introductory text that would work well for many introduction to sociology courses. I only reviewed the textbook itself, but I am happy to see there is a test bank, powerpoint slides, and other instructor resources as well. I will definitely consider adopting this instead of my current non-open source textbook.

Reviewed by Pete Martini, Assistant Professor, Manchester University on 6/14/19

The book does a good job on topical material (i.e. it hits all the "big items" in a typical Intro Sociology text). The text is short and sweet in each section and does not feel overburdened. For those of us who go into detail in lecture, this text... read more

This book has a solid footing in the topics covered. When discussing a topic in a prof's area of interest, it can feel a little light. For example, I found the health and sexuality chapters to be missing some things I would have liked. I feel like that's probably the same reaction stratification folks will have of the stratification chapter, or race/ethnicity folks will have of the race/ethnicity chapter. Approaching this text with a generalist's eye is probably a good idea.

This is a strength of the book. The topics covered will be enduring in their importance, but the to-the-point nature of the writing makes necessary updates easier.

The writing in this book is very appealing for a generation of students who are used to communicating in Instagram posts. Short, sweet, and to-the-point is the description I would use. It lends itself to be useful for professors who deliver a lot of additional detail in either lecture or in-class activities.

I particularly enjoy the way the authors bring each topic back to the "Big Three" theories while including other relevant theoretical families where appropriate (e.g. Queer Theory in the Gender, Sex, Sexuality chapter).

Each chapter is divided into easily digestible chunks. One can easily read a section then come back. At the same time, the book does effortlessly flow from topic to topic throughout the chapter. This allows the chapters to be taken in as short bursts, or as a bigger chunk that's clearly divided into relevant and understandable sections. Needing to click between sections reinforces may help reinforce the idea that "we're moving on to another topic" in a way that traditional book headings do not.

Honestly, pretty standard Sociology text organization here. Nothing new or earth-shattering. Just solid.

Interface rating: 3

I used the OpenStax CNX interface to view this book. My only issue is that I wish the sidebar used indentations to help denote what is grouped together. It's not the prettiest navigation pane. I loved the "Next" button that allowed me to simply move from section to section. Each section also maintains all download options in case a student needs to download a single reading rather than the whole book. I wish the CreativeCommons block at the bottom was either collapsible or smaller (read: less visually intrusive).

I found no grammar errors. To be fair, I was reading quickly and for content and keywords.

As is common with introductory texts, I wish this text spent more time including sexual and gender minority individuals. Discussions of how intersectionality impact each of the topics covered is no MORE necessary with this text than with any other text I've used though.

I've used Giddens and Carr for several years now. The quality of this text, along with its availability, make me seriously consider moving to an open text.

Reviewed by Zorian Sasyk, Assistant Professor, E-Resource and Discovery Librarian, Metropolitan State University - Minnesota State on 6/4/19

The text is thorough in its coverage of the introductory aspects of sociology for a contemporary undergraduate audience. It seems equivalent to other introductory texts that I have encountered. read more

The text is thorough in its coverage of the introductory aspects of sociology for a contemporary undergraduate audience. It seems equivalent to other introductory texts that I have encountered.

The text overall is accurate in terms of content, although as others have noted, there is some variation by chapter (the characterization of Simmel in Chapter 1, as well as the omission of Talcot Parsons in the section of Chapter 1 pertaining to Structural Functionalism). However, such omissions or contentious points of emphasis could be easily addressed by supplementary material from an instructor.

The content is reasonably up-to-date, more so than most sociology texts I've come across.

The text is written in an easy-to-read, fluent style that is always a welcome sight in any sociology textbook. The text generally avoids unnecessary deep dives or tangents into theory, methods, or history; it strikes a good balance between readability and technical content coverage, excellent traits for an undergraduate introductory text.

The text is fairly consistent in terms of prose style, definitions, and formatting. However, a few sections (depending on Chapter) are more thoroughly fleshed out or investigated then others (for example, the Chapter 1 sections on Functionalism vs Conflict Theory, where the latter as several paragraphs dedicated to different theorists in said tradition). In addition, in a few places, the prose is a bit choppy and it is obvious to the reader that the work was most likely written in chunks by several authors, even within sections and Chapters.

The aforementioned concise nature of the text's chapters and sections, as well as its granular and hyperlinked Table of Contents, makes it a fairly modular tool for instruction. It would be easy to divide the text's chapters into shorter assigned readings using the Chapter hyperlinks.

The text was organized in a manner congruent with other introductory texts in Sociology. Although theory is discussed in a small section in Chapter 1 and sporadically via sociological topic, the text lacks a dedicated and comprehensive section or chapter on full breadth of the sociological tradition.

In my experiences reading the text via web browser and as a desktop PDF file, I encountered no interface or usability issues.

I encountered occasional typos and missing words, more than in a standard textbook but within acceptable limits for a collaborative, CC-licensed educational resource.

I found the text to be, overall, very inclusive, perhaps more so than many sociology textbooks I have encountered. For example, Chapter 1 mentions several historical female sociologists that I had never seen featured in a introductory text before. However, it also seemed like many of the "Making Connections" boxes were United States-centric; it would be great if more of these featured global examples.

Reviewed by Deborah Van Cura, Adjunct Lecturer, LAGCC on 5/16/19

The text provides an excellent introduction to sociology. It includes the usual topics that are covered in all basic introductory texts for a one semester course. I found the glossary and summaries at the end of each chapter very helpful. read more

A few definitions were different than other sociological but overall would be considered a reliable text.

The presentation of ideas and examples were very relevant to today's students. I liked that a whole chapter is devoted to media and technology but it would be up to the individual professor to update some of these issues as this topics changes so fast. This is not unique to this text but a very common challenge.

This text is very easy to read and should keep students engaged. The explanations of concepts are clear and concise. The reviews at the end of each chapter would be very helpful to students.

The text was extremely consistent in presenting ideas. Throughout the text the sociological perspectives are discussed which reinforces them.

The text is easy to divide and reorganize based on the preferred flow of the course.

The text follows a typical progression throughout the course of an introductory class building on skills previously covered. There format is logical and has a natural progression.

The text is fine in the pdf format. I downloaded it in my Kindle and some names (i.e. Emile Durkheim) and numbers did not show up accurately. Not sure if it is just my tablet or a general problem.

I did not find any grammatical errors in the text.

The text is culturally inclusive.

This is a text I would definitely use in my course.

Reviewed by Paul Kamolnick, Professor, East Tennessee State University on 4/18/19

This text contains the standard chapters found in virtually all textbooks. read more

This text contains the standard chapters found in virtually all textbooks.

I detected no errors in matters of fact. The bias toward a virtually 100% socioenvironmental theorization of human society exists, but is sane relative to other accounts. I did detect a major error in describing Georg Simmel (1858-1918). He is described as a "German art critic". For ANYONE familiar with Simmel, that is an atrocious characterization. He was first and foremost a philosopher, but also a pioneer of a distinct method and theory for understanding sociological phenomena. Art, aesthetics, culture, certainly were subjects of his interest, but his vast scholarship in sociology and other subjects are not captured by that description. But I feel overall, without question, the general thrust of the text is scholarly.

It should be easy to update as necessary factual developments. It is far less dated than some texts in their 14th editions that still use sources and notes from the 1970s and 1980s.

The text is well written, and is lucid. Jargon is defined. I would say that perhaps the writing is pitched at a higher level of language capacity than the typical student with whom I deal. But it is lively, and it can be complimented by instructor elaboration.

I detected no inconsistencies.

Modularity is an asset here. Supposing rearrangement of material is possible when necessary, it will work well.

It follows, in general, the standard template for Intro texts. Topics do flow logically.

I experienced no difficulties from my laptop using a standard browser.

I detected no obvious errors.

It is sufficiently inclusive, and non-offensive.

I am impressed with this text. It compares extremely favorably with any text I have reviewed. I will strongly consider this text for my course.

Reviewed by Shelley Koch, Associate Professor of Sociology, Emory and Henry College on 4/10/19

This book presents as your standard sociology textbook in terms of content and organization, starting with an introduction and then chapters on theory and research, and then content areas. If I were to use a textbook, I think this would be... read more

As far as I can tell, the information presented is pretty standard.

The I find the three theoretical model outdated but so constraining as this framework structures every chapter. In the Chapter on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality, for example, feminist theory is given one small paragraph and theories on gender or intersectionality are not even offered. While this particular chapter has a decent discussion of the difference between sex, gender and sexuality, I probably would not even assign the section on theoretical perspectives. Also missing in this chapter is any discussion of women and work, a topic I did not find in related chapters. In the chapter on population and the environment, coverage of climate change gets one section, as does environmental racism. I know a textbook cannot include everything but I find these chapters to be rather thin.

The text is clear and accessible. I do appreciate the short vignettes at the beginning of chapters or sections that introduce the main content.

The text is consistent throughout.

As with any intro textbook it would be easy to assign particular content chapters which could be integrated with the introduction, theory and research sections.

Each chapter contains an overview and is divided into two or three specific topics. It is easy to follow.

The text is easy to navigate and has good images and graphics. I wonder if it would be possible to embed videos and other activities to aid students in understanding the concepts.

This text appears to be well edited and I could find few errors.

The text is culturally relevant and appropriate.

Reviewed by Alecea Standlee, Assistant Professor, Gettysburg College on 3/12/19

This book covers the major subfields and concepts within sociology. Each chapter provides a solid overview, and covers major thinkers, concepts and vocabulary within the field. read more

This book covers the major subfields and concepts within sociology. Each chapter provides a solid overview, and covers major thinkers, concepts and vocabulary within the field.

Overall all the book is reasonably accurate. Inaccuracies tend to be primarily the result of the age of text. It is 4 years old, and some of policies, practices and statistics in the book are outdated. This is an issue in sections of the book the rely heavily on statistics or discuss public policy, for example the healthcare chapter.

Text is reasonably up to date, but needs revision in some sections to reflect changes in healthcare, politics, education etc in the last 4 years. I would say that it should be reasonably simple to update, though there are some areas that need to be rewritten.

The writing style is clear and accessible. The organization is straightforward and the use of vocabulary is appropriate to the level.

Very consistent. I didn't notice any real variation in tone or framework from chapter to chapter.

Overall yes, the text is broken up into subheadings, however many of the sections are interconnected, so within chapters, it might be a bit of a challenge to assign partial sections.

Logical, clear and well organized.

I don't see any navigational or display issues. Well designed.

I didn't notice any grammar issues.

This is a difficult one. By its very nature, sociology is a discipline that students may find challenging. For example, white students often find the idea that racial inequality exists to run counter to their beliefs. Students who specific religious convictions may disagree strongly with the idea that non-heterosexuals should be viewed as a normal variation of human sexuality. Students who are from economically privileged backgrounds can feel like the poor are morally bad. Presenting information, even objective data that counters stereotypes is essential to the discipline but can be challenging. In general, this text does this well. It err's a bit on the side of neutrality actually, and in doing so avoids some of the heavy lifting in challenging stereotypes and inequalities, which may mean the faculty member has to do a bit more.

Overall, this is well written and clearly organized. A good solid introductory textbook for sociology. It is perhaps a bit bland, as the authors focus on providing vocabulary, concepts and basic knowledge. The Making Connections features provide a bit more interest, and provide some venues for more robust discussion.

Reviewed by Chris Solario, Adjunct Instructor, Western Oregon University on 3/1/19

The book provides an excellent overview of the sociological topic with clear objectives. Each chapter wraps up with key terms, a section summary and both multiple choice and short answer questions that will help students master the material. read more

Book appears to be error free and unbiased.

The text provides several current "real world" examples along with references to further scholarship. Supplementing textbook with real time events would be straightforward..

Key terms, concepts and theoretical frameworks are clearly presented throughout the book with several relevant examples.

The textbook chapters are consistent with clearly defined learning objectives at the beginning, and a comprehensive chapter review that includes key terms, sample exam questions and an extensive reference list.

Textbook is broken up into small easy to read sections with no more than a few paragraphs per topic. Chapters are fairly short and there are several graphics and captions that help students make clear connections to each concept.

There is a clear flow through each chapter building on previous concepts mastered in earlier sections o fetch text.

Book is easy to navigate with a nice complement of graphics and images.

Grammar is consistent throughout the book and would be easily interpreted by undergraduates.

The text provides a nice overview of various peoples' races, ethnicities and backgrounds.

This is an excellent, comprehensive textbook for a survey course in sociology.

Reviewed by Dee Malcuit, Associate Professor of Sociology, OhioLink on 12/2/18

Overall, this OER offers a general/brief overview of Introduction to Sociology content. read more

Overall, this OER offers a general/brief overview of Introduction to Sociology content.

The provided content examples and data is outdated. The routine use of “Wikimedia” for chapter charts, graphs, and photos is a concern.

Updating chapter content examples and data is suggested. Student required assignments focused on current outside sources and data would compensate for content deficit.

The OER is well formatted and presented. The chapters are brief and to the point. Each chapter includes sociology terminology, theory and concepts, and a test bank for review.

Consistency rating: 3

Yes, with the exception of chapter one and two. Limited content for the foundations of sociology and the social science research process.

Yes, the brief and general format is conducive to a quick review of general sociology concepts and material.

Yes, with the exception of chapter two, personally I would move the research and methods chapter further back in the text - chapter five perhaps. Covering origins, theory, theorist, culture, and socialization prior to research and methods has proven to ease students into the application concepts of research.

It is my opinion that data, such as charts and graphs, work toward a better understanding of the content presented in each chapter. Students that are visual learners benefit from reliable images/charts that accurately support the written material.

Correct, I did not find grammatical errors

Yes, I agree that the content is inclusive and appropriate

Overall, this OER offers a good general overview of Introduction to Sociology content. The material can be easily subsidized to incorporate updates outside sources and data.

Reviewed by Paul Croll, Associate Professor of Sociology, Augustana College on 11/15/18

This text is comprehensive. It is comparable to the other main Introduction to Sociology alternatives in the market. Comparing the table of contents to other widely-used Intro texts, this text is equally comprehensive. The chapters and subjects included in this text work for the way I teach Introduction to Sociology. I appreciate the "key terms" (glossary) at the end of each chapter. It makes sense to me to have the glossary sections at the end of each chapter, rather than the end of the entire text. The index at the end of the text is sufficient. However, there is a little quirk with the index given the chapter glossaries at the end of each chapter. Most terms in the glossary are listed twice -- first the mention of the term in the chapter and second the term in the chapter-end glossary. I would suggest removing the second page number in the index for these terms and just pointing students to the place in the chapter where the term is discussed.

I found the content to be very accurate. I did not find any errors or inconsistencies. I do feel the text is unbiased. As best as possible, the text presents key sociological ideas in an unbiased, objective manner. I feel like the text does a good job dealing with potentially controversial issues and providing the empirical data available. I can use the material presented here to have productive conversations about these topics without fear or criticism of bias.

I feel like this text is as up-to-date and relevant as any of the Introduction to Sociology textbooks in the market. I do not entirely rely on my textbook to be completely up-to-date. Rather, I use the textbook to provide the key ideas and concepts and then often bring in my own relevant, current examples for the chapter and material we are discussing. In this regard, this text will work well for my purposes. I do not see any concerns about the format and arrangement of the chapters causing any difficulties for updates as needed.

This text is written at a level that is appropriate for an Introduction to Sociology course. The discipline-specific terminology used is appropriate and there are plenty of definitions for students throughout the text.

The text is consistent both across and within the chapters. The framework and organization of the text works well for students.

I believe it would be easy to select only certain chapters from this text for use in a class. I probably would not divide the chapters into smaller reading sections, but I could imagine an instructor only using some of the chapters from the text. If it was necessary to divide the chapters into smaller sections to be assigned, I do believe this could be done. However, I would not suggest only assigning part of a chapter from this text. I would strongly recommend using complete chapters from this text if this text is used for a course.

I like the organization of this book. As many Introductory texts are organized, this text starts with a couple chapters on big ideas about sociology as a discipline and how we do sociology. These are followed by chapters on specific topics. This is how my own Introduction to Sociology course is organized. Each chapter is organized in a clear fashion and I think students would get used to the style and format of the chapters as they used this book. I appreciate that the last chapter is about Social Movements and Social Change. Much of what we do in sociology focuses on social problems and inequalities. I believe it is important to end a course like this thinking about prospects for social change. We study the problems in society because we want to make it better. I agree with the authors to end with Social Change.

No issues with the interface. The text, pictures, and format work on multiple devices in multiple formats. The hyperlinks to pages and chapters in the table of contents, index, etc. work fine without any problems.

No issues with grammatical errors in this text.

This text does a good job including diverse perspectives across the topics presented. Across U.S. society and across the globe, appropriate examples and comparisons are used. I did not see the text as culturally insensitive or offensive in any way.

I think this is an excellent Introduction to Sociology textbook. This text provides the basics I need to teach the course at my school. The text covers the main ideas, theories, concepts, and topics I believe should be part of any Introduction to Sociology course. I do not believe any textbook is perfect, but this text is sufficient for my needs. The advantage of providing the text to students as an Open Educational Resource (OER) is a major advantage of this text. I do not feel that the other texts in this market are worth the cost of adopting over this text. I plan to switch to this OER text for my Introduction to Sociology course.

Reviewed by Robert Wengronowitz, Visiting Assistant Professor, Augustana College on 11/8/18

Keirns et al. are very comprehensive. The book covers all the major ares within sociology and in terms of comprehensiveness, is on part with other Intro texts. read more

Keirns et al. are very comprehensive. The book covers all the major ares within sociology and in terms of comprehensiveness, is on part with other Intro texts.

The book is accurate. I'd like there to be more specificity. So for instance, intersectionality is attributed to Hill Collins. Sure, she was critical, but Crenshaw is the typical cite. Much of the time, I'd also like the text to be more critical. So for instance, in the chapter on global inequality, it takes a long time to say anything about colonization: "Why is Africa in such dire straits? Much of the continent’s poverty can be traced to the availability of land, especially arable land (land that can be farmed). Centuries of struggle over land ownership have meant that much useable land has been ruined or left unfarmed, while many countries with inadequate rainfall have never set up an infrastructure to irrigate. Many of Africa’s natural resources were long ago taken by colonial forces, leaving little agricultural and mineral wealth on the continent." I use the textbook for basic material, and it's accurate enough for that.

A lot of the modern examples to introduce material and relate to students is okay. It's difficult to keep it fresh though, so this is something all textbooks suffer.

The text is clear. It could be much more lucid. But this is a common feature with textbooks.

Each chapter follows the same pattern, there's an outline and learning objectives, there are "making connections" pop-outs, then the main themes with subsections, then a review and end of chapter stuff: terms, summary, quiz, etc. the main topics found within the chapter are presented with the chapter's number and section number followed by a main area within the topic that is consistently found in a different color and bigger font than the main content of the chapter, and finally there is a chapter review that provides the following information: terms, really short summary, quiz, further research, and references.

Definitely. I only use five or so of the chapters and don't go in order and it works fine.

I'd order the chapters differently. Why is media before stratification, race, and gender? Social movements always seems to come at the end. I get that it's a nice way to leave students thinking, but changing that up might be fun.

Very functional. Search features work, chapters are clickable from table of contents, and there's an index.

Suffers from white guy syndrome, but this feels like other textbooks as well and is somewhat difficult to remedy given the history of the discipline. To cite one example, Du Bois is entirely absent.

My main hiccup is the limited critical perspective. But it's often useful in class to show students it's GOOD to question things and be critical, even if something is in a textbook. For example, the social stratification chapter has a figure of strata in rock and how this illustrates stratification. That sure makes it seem natural. But it's fun to pull it apart with students. The "Soc research" and "Soc in the real world" bits the authors have sprinkled in are often the most useful. More of those on a revision would be good.

Reviewed by Lloyd Klein, Associate Professor, Laguardia Community College, CUNY on 5/21/18

The text is extremely comprehensive. Topics covered comprise the traditional menu associated with with most introductory sociology textbooks utilizing the "Ian Robertson" layout that has been customary. This is the cursory summary of the leading... read more

The book is objective and accurate in regard to data on such topics as aging, poverty, race, and inequality. The authors basically state the facts in a short, clipped fashion without going into subjective viewpoints.

The text states universal information that will tend not to really go out of date over an extended period of time. Any updates will easily fit into the format of description and definition of concepts. Perhaps the photos and some graphics would change with time.

The prose is clear and written for the comprehension of students undertaking the study of Sociology. Although not glossy or spectacular, students will come away with knowing the basic information in this overview of sociological ideas.

Internal consistency is very evident in the framework of each chapter from introduction to discussion and ultimately summation and sample questions to test students on the information.

Modularity is one of the stronger suits of the text. There are enough chapters covering virtually any topics that instructors would want to include in their introductory sociology course. The information flows in a comprehensive fashion within each of the reading sections.

The book employs the logical flow associated with other standard introductory sociology texts. The transition between chapters is clear and logical.

The charts and photos occur naturally without distracting the reader from the main point of the reading. In fact, the information presented in charts and photos strongly enhance the traditional objective organization of the overall text.

The book is grammatically correct have been edited and carefully presented to the professor and students.

The book is indifferent to various social issues and avoids any material that might be insensitive or offensive. The materials are objectively presented in reflecting current cultural values while allowing the instructor to interject additional materials supplementing the presentation of the materials.

The book offers an inexpensive and good option to the glossy texts presenting the same materials. This would be very helpful for a hybrid or online course.

Reviewed by Aysha Bodenhamer, Assistant Professor, Radford University on 3/27/18

The text is very comprehensive, offering chapters on most all major concepts in an introductory sociology text. read more

The text is very comprehensive, offering chapters on most all major concepts in an introductory sociology text.

This varies greatly by chapter, but it does seem to be a bit left-leaning at times.

Content appears to be up to date, but some examples could possible be outdated pretty quickly (ex: tv shows in Chapter 3, section 3.3). Discussion of inventions/discoveries seems irrelevant.

The layout, different sections in each chapter, make it easy to follow, but vary greatly between sections and chapter, particularly with regards to relevance.

Language is okay, but clarity could be improved for some discussions. For example, section 5.1 is lacking discussion of Goffman's presentation of self and dramaturgical theory, which I believe is located in chapter 1.

Consistency seems to vary greatly in between chapters. Some topics that seem tertiary are talked about in great detail, whereas, other seemingly more important topics are not discussed very much at all. Example, xenophobia in chapter 3 is only mentioned in passing.

Sections are divided well, but organization seems off. For example, history and theory in Chapter 1 should be better integrated instead of separate sections.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 3

Again, the structure and flow could be improved. For example, the Global Inequality section has a better discussion of poverty and inequality than the stratification section, which seems strange to me. Globalization could be a better chapter, and the inequality part could be included in the stratification section.

Students have told me that the page numbers and graphic numbers do not match when viewing online compared to the downloaded pdf.

Seems okay as far as I can tell.

I think there are good examples across cultures. I haven't noticed anything blatantly offensive or insensitive.

I LOVE the idea of a free textbook for my students, which are largely racial/ethnic minorities and/or first generation students, but there are some inconsistencies across the book, and the lack of resources makes it cumbersome at times. Thanks for your efforts in pushing this open source movement forward!

Reviewed by Peter Grahame, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University - Schuylkill on 2/1/18

This text covers all of the standard areas for an introductory textbook. An index is provided at the end, and each chapter has a list of key terms and definitions. read more

This text covers all of the standard areas for an introductory textbook. An index is provided at the end, and each chapter has a list of key terms and definitions.

In some chapters, I found some strangely off-base assertions and misleading sentence constructions. I will cite a few here, but there are many others. In the theory segment, Georg Simmel is described as a literary critic. That's like calling Karl Marx a newspaperman. You could say those things with some (scant) justification, but both men trained as philosophers and were regarded as philosophers. In the research chapter, institutional ethnography is given a wildly misleading description, and the only citation provided as authority is from a brief account of a career award. There are so many fine sources that could have been used--this is very sloppy scholarship. One could do much better just going to Wikipedia. The definition of culture provided refers to beliefs and values, omitting material culture. Material culture is mentioned later, referring--somewhat narrowly--to "objects," but the glossary definition again mentions only beliefs and values. A more inclusive definition of culture is needed. I found descriptions of "theory," "hypothesis," and "interpretive framework" to be awkward and oddly off-base. The relation of participant observation and ethnography is not properly presented: one might think they were entirely different enterprises, whereas a great deal of ethnographic work in sociology is PO based, and not all of it it concerns "entire communities." The account of "ideal type" is disgraceful. In the first two chapters in particular, there are so many small but consequential errors that I could not imagine having my students read this. I should note that some of the later chapters are much better: chapters on deviance, stratification, and race seemed okay. This suggests multiple, piecemeal authorship. The urban/environment chapter is really an environment chapter; the urban part is very thin indeed.

The content seems pretty up to date, and is comparable with other introductory textbooks on the market.

Regarding longevity, it seems average. The book is thoroughly committed to the "three paradigm" approach, which is being questioned seriously these days. Virtually no upper level textbooks are built around the "three paradigms," and professional sociologists don't rely on this set of distinctions. It seems very old-fashioned, a legacy of the 60s and 70s.

The book is clear in parts, but some chapters are better than others. The first two chapters include many formulations that are somewhat misleading or off-base. Someone who knows the field well needed to go through these chapters and do some heavy editing. I felt that the author(s) was/were unsure of the distinctions they were attempting to make. Some of the later chapters are better.

Consistency rating: 2

The book is not consistent. Some sentences are illogical. Some terms are defined in one way and then used in another way in the chapter. The quality and accuracy of the different chapters varies. Some are fine but others are not. I find it unsettling that some of the least well-written chapters are the first ones.

I think it could be used this way. In this respect, reading the book is a bit like reading Wikipedia: everything is there, but the arrangement seems purely conventional, and without much of an overall design beyond tradition and convention. This is not a text with a point of view or an overall argument. So while I could pull out pieces for use on a free-standing basis, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

The topics are presented in the standard way for introductory textbooks. I found few surprises. All of the topics were pretty much as expected. Some topics were handled in a very weak way for my purposes (e.g., social interaction and urban life, to mention two), but they were located where I expected them to be.

I had no problems with the interface. Everything seemed to work smoothly. Like many textbooks, I found this one to be somewhat cluttered. That is typical these days.

I noticed one typo, where Trayvon Martin is referred to as "her," but there are not many problems of a strictly grammatical nature.

I thought that the book was okay with regard to cultural sensitivity. I looked closely for that issue in the chapter on race and found nothing that stood out as problematic. In fact, I liked that chapter.

It's of such uneven quality that I could not imagine using it as a main course text. Another problem for me is that there is insufficient attention to topics, such as social interaction, that are important in my course.

Reviewed by Jill Sturges, Instructor of Record, Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus on 2/1/18

This textbook is an excellent introductory text for Sociology. It cover many of the major components that need to be discussed in an Introductory Sociology class. It includes an easy to read preface and glossary. I was able to effectively find and use different topics of discussion using the glossary. I like how they have a search bar and it is easy to search a specific topic. For example, I searched "Freud". It found 6 matches and told me the exact pages and what was discussed about Freud on these pages. I was able to easily click on the match and go to those pages. This is excellent when a student asks a question and you are able to quickly find a match and page number to direct them to for help. I was able to navigate through chapters by clicking on the contents and choosing what I wanted to look at. I think overall this is a great start for an introductory course and it covers a wide array of topics in an easy to read and navigate fashion.

I found this book to be accurate and to my knowledge did not contain errors. I think it is unbiased and has a complete view of a wide array of topics. I teach an introductory sociology class online and I would consider using a textbook such as this in the future. I was impressed to see the discussion about feminism and feminist theory. I think this is important for all students to know and understand. For example, Chapter 8: Theoretical Perspectives on Media and Technology discusses cyber feminism, the application to, and promotion of feminism online. This is very interesting to me, I teach a class about feminism and I did not know of this topic until reviewing this text! I will incorporate this concept in future discussions for that class.

I think this book does a wonderful job at getting the reader interested in the topic by starting out each chapter with relevant examples in today's day and age. I think this is very important in order to keep students interested and for them to understand the topics better. This textbook is up to date and I think most students can relate to the examples. An example of this is Chapter 7: Introduction to Deviance, Crime, and Social Control. They begin by discussing how 23 states have passed measures legalizing marijuana in some form. They continue by discussing that a majority of people (52%) now favor legalizing marijuana. I think these are important topics that can affect our future and students need to learn about them and understand the consequences of this and many of the other topics discussed in this text. Another example that I found intriguing was Chapter 8: Introduction to Media and Technology. This chapter discusses friends and how many "friends" do they have on Facebook versus having a face-to-face conversation. This is a major issue especially with the newest generation of children growing up as Gen Z or iGeneration children. How will this affect their socialization overall? How will it affect businesses and technologies. There are many many questions about this and how it affects socialization. I think these are current and important topics for now and the future! As I stated in a prior comment I also did not know or hear of the term cyberfeminism until reviewing this text and in the future I will bring this term to the students attention because I feel it is an important topic to cover in that particular class.

I believe this text to be an easy to read. This is very important since most students that will be reading this text will be most likely be at more of a beginning college level versus later on in their college careers. I have gone through many textbooks to decide on the best choice for the class that I am teaching. All to often, I will completely disregard a text if I feel it is above the students heads so to speak. I want students to be able to sit down with a text and enjoy reading it. I do not want students to feel flustered or overwhelmed because they have to reread chapters several times to understand a topic. I have a pretty good feel for what students like as far as textbooks and I feel students would enjoy this text. It is an easy read but covers all the topics in detail. I believe the writing in this text to have adequate context and relatable jargon for the students. I feel students of any college level could easy read and navigate this text without problems and that is very important for an introductory text.

This text is very consistent throughout the chapters and makes it easy for each student to relate the different sociological concepts to the relevant discussion at hand. For example, almost every chapter discusses theoretical perspectives on each chapters topic. They include, Functionalism, Conflict, and Symbolic Interactionism in each chapter, and Feminist theory when relevant. This makes it easy for students to understand how to apply these different theoretical perspective on each topic. I have seen other textbooks other than this one where this has been placed in a non-organize fashion and it makes it much harder for students to understand and relate the theoretical perspectives on each topic. However, text is very well organized and clearly shows how each theoretical perspective applies to each topic. This text is highly consistent in terms of terminology and the framework.

This text modularity seemed to be well laid out. I think each section makes it easy to break stud nets into groups or assignments. As far as the chapters themselves, I feel this text is well organized and easy to navigate. It is self-explanatory and any student could easy break down the chapters to read or discuss at their liking.

The topics in this text are organized in a clear-cut easy to navigate way. I feel that it is very easy to navigate from chapter to chapter and topic to topic. I especially like the search box where you are able to search any topic and it tells you exactly how many matches for that word or topic and then you are able to click on the one you want and it takes you directly to that page. For example, I searched "feminism" and it told me of 11 matches total. Then it broke it down to each chapter and section where I could find feminism. My only complaint about this is that in one search it came back with 8 matches and another time it came back with 11. I spelled feminism the same way each time so I am not sure why one time came back with more matches than another. I was specifically looking for cyberfemism and it came up in one search but not the other. I think this area should be expanded to search different forms of the word so that if a student is searching they can easily get results for the topic searched. For example, if they search "feminism" they should show matches for feminist, cyberfeminism, and other terms that relate to feminism. However, I feel it should still be close to the match and not too far off the realm so that they are not overwhelmed with matches so I am not sure how plausible this would be.

The interface of this text is easily navigated, searched, and free of clutter. I think this text is clear cut and well organized. It does not feel cluttered or overwhelming. The only navigation issue I mentioned earlier was that I saw was when I searched feminism versus feminist it didn't bring up the same results and being such a similar term I felt it should of had the same search results. Other than this, the interface is extremely easy to use and navigate.

There are no grammatical errors in this text to my knowledge. I think this text was well reviewed and edited and is an outstanding text.

The cultural relevancy of this text is up to date and is not insensitive or offensive in any way. The text gave great excellent example on each topic and incorporated up to date information. For example, in chapter 10: Introduction to Global Inequality, the text discusses where close came from and how the business is outsourced for a cheap price. When that country had a major disaster, not many from the U.S. stepped in to help that country. These are important relevant topics that students need to understand and discuss.

Overall, I think this is an excellent text. I have not found any major problems or concerns. The text covers a wide array of topics for an introductory sociology course and anyone teaching the course can easily break it down into smaller sections and/or choose which topics to focus on. It encompasses relevant and important information, theories, and topics. The text us easy to read, understand, and navigate. I would recommend this text for others teaching an intolerable sociology course and I may incorporate it into my class in the future. I think ebooks are becoming more and more popular and students like to have the option of purchasing cheaper textbooks since most are on a budget. Very well done!

Reviewed by Kallie Kantos, Adjunct Instructor , Rainy River Community College on 2/1/18

The book is very detail oriented, but in a way that is not difficult to understand. The learning objectives are clear and concise and placed a the beginning of each chapter. The terms are placed in bold throughout the text, allowing the reader's eyes to go straight to them. The book also includes a section in each chapter entitled, "Society in the Real World - Individual-Society Connections." The book also has a section entitled, "Making Connections" This section encourages instructors and students to discuss real life topics that can be related to sociology.

I like how these readings relate sociology to the reader's life, a practical application if you will.

The index is very detailed and it breaks the main topics down into easy to read and understand sup topics.

At the end of each chapter there is a chapter review that summarizes the chapter's content and allows the students to test their knowledge through multiple choice and essay questions.

The authors clearly made an effort to include students from various ethnic groups and areas of interest, IE sports.

This edition of Introduction to Sociology takes a neutral standing on the referenced topics. The authors make an effort to cover multiple sides of a topic. Bias does not appear to play a role in this text.

The book takes current topics into consider, IE - Media and Technology - and shows how technology impacts everyone's lives. This is an ever-evolving topic and would have to be updated over time, but the topics that are covered under that umbrella topic lay the foundation in a clear and concise manner. The student can relate to this topic easily.

The photos that are used in each chapter are current for the times. These can easily be changed as time goes on to reflect more up to date happenings.

The topics that are addressed in the chapters are current. The book uses examples and situations that are found in today's world, not examples or situations from the past.

The wording in this text book is easy to read, It is written at the appropriate reading level and the concepts can be related to the students' life. The book presents the topics and examples in an easy to read formal.

The key terms are highlighted throughout the text which allows for easy identification of a new concept.

The book follows the same formal throughout its entirety. Book layout: At the beginning of each chapter learning objectives are presented, in the body of the chapter the student will find sections entitled, "Making Connections..." that are offset in different colored boxes (so the eye is easily drawn to that section), the main topics found within the chapter are presented with the chapter's number and section number followed by a main area within the topic that is consistently found in a different color and bigger font than the main content of the chapter, and finally there is a chapter review that provides the following information: Key Terms, Section Summary, Section Quiz (broken down by subsections), Short Answer questions, Further Research and finally References.

This book is divided clearly into main sections and subsections. If an instructor did not have enough time to cover the main topic in full, it would be easy to stop part way through the topic on any one of the clearly delineated subtopics.

The book's format is easy to follow. It is consistent throughout the text and the topics flow into one another - they build a base and then expand into greater detail in the later chapters.

This book is easy to navigate. When viewing it in a pdf format, the images and charts are clear without any visible distortion.

The photographs pertain to the topic at hand and they are clear, no distortion or clarity issues.

Reading through this edition, I did not see any blatant grammatical or textural errors.

I did not see bias in this text book. The author's made an effort to present multiple sides of a topic. The way the information is presented is neutral, no bias. People will always be offended by something, so it is impossible not to offend a few people. This is the risk that authors run when presenting information that pertains to peoples' lives directly. Many of the topics are touchy, especially when today's society mandates that everyone be hyper politically correct. What was not offensive in the past is considered offensive today and I am sure the same thing will be able to be said in years to come about today's version of being "correct."

I like how the book is current with today's topics.

Reviewed by Geoff Harkness, Assistant Professor , Rhode Island College on 2/1/18

It's comprehensive, but there’s a kitchen-sink approach. There are 21 full-length chapters, enough for two semesters of full-time coursework. The kitchen-sink approach is especially noticeable in the chapter reviews, which include a glossary of every key term (with definitions), a summary of each section, a multiple-choice quiz for each chapter section, a short-answer test for each chapter section, suggestions for further research, and complete references. It would be more useful to include this material as a standalone product or at least move it to the end of the book. In general, a more streamlined approach would be helpful for students being introduced to sociology. Part of the job of teaching intro courses is to engage students and get them excited about the discipline. The kitchen-sink approach creates additional work for the instructors and students, who will have to labor to find material of interest. I appreciate the comprehensiveness of the book, but it would benefit from some editing.

The book is accurate, although some of the information seems slightly outdated.

The role of technology is not incorporated into the text very much. There is a standalone chapter on media and technology that addresses technology directly, but today’s college students are so drenched in technology it seems necessary to include it in chapters on subjects such as interaction, culture, or even race. That’s not done here. I understand that things are changing so rapidly it’s impossible to keep up. But even the chapter on technology relies on social media sites such as Facebook, which are not used by many of today’s college students.

The prose is straightforward and easy to understand. There is a lot of jargon, but that's part of the role of a textbook -- introducing fundamental terms and concepts.

It seems as if an anthropologist was involved in writing the book. There are numerous citations of anthropologists and examples of research by anthropologists, as well as entire sections of the book (an exhaustive history of various types of societies – hunter-gatherer, horticultural, etc.) that strike me as more anthropological than sociological. This is not really a problem (and many will view it as beneficial), but given the differences between these disciplines, it could be confusing to students.

The book is extremely text heavy, broken up with a few photographs. I realize that’s part of the deal when the textbook is free, but I have a hard time imagining students engaging with page after page of solid text. It’s a barrier to engagement.

The “making connections” boxes are standalone sections that are designed to elaborate on a particular concept. This is helpful, but not always effective. For example, there is a discussion of Jimmy Buffett fans, the Parrotheads. Few college freshman have any idea what Parrotheads are, nor do most of them care. This is fairly common in textbooks – writing that appeals to the author’s demographics, rather than that of 18 year olds.

The authors just seem to throw anything and everything ever written on the subject into the text. At times, this is confusing. For example, the chapter on culture includes discussions of ethnocentrism and social control, subjects that would make more sense elsewhere. If everything is culture then nothing is culture.

The book is straightforward and easy to navigate.

I did not noitice any errors.

Most intro to sociology textbooks have issues that make them less than perfect. In that regard, this one is no different, but at least it’s free. I could imagine it being useful as a supplement to instructors who prefer to use monographs, but would like to have a foundational text available to students. With some careful (and labor-intensive) curating, it would be effective and save students the cost of an expensive textbook. It’s harder to imagine using it as the primary text for an intro class.

Reviewed by Allison Wisecup, Associate Professor, Radford University on 2/1/18

The text includes the requisite breadth for an introductory text. I, and I think my students, really appreciate the short quizzes at the end of each chapter. These help them gauge their understanding of the material and prepare for course exams.... read more

The book accurately, though superficially, addresses the key content for an introductory text.

The content is reasonably current and I wouldn't imagine that it would need to be updated any more frequently than any other introductory text I have used.

The language used in the book is very accessible to students. It is not heavily laden with unnecessary jargon that might confuse or distract from student learning.

I find no problems with the text in terms of consistency and framework.

The text is highly modular. I can assign various small modules as a foundation for class lectures and discussions. The modules in the text provide students with a common starting point without being unnecessarily long or boring.

There are no inherent problems with the flow of the text. As is usually the case with introductory texts, faculty generally present and cover material in a way that is consistent with their own, rather than the author's organization.

I really appreciate the linked content from the table of contents which makes finding the material for reading assignments very easy. Moreover, I can open the text in class and jump directly to sections of text such as images or the quizzes with east and efficiency.

I have not encountered any grammatical errors in the text.

The text is very culturally relevant.

I notice that some chapters are not as deep in their coverage of material as other chapters. Also, in some places (i.e. crime and deviance) there is a lot of depth in some material (i.e. theory), but only superficial or no discussion of the really important, sociological treatment of the content such as racial disparities in arrests and imprisonment.

Generally speaking, I selected this text to help my students avoid other costly options. I think I will continue to use the text, but I do have to do quite a bit of supplementing the text in lecture and with other readings to be sure that my students have access to important information not included in the book. This can be particularly problematic when students do not or cannot attend class and miss important information covered in class. While this is always a problem, I do not have the luxury of telling them to refer to a specific section of the text for information they missed in class.

Reviewed by Brittanie Roberts, Part-time Sociology Instructor, Portland Community College on 8/15/17

While this text does provide an adequate foundation for students with no prior experience or exposure to the sociological discipline, it lacks alternative perspectives, and is White, and male privilege heavy. While viewing different subjects and topics through the lenses of the 3 main sociological perspectives introduced in the first chapter was fantastic, I felt the text lacking as it did not allow for the exploration of feminist theory and critical race theory as their own sociological lenses. I also felt that the text was repetitive at times, and not in an advantageous way. Certain terms or ideas would be repeated, and hit home without expanding on the term or concept.

I think the authors believe the text is unbiased, but the exclusion of critical race theory and feminist theory make me feel that it could be more objective. I am also not convinced of the book's accuracy; this is somewhat difficult as some of the terms I took issue with (transgender, master status, intersectionality theory, etc.) are sociological and can be up to interpretation and/or evolution over time. However, based on my background, definitions from colleagues, and basic term reviews, some of the defined terms are not accurate.

I implemented this text in 2017; it is fairly relevant, has a lot of up to date issues and topics of debate, and I think adding new issues, or updating issues and topics should be fairly straightforward.

Clarity rating: 2

The text is not written in lucid prose, and there are numerous sections with poor context. The prose is accessible, however, a little too accessible. The jargon makes the text seem like more of a Middle School or High school text and not the text of a post-secondary institution. I have mixed feelings on this. One other complaint as to clarity was the inability to check sources for certain pictures/statistics. For example, Black mothers not re-marrying at the same rate of White mothers. A student had a question about this, and when I attempted to find the source and research the statistic further, I was unable to access the source.

Terminology is consistent (albeit controversial, as addressed above) and the use of the different frameworks is consistent, and well done.

I cannot comment fairly on this as I did not use the text in this manner, but I do think that the text has the potential to be readily divisible into smaller reading sections throughout the course. I can say that I was able to reorganize different chapters to fit my course, and that this was easily done, with little to no disruption.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 2

The layout is problematic. Globalization, society, stratification, and class (which did not have its own module) were inconsistent. There are some other topics and areas that could have been laid out and connected more consistently. The topics were not presented in a logical, clear fashion; they were all over the place.

My students and I only had one issue with the interface, and that was with printing multiple chapters at a time; the answers to quiz questions did not print, and the layout of the quizzes combined into one long quiz out of context with the chapter sections. Otherwise, there were no navigation problems, images were clear with no disruptions or distractions.

Grammatical Errors rating: 2

The text contains consistent grammatical errors, as well as spelling errors.

The text is barely culturally relevant. It attempts to address different races,ethnicities and backgrounds, but a lot of the text is stereotypical and overused (Black culture has to address MLK Jr., Malcolm X, Civil Rights; Hispanic Latino culture has to mention Cesar Chavez; lack of new or varied/diverse cultural representation and/or history).

Reviewed by Rebecca Vonderhaar, Instructor, Tidewater Community College on 6/20/17

This textbook does a very good job covering all of the critical subjects in Sociology. The way in which the chapters are broken down into smaller subjects allows the the instructor more time to focus on certain issues. The index is very helpful in choosing exactly which subjects we want to cover in case we do not want to cover the entire chapter due to time constraints.

The content seems to be accurate with the exception of PowerPoint for Chapter 1, which states that Clarke and Clarke are sociologists and it is my understanding they are Psychologists. Also, the text does not incorporate the lift of the ban on same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2071 - 2015. The content is presented in an unbiased way.

The content is up-to-date with a wide range of research from classic research/concepts to contemporary issues such as legalization of marijuana the issues surrounding same sex marriage. Due to the fast changing pace in society today, I am concerned of the longevity of the textbook as it relates to the updating the textbook as changes take place.

The textbook is written very well and the concepts are clear.

The textbook is very consistent.

As stated earlier, the textbook chapters are divided into manageable sections.

The topics are addressed in a logical manner and builds on itself. For example, Culture is taught before Deviance.

So far, I have not had any issues myself while reading online. I plan on integrating the chapters into my BB shell by weeks, so I am hoping I will not have any issues.

I have not found too any issues. One issue I did find is in the Gender chapter. "Individuals who identify with the role that is the different from their biological sex are called transgender."

The text is inclusive and the information in the "Making Connections" boxes are useful in providing real world, contemporary examples and connections. For example. "Social Media as a Terrorist tool."

Overall, this book is organized well, easy to read, broken down in manageable chapters and the examples and images are interesting and on point. Instructors can always add any supplemental readings or topics as they choose.

Reviewed by David Taylor, Instructor, Northshore Technical Community College on 6/20/17

This is a very in-depth look at the fundamentals of Sociology. The 21 chapters give the instructor a variety of materials to choose from but covers quite well the major aspects of each. The index of the book and the glossaries at the end of each chapter help the student in reviewing the major concepts of the chapter. The sample questions are helpful. It is important to me that the student not be given multiple attempts to get the answer right as found in so many online formats of textbooks. I would erase the answers (I assumed this was what the lightly printed "2, A" was for) that are given at the end of the chapter. I think this text could be used either in an online class or face-to-face setting with little adjustment. The essay-style questions at the end are good stimulants to critical thinking.

I found the text to be accurate and UNBIASED. Far too many Sociology textbooks have a leftist/liberal bias that is openly observable. This critical approach to Sociology from the left is no different from a bias coming from the right. I guess you can see that I am positivist in my thinking.

I think the book is very relevant and that the examples used are up to date. As with all textbooks, revision will be needed, but bringing current examples to the classroom is also the responsibility of the teacher, varying from venue to venue and in step with current events.

The text is clear with good flow in the presentation of ideas. New concepts are explained as they arise and reinforced at the end of each chapter. Many times, if there are multiple authors within a work, the style varies from chapter to chapter. I did not get that feel while reading the text.

The text seemed to be consistent from chapter to chapter. Approximately 20 pages were devoted to each and the terminology within and at the end were consistent.

Much of the division of the text was already done by the authors, but the division was logical and there was a flow to the presentation. Terms and examples were consistent with the topic and were fitted at the appropriate place in the text.

This text was most definitely presented in a clear, logical manner.

I found that I could copy and paste text but not pictures from the downloaded format. As I make my own Power Point presentations, it would be helpful if I could also borrow the same pictures as found in the text to include in my PP presentations other than printing the screen. There did seem to be a flaw in photo B on page 491. I don't know if this is something that could be fixed or not.

I did not note any grammatical errors in the book. This might be that I am not the best in English, but also the flow of the text keeps the reader engaged to the point that if errors are there, they are not prominent.

I found the book to be very relevant and applicable to today's (American) society. The examples used were relevant and sensitive to the viewpoints of others.

This was a very thorough book and I hope our school adopts this over what we are presently using for an introductory text.

Reviewed by Jordan Durbin, Sociology Faculty, Portland Community College on 6/20/17

The book lacks a chapter on power which is critical for student's understanding of how society works. Overall, the text covers the main subjects covered in an introductory text. The globalization focus is welcomed. It's not possible to click on a chapter to access that chapter - this makes movement in the text cumbersome. Moving to the next chapter when reading the text is slow.

No information on accuracy at this point.

The text is relevant and updates should be easy to implement. I suggest a need to add the theory and concepts about social power including the work on authority by Weber, the power elite by Mills, and concepts of class and class dominance by Domhoff. Concepts on authority, types of authority, types of power - cultural, economic and political and how society is stratified not only economically but along a clear power dimension are critical concepts in sociology. Even though there is a section on authority under Government and politics, the book does not address power comprehensively

The text is clear and easy to understand. I like the questions at the end of each chapter that enable students to test their understanding of key terms. Additional questions would be helpful. I like the way the chapters are organized in subsections.

There is a clear organization of presentation on the key areas typically covered in a sociology text - with the exception of the power dimension. However, there is much that is not covered.

Easy to extract separate chapters to compile for student use.

Appears logical and easy to follow.

Interface rating: 1

Weak interface - difficult to navigate easily. Cumbersome. It's not possible to click on a chapter to access that chapter - this makes movement in the text cumbersome. Moving to the next chapter when reading the text is slow.

Grammar is fine

On the chapter on race and ethnicity - race in the United States - the description of Native Americans and Hispanics includes a chapter labeled: And why they came This indicates that these people were outsiders, when in fact they were native to the United States. Some bias reflected there. I do like the way the text incorporates current instances of police violence and criminalization of African American youth. The chapter on gender is extremely limited. It would need to be supplemented for students with other resources.

I think the OER text would work if it were supplemented with additional chapters from other books or academic articles.

Reviewed by Ian Bolling, Faculty Lead: Social Sciences (Full-Professor fo Sociology), Tidewater Community College on 6/20/17

The textbook is comprehensive. I have selected numerous chapters from the textbook, but do not require all of the material in the text for a principles of Sociology class. Thus it is more exhaustive than I need, but have the ability to choose... read more

This textbook has been reviewed in its entirety more than once and I have found now errors. It is relatively up to date (more so than hard bound copies are) and accurate.

This is a good solid introduction to Sociology textbook. Statistics are a big part of Sociology so it, like other intro Soc textbooks, will need to be updated regularly.

The textbook is written in a down to earth manner that students can understand and comprehend. Greater use of visual aids would assist students however.

The textbook is consistent with use of terms and does not mistakenly use terms interchangeably which can create confusion for students. It comes across as a professional book.

It is very easy to assign separate chapters in the order one would prefer. Because of its great depth of analysis this textbook could also be used for a Soc 201/202 course that requires more chapters.

It matches up with other Sociology textbooks (which is pretty standard).

There are no issues with its interface, but I would like more interfacing in general with digital resources, clickable maps, videos, etc.

No grammatical mistakes.

As a Sociology textbook it does a good job of looking at concepts from a cross-cultural perspective, thus it is culturally relevant and not offensive or insensitive to various races, ethnicities, sex, gender, and other groups of people.

I will be using this textbook in an OER course for Principles of Sociology.

Reviewed by Jennifer Valentine, Instructor, Sociology, Tidewater Community College on 6/20/17

This text generally covers the same areas and ideas as the physical, paid-for text adopted by my institution. So, all the better that this version is available at no-cost. At the end of each section, there are practice quizzes, reflection questions and a glossary of concepts. The concepts are appropriate, and cover terms and ideas that I think are important to an understanding of the discipline. This is an "introductory" text, so - because most students are exposed to the discipline for the first time - I think that this textbook provides a good foundation to the major concepts, theories and methods of the discipline. Should students choose to move forward and take more sociology courses, I think this book provides a good springboard from which to launch into the next sociology course.

In Chapter 1, the textbook features a photo of Kenneth and Mamie Clarke and credits them as "sociologists." In all the research I've read on the Clarke and their doll study, I've only ever seen them described as "psychologists." A quick Google search reveals that they both held doctorates in psychology. Kenneth Clarke was the first African American president of the American Psychological Association. While this may seem slight, there is a section later on in the book comparing psychology and sociology, so it is worth attributing the correct professional and disciplinary association to researchers, when their work is used to illustrate a concept.

I agree that the content appears up to date and relevant. The concepts will remain unchanged, so the examples could be easily updated, because most are set apart in grey, text boxes. This should be a simple fix to change out the content as needed.

The writing is clear and accessible. Students unfamiliar with sociological or social scientific writing should not be overwhelmed by this textbook. The examples are relevant and clear, and help to illustrate the theories and concepts.

The text is consistent in its terminology and framework. I also like that the theoretical perspectives show up each chapter, demonstrating how to analyze the topic's through the major theoretical lenses.

The text is easily and readily divisible into smaller reading sections, which should keep students engaged with assigned readings. It only takes a few "clicks" to complete a chapter.

The topics are presented in a logical, clear fashion. It starts with the "sociological toolkit" which consists of theories and research methods. From there, it builds like most introductory texts: culture, society and social interaction, socialization, groups, deviance, social inequality (economic, global, U.S., race, gender and age) and social institutions.

I was able to engage with the online text without issue or error. I neither experienced navigation problems nor distortion of the images. The interface feels intuitive, and wasn't confusing or troublesome to navigate.

I didn't see major grammatical errors.

I was impressed that the section on the history of sociology begins before Auguste Comte and 18th century Europe (where most textbooks begin). I've only read one other source that credits a Chinese historian (13th C) and Tunisian sociologist (14th C) with making early connections between social dynamics and human behavior. I think that the inclusion of their contributions is crucial to dismantling the Eurocentric model of knowledge and knowledge production (i.e. that science and knowledge is only credible if produced by Western European men).

I like this book. It is clear and concise and meets the learning goals for my institution. For the discipline of sociology, it covers relevant and appropriate topics. The faculty member can then build in more detail as it suits their instructional need.

Reviewed by Tiffanye Sledge, Associate Professor, Tidewater Community College on 6/20/17

This is a very comprehensive textbook, yet, with pretty succinct chapters. The book is on par with other textbooks that we have used that are very costly and there did not appear to be any missing concepts. There were no errors aside from the... read more

The glossary and index are effective. I noted that there is also a wide range of research from the older classical research that MUST be included in any sociology text, to more recent studies that provide more updated perspectives. This is important because so many question the relevance of open source ware, but this substantiates the contention that OER is sustainable at least in the short term.

There is an error regarding the Clarkes on page 19 of the text. This is a landmark research endeavor that we USE in sociology, but the Clarkes are Psychologists.

Aside from this error, the books seems to be accurate and also has some very robust examples, particularly with regard to application of the classical theoretical perspectives to various social issues.

I noted that there is also a wide range of research from the older classical research that MUST be included in any sociology text, to more recent studies that provide more updated perspectives. This is important because so many question the relevance of open source ware, but this substantiates the contention that OER is sustainable at least in the short term.

This book is EXTREMELY easy to read! It is written in a manner that allows any student to quickly understand concepts, but is not that are presented. I am not sure, but I also think that it may be way to use a screen reader for students that require accessibility.

Yes... the Making Connections sections and the quizzes at the end of each chapter helps with readability by setting the reader's expectation up for reading and absorbing the content, and then reviewing the concepts in context and then applying and assessing understanding.

The modularity of the book is acceptable. There was never too much unbroken text without subheadings, and in some instances, there were too many subheadings, but this only occurred 2-3 times that I recall.

This is actually a very well organized text. There is not much to say here, as it is very similar to most other introductory sociology textbooks

The book can be viewed online as well as downloaded as a PDF. Given that it is completely open, the interface is fine. It would be helpful, as an aside, for students to be able to access the book more readily within the LMS in its online interface instead of a PDF.

There were no grammatical errors.

The books is very culturally relative and this SHOULD be the case with a sociology text. The examples are also very relevant to current social phenomena. There is still room for the instructor to include even more recent information as well.

I am thankful that my students have free access to a QUALITY resource.

Reviewed by Sarah Ovink, Associate Professor of Sociology, Virginia Tech on 6/20/17

This is a comprehensive introductory sociology textbook. Its 21 chapters cover a vast array of topics of interest to sociologists, and include some that are often left out of other texts I have used, such as Global Inequality. The variety of topics should make it possible for instructors to tailor an introductory class toward their areas of expertise. An index is included, and a list of key terms is included at the end of each chapter. The index is missing some terms that students might look for, such as feminism/feminist theory and rational choice theory.

The text’s content is highly accurate overall. I did note some errors and instances of imprecise language, that a conscientious instructor will want to watch out for and correct. For example, Table 1.1, which appears on page 8, is titled “SNAP Use by State,” but the table included here shows something else: SNAP eligibility. As another example, Figure 4.6, representing Marx’s ideas of “base” and “superstructure,” which appears on p. 81, is overly simplified and could use more discussion. On page 236, the theory of intersectionality (presented as “intersection theory”) is attributed to Patricia Hill Collins, when it was actually coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (and later gained prominence through Collins’ works published in the 1990s). At times, statements are made that that either praise or criticize aspects of society, which might be more properly classified as opinions. For example, on page 193, the author(s) state, “...we are fortunate that the poverty experienced here [in the U.S.] is most often relative poverty and not absolute poverty.” This could give students the impression that the author(s)’ conclusion that poverty in the U.S. is less serious than that experienced in other countries is a consensus broadly shared by sociologists, when in fact the levels and severity of poverty in the U.S. is a hotly contested topic. Of course, no textbook is error-free--instructors should always thoroughly preview any text to identify errors and take steps in class discussions to correct any misstatements or mistakes found in textbooks.

The text includes commentary on recent national and world events, such as gender politics in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in 2013 in Bangladesh. This content will help make concepts relevant for students, and examples are arranged in such a way that updates will be feasible as new editions are written. The text stops short of offering content that is too close to the cutting edge--such as incorporating contemporary slang or relying on links to online materials that may quickly expire.

This textbook is easy to read, with a fluid, friendly tone that avoids being overly wordy. The book’s many examples and “Making Connections” features keep the text from becoming too dry or inaccessible. Because the entire textbook is just short of 500 pages, each chapter is rather brief, and some sections could use more description or examples. Key terms are presented in bold, and a list of key terms, with definitions, is provided at the end of each chapter. A suggestion for the future would be to also provide a brief definition in the margin of the page next to the paragraph where each key term first appears, as an aid to students who study by skimming through the chapter a second time.

Sociology 2e is internally consistent. I appreciate that some terms and theories, such as conflict theory, appear multiple times throughout the book. This gives the student a chance to understand how a sociology theory can be used in multiple ways, and is applicable in multiple contexts. For example, feminist theory appears not only in the chapter Gender, Sex and Sexuality, but also Media and Technology, among others.

Given the consistency of the text, this book is highly modular. Chapters could be assigned independently of one another, and chapters could be skipped without disrupting the reader’s experience. Most introductory sociology instructors will not be able to cover all 21 chapters in a 15-week semester, so the ready modularity of this text is a positive feature.

Some sociologists may disagree with the choice to organize many of the main strands of theory in the discipline under three umbrella-like paradigms: Structural Functionalism, Conflict Theory, and Symbolic Interactionism. This organizational structure works for the most part, though some more recent theories, such as postmodern theory and contemporary theories of structure, would struggle to fit. Overall, however, the text is logical and topics are presented clearly and simply.

I did not detect any serious navigation problems in the text. However, some figures are fuzzy or pixelated (cf. Figures 7.9 and 8/1), suggesting that the images used are of low quality and did not transfer well to the texbook. The included photos are mostly of good quality, and I commend the authors for finding so many copyright-free images to include that do a good job of providing examples and context for the text.

I found no grammatical errors in the text.

The textbook does a good job of using inclusive examples and including pictures depicting people embodying a variety of racial/ethnic backgrounds, ages, and walks of life. The book shines a critical lens on many topics--for example, pointing out how felony disenfranchisement disproportionately affects black citizens, and including “Making Connections” sections that highlight LGTBQ individuals and their families.

This is a solid introductory sociology textbook, and provides a great option for instructors who wish to relieve their students of the financial burden of buying an expensive text. There are other introductory sociology texts that have more entertaining content and more online features, but this text will provide a solid foundation at a more than reasonable price.

Reviewed by Asha Lal Tamang, Adjunct Professor, North Hennepin Community College on 4/11/17

The textbook is comprehensive covering all the ‘traditional topics’ typically covered in a general Introduction to Sociology course. I would prefer to see addition of two topics: 1) Role of the United Nations in societal change and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and 2) Terrorism, war and people’s security. Also, the following points could be worthy for adjustments: - The textbook has done justice emphasizing the three main theoretical perspectives (functionalism, conflict theory and symbolic interaction). However, to address the contemporary developments, it may familiarize more contemporary theories e.g. complex adaptive systems theory and feminist theory. - Regarding sociological research, elaboration of practical vs scientific knowledge may be more helpful. In addition, it is important to include indigenous research methodology. - Under social control and deviance, a section on positive deviance could be more fruitful.

Included information is accurate that directs readers to references and further research to find further information. The textbook is unbiased in written material and presents topics, including religion and politics, from a neutral position.

The textbook includes relevant examples related to emerging social agenda e.g. same-sex marriage and new immigrants.

The textbook is easy to read. It avoids unnecessary jargon and explains technical language maintaining the college-level reading.

The text is consistent throughout the chapters. Emphasis on key words including a glossary after each chapter is helpful.

Modularity rating: 2

The textbook can be made more practical by diving the chapters under 12 to 14 parts while accommodating reviewers’ suggestions that would help instructors and students to match with a semester long course e.g. one of the parts could be ‘diversity, inequality and inclusion.’

The textbook is well organized in general. As suggested above, it can be made more practical considering a semester long course.

The textbook’s interface is well maintained. The iBook version provides easy navigation and the pdf version is searchable using a find option. And, a new initiation to make the book mobile friendly could be beneficial!

I did not find significant grammatical errors during my review. It is important to remember that language and styles are always evolving.

The textbook includes diversity of examples regarding cultural relevance. It needs to highlight the existence of hidden cultures and an importance to address the issue of cultural subjectivity.

I am so happy to find this open textbook and was able to adopt as the required text in my last semester class. However, a few students went to ask the Dean of the college that the printed copies were not available locally. Hence, to make the textbook acceptable and accessible, OpenStax may network with the libraries at colleges.

Reviewed by Aida Ramos , Assistant Professor , George Fox University on 2/8/17

The text covers a wider range of topics in sociology, probably more than one can cover in one semester. I found it's comprehensiveness to be satisfactory with more than enough information. The only critique in this area would be regarding the chapter on religion, which I had to supplement with additional information about religiosity, it's measurement, and demography of denominational differences in the U.S. These was no way I could fit every single chapter in the semester, so be prepared to pick and choose.

The book's information is error-free and and accurate. Some definitions are slightly different from other texts, but overall reliable and easy for students to grasp.

I was impressed with how relevant and up to date the book's examples were. In each chapter, relevant social issues were used as guiding examples of the chapter's content (i.e., Black lives matter movement, same-sex marriage laws, etc.). I can see how these might become dated at some point, but definitely not in a short period of time. It also seems that the way the text is written makes it easy to update examples as needed.

The text avoids unnecessary jargon and complexity, while still maintaining college-level reading level. When technical language is used, it is explained within the context of clear examples. The reading is accessible and engaging.

The book's organization (introduction with vivid example, major concepts, then analyzing topics with each of the main sociological frameworks, e.g., conflict, symbolic interaction, and functionalist) is consistent throughout the book and for each chapter. I found this format made it easy to prep for class and assists in a deeper understanding of each of the important frameworks.

Each chapter is divided into several smaller subsections related to the format described above. Each subsection is logical and places key terms in their relative context and can be easily connected with the glossary in the back of each chapter.

The book's organization begins with general sociological topics (i.e., prominent theories, socialization, stratification, etc.). These tend to be the most difficult for students to grasp, however, tangible examples help ease the ambiguity for students. The subsequent chapters use the concepts given in these first chapters as tools to study the rest of the social world divided by respective important areas in the discipline (i.e., a chapter on education, health, race/ethnicity, etc.). The organization of the text ensures that students get the essential building blocks before dividing into studying everyday social institutions.

I used both the digital PDF copy and the iBook version. The iBook version makes for fast and easy navigation. Chapters are just two clicks away from an interactive menu and students can click on the terms featured in chapters and be taken to the glossary instantly. I did find some differences in examples used between the PDF version and iBook version (particularly in chapter 1) for the "Making Connection - Sociology in the Real World." This can be problematic if the instructor expects students to know these. Some of my students ordered the hard copy, but I did not get an opportunity to review it.

There were no problems with the book's grammar.

I was very pleased with the diversity of examples used in this textbook. It was able to accomplish this without being biased or dogmatic.

Reviewed by Beverly Logan, Adjunct Instructor, Mt. Hood Community College on 12/5/16

Each chapter section has an extensive glossary. Occasionally, key terms are not included nor bolded in the text. It would be helpful to have a separate, clickable comprehensive glossary for each chapter, and ideally for the book, which one can click on to search for a term, rather than needing to search chapter section by chapter section. If I've missed this, then I'll say it could be made more readily viewable.

This book has a strong level of accuracy, at least for the chapters I am most familiar with from my use in Soc 204, Chs 1-11.

This book has a lot of currency and discusses recent events. There are examples that could be heavier on the basic concepts they connect, within the discussion of a particular case. But it has a good balance of relevance and longevity.

This is a strength as well as a weakness in the text. The language is technically very clear and accurate, but sometimes to a fault. For example, there are definitions that are so laden with academic-speak that they can be meaningless, at least to my community college students (some were difficult for me to make sense at first exposure, in spite of my familiarity). Others are so brief and colloquial that they are also unhelpful in distinguishing the term. These are the exceptions that could be improved, and in those cases, I supplement in class with better definitions. Most definitions in the book are well constructed. The prose itself is very accessible on the whole.

The text is consistent.

The book's modularity is a strength.

At first I was a bit jarred by this book's organizational structure for the chapters I use in Soc 204, which varies from previous textbooks (notably on placement of the discussion of sociocultural evolution, as well as other concepts in chapter 4). On further thought, I see the rational for it.

I've had no problems at all with the Interface.

For the chapters I use, 1-11, I've noticed no grammatical errors (an improvement over other textbooks).

The book is inclusive of a variety of races, ethnicities and backgrounds. I think there are some that could be replaced with more examples more relevant to community college students (looking at you, Parrotheads discussion). I also think that at times it uses examples that are of limited impact when more obviously relevant issues, ongoing in the last few years, would have been more meaningful and historically enduring (re longevity).

It's a solid and relevant textbook. My main criticisms would only be around fine tuning. I'm happy this resource is available practically cost-free for my students and I appreciate the instructor resources and hope they will be expanded over time.

Reviewed by Jerry Loveless, Sociology Instructor, Portland Community College on 12/5/16

The text overall does a great job covering the relevant content for an introductory course and provides a detailed glossary for key terms at the end of each chapter, while also including a comprehensive index in the back of the book. read more

The content is accurate, yet not always in an unbiased way (e.g. framing Structural-Functionalism as an outdated, and potentially unuseful, paradigm in Chapter 1).

The text offers both classic and modern examples for illustrating the concepts, which can be helpful for students of all ages to connect with the content.

The textbook is written in a very accessible way, overall the authors do a great job explaining the concepts and illustrating them with relevant examples. Some of the figures could use further explanation (e.g. Table 1.1).

The text is very consistent, especially with regards to formatting and chapter layout—very user friendly!

The sections, formatting and sub-headings are organized in a consistent and logical fashion overall.

The topics are presented in a consistent and logical fashion, while the writing style is clear and easy to follow. See my comment regarding the structure of Chapter 1 at the end.

As discussed above, some of the figures could use more explanation and examples but all images within the text are free of any distortions and showed up on my Nook reader well (even though I downloaded the 10MB version of the text).

I found no grammatical errors in my reading of the text.

As with most Sociology textbooks, all topics are presented in an inclusive fashion with no culturally insensitive language or framing.

I feel the text could do a better job discussing the 3 foundational theorists along with the 3 main paradigms in Chapter 1. I would save the discussion, concepts and pictures of Marx, Durkheim and Weber for the section that discusses the 3 main paradigms (where you can connect each foundational figure and their concepts with the appropriate paradigm). I thought the other chapters, and especially the research methods chapter, did a great job with organizing and discussing the content—I just feel the first chapter could use some additional restructuring to engage the students from the very onset of the course.

Reviewed by Amy Ernstes, Lecturer, Sociology Department, University of North Carolina at Greensboro on 12/5/16

I would rate this text as comprehensive. While i might re-arrange the order of the material, in some cases/chapters, overall i find the book as including the main tenants of sociology as needed in an introductory course. (As a minor note, i personally appreciate the inclusion of media and technology as a chapter’s focus, as this is lacking in the book i currently use.) With 21 chapters, and my tendency to cover one chapter a week in class, i would, however, perhaps only use 15-16 of the chapters in class.

Based on my review, i would say that the textbook is accurate. I did not run across any examples of errors or information that i felt was biased.

I would say that the text uses many socially relevant/current examples. The “Making Connections” boxes were particularly helpful in providing these examples to help students think about/apply sociological concepts to such examples. In my experience, in an intro class, brining in example related to pop culture can additionally help to engage many of the students in the classroom (in helping them think through the sociological relevance of things they are already paying attention to) - so i could perhaps see some slight room for improvement here, but, overall, the text provides relevant content that i believe could be easily updated.

I would give the text high markings for clarity. I could see the chapter reviews at the end being extremely helpful for students in terms of gaining a clear understanding of the material and terms.

I would give the text high marks for consistency. I did not notice any examples of inconsistency. As just one example, the text seemed to make a point of utilizing theory throughout, and applying the different theoretical perspectives discussed through the different chapter’s topics.

I appreciated the use of the “Making Connections” boxes in this regard. They helped breaking up long pieces of text (in addition to providing interesting examples). As mentioned previously, given the structure of my Intro class and the weeks in the semester, i would likely not utilize every chapter in this book for my class - however, i believe it would be easy to select 15-16 chapters from the 21 to use, and that using such a selection would not yield any problems in terms of flow.

Overall, i believe the topics are presented in a logical, clear fashion. There are a few pieces which, as a matter of opinion, i would perhaps have changed - for example, i like to include a discussion of society alongside culture, as a means to talk about and differentiate between these two terms. I did not care for this book’s inclusion of society within social interaction. I personally believe that the topic of social interaction is enough for an entire chapter on its own. I also structure my class with a review of socialization first, and then social interaction. This could probably be re-worked with this text, in terms of just assigning readings out of the order provided (although, with society lumped in with social interaction, this might cause some challenge). Yet, these are mostly a matter of personal preference - the text still did a nice job in presenting flow in the order it utilized (i just would approach it slightly differently in this particular case with some of the earlier chapters).

There seemed to be some large blank spots on some of the pages. Not a huge deal, but a slight annoyance. Other than that, the interface seemed fine. I am a bit biased as i am still a fan of hard copy texts over online texts, but, for the format it uses, i think the interface was alright.

I did not notice any grammatical errors.

I think, overall, the text did a reasonable job with this - - including coverage with pictures, examples, etc. - - although perhaps slight room for improvement. For example, i found myself paying attention to how many pictures included just white people as opposed to other groups, and felt there was some room for improvement re: diversity in visual representations. Overall though, i think decent effort made.

One of my favorite things about the textbook was the chapter review information. I think this could be very helpful for students in terms of reviewing the material.

Reviewed by Ariane Cox, Lecturer, University of North Carolina at Greensboro on 12/5/16

This book covers the expected chapters and key terms for an Intro textbook. read more

This book covers the expected chapters and key terms for an Intro textbook.

This book adequately represents the information found in most Intro textbooks. However, the clarity of the content is uneven. I find the description of Ritualism (Strain theory) problematic and thus, hard to differentiate from innovation. The definition of deviance is more elaborate than needed.

The text includes recent statistics and contemporary examples

The clarity of ideas is uneven. For example, the explanation of the difference between belief and value is confusing. The discussion of social control makes it difficult for students to differentiate between social control and social norms even though the definitions are clear.

The book's application of the theoretical perspectives is consistent.

This book is organized well

I think the organization of this book works well.

I have never experienced a problem or had students complain.

I have found no grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 1

The distinction between transgender and transsexual is unnecessary and disrespectful of the trans community's wishes.

Overall this is a good book to use if you are an experienced educator. I would have struggled with creating comprehensive lectures in my first few semesters using this book. I would recommend newer lecturers to use a traditional Intro book in the beginning. However, now that I have a good foundation, this book is adequate. Students really appreciate the free textbook. The test bank is poor. Many questions are confusing and there is not enough varying levels (knowledge vs. comprehension vs. application).

Reviewed by Aimee Krouskop, Instructor of Sociology, Portland Community College on 8/21/16

The comprehensiveness of this text is where I find there is room for most improvement. While I can appreciate length-constraints, there are a considerable number of topics i feel could use more explanation in order to make the concepts accessible to introductory students. I use this textbook as a 'skeleton' resource for my students (for this it serves very well), and supplement with additional general material.

I have found no inaccuracies within this text.

As 'pull-out' illustrations of ideas are included in this text to supplement learning, these appear to be easy to replace as updates are needed.

I find the language and readability generally accessible for my students at community college. There are some concepts that (as I referred to regarding comprehensiveness) I feel could be embellished in order to convey more abstract ideas.

This textbook offers a consistent read and framework for learners.

Thus far, I use specific chapters of this text as a packet and find no struggle in modulating for my lessons.

The organization, structure and flow follow an intuitive and understandable format.

I find no difficulties with this book's interface.

I find no grammatical errors in this text.

Cultural Relevance rating: 2

Considering the diversity of culture, ethnicity, and gender found on campuses today, and that resides in our global society, there is ample room for this textbook to include a broader array of races, ethnicities and backgrounds as it illustrates concepts with current and historical events and phenomenon.

Reviewed by Kaitlin Yanchar, Adjunct Faculty, Social Sciences, Klamath Community College on 8/21/16

Introduction to Sociology covers topics that are sometimes only mentioned in other texts. The authors did an excellent job of including the most important topics of Sociology, including socialization, groups, gender, race, and forms of governance. read more

After carefully reading multiple sections of the textbook, I am confident that the authors made the effort to provide accurate information. I'm impressed that each section includes a references list. This lends a huge amount of credibility to the text and enables instructors and students to go back these sources for more information.

The main text of each section is broad enough that it has strong longevity. Insets of what I like to call "case studies" provide more timely examples that could easily be switched out in the digital versions of the book. As a print version, these examples could run into the problem of becoming out of date, but that would be the case with any hard copy of a textbook.

The style of writing used in this text is mostly clear, and special vocabulary is properly defined. However, I don't find the prose as accessible to community college students as it could be. I will say, though, that quality lectures could easily make up the difference.

In terms of consistency, those who designed this textbook did an excellent job. Each chapter has a strong introduction that creates a framework for discussing specific topics that appear after. Every section has high quality pictures that effectively illustrate ideas, sections are clearly labeled, there is a summary, self-quiz questions, an invitation to do further research, and references. There is a clear pattern that both instructors and students can follow in a natural way.

My favorite thing about this textbook is its modularity. I felt overwhelmed at first when I saw that there were 21 chapters, but it would be extremely easy to break them up to fit a variety of term time frames and even how many days the class meets each week. Because each chapter has its own introductory section, it is easy to jump around without worrying that one chapter must come before another. Really impressed by this because it is not easy to do.

Creating a flow to a Sociology text can be difficult because there are some essential theoretical concepts that must be understood before you can start looking at the multitude of specific topics/concerns addressed by the discipline. At the same time, some of these ideas are abstract enough that the best way to get them across is to give examples. This text follows the most common approach, which involves laying out the theory first and then using those ideas to explore other topics. I personally prefer this approach, as opposed to textbooks that start with a problem and then bring in theory to provide the solution. Also on the topic of organization and structure, having a table of contents in the online version of the text is really helpful. For someone reading a print version, I don't think the text would seem as organized.

I did not encounter any interface issues. Every time I used the table of contents, I was taken to the correct location in the text. I browsed at least half of the text, and I did not encounter images or charts that were distorted. Also, all of the text appeared where it is supposed to. There was no floating text, bulleted lists that didn't line up, awkwardly large or small text, or any other HTML-related errors.

I did not encounter any grammatical errors, although the text does tend to have fairly long sentences. Breaking up sentences may improve clarity and make the book more accessible to community college students.

Some Sociology texts struggle with cultural sensitivity, but I did not encounter that problem with this text. My background is in Anthropology, and I have to say I was impressed by the way people of other cultures and ethnicities were discussed. The authors also took the time to include examples from a variety of time periods, regions, and cultures. The textbook acknowledges that American culture is influenced by people from many different places, and presents this information in an unbiased way.

I consider this textbook high quality and am seriously considering using it for my introductory Sociology class. The online interface is well-executed and adds value to the text. Being able to pick and choose modules very easily also makes this text very appealing, especially for newer instructors who aren't sure where to start. Finally, having access to tools to help build a course syllabus and powerpoint slides makes adoption of this textbook almost a no-brainer.

Reviewed by Jessica Breidinger, Social Science Faculty, Treasure Valley Community College, Ontario, OR on 8/21/16

This textbook seems to provide an excellent introduction to the basic theories and ideas in Sociology however, for those of us who teach a series of General Sociology courses over three terms, essentially dividing the text into thirds, additional... read more

The content appears to be very unbiased and straightforward. I did not spot any accuracy problems or errors in skimming through multiple chapters.

The data used in the tables are based on very relevant basic social concepts that are unlikely to change any time soon. The making connections sections relate important concepts regarding current social policy.

The text is very accessible to the undergraduate student. The concepts and key terms are clearly identified and the section summaries reinforce the learning objectives of each chapter.

I appreciate the format of the text, with the learning objectives for each chapter followed by the introduction and chapter sections clearly defined and numbered. The consistency of the framework would make it easy to locate information during lecture and classroom activities for the instructor and provides a logical format for students as they explore the content within the chapters.

I believe the textbook provides excellent modularity. For instance, for a struggling learner it would be easy to chunk the information into manageable components. I find many of my students are not interested in reading long blocks of text and would much rather see information arranged in smaller bytes.

The presentation of the materials in the text follows a very clear and logical order. Although it would be easy to re-arrange chapter presentation, I appreciate that the research chapter follows the introductory chapter. While I am concerned with the fact that a full year course would be difficult to build with this content alone, it is refreshing to see a text that limits the chapter content to approximately three to five major concepts.

I did not find any issues with the book's interface, as a former disability services coordinator I was pleased with the Design For All elements included in the text and it's barrier free design.

I did not find any problems or concerns with grammar in the chapters I read.

I did not find any offensive content and I felt that the examples provided in the Making Connections sections were culturally diverse and relevant to today's social issues, but not necessarily presented as "hot-button topics". In fact, I found some of the detail regarding social problems to be less edgy and controversial than other sociology textbooks.

Overall, I like the text. I would consider adopting it for my courses but I would need to spend a fair amount of time redesigning my course series to make sure I could utilize the text for the full three terms. I am pleased to know there is a way to lower the textbook expenses for my students without compromising quality.

Reviewed by Susan Stalewski, Clinical Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwauee on 8/21/16

This text is used for foundation content in a health sciences diversity course. The coverage of culture, health, medicine, aging, disability, specific ethnic groups is appropriate and presented in a thoughtful and engaging manner that encourages... read more

Information is presented in a manner that encourages the learner to critically evaluate current issues from a sociological lense and to analyze multiple perspectives.

The content and additional resources present timely issues, conflicts and opportunities to critically evaluate major issues in society. The topics chosen to represent current issues are fairly long-standing and persistent concerns. This edition is designed to be relevant and useful for some time.

Topics are clearly presented at an appropriate level for the entry level student.

Each chapter/module is presented in a consistent manner. Learners are able to develop a pattern in reviewing the important concepts in each section, making the most of self-testing and additional resources.

Since this text is to be used as a foundation for a cultural diversity course, the ability to choose and use selected modules is important. Each module can be used independently, however, reference to theory and consistent organization help the student to maintain focus through the entire book

Flow and organization support learning, allow the student to reinforce theory and themes, foster critical thinking and analysis.

Everything works as intended. The ability to easily move through chapters and topics is a useful feature of the digital edition.

I did not identify grammatical errors

Sensitive topics are presented in a manner that encourages the student to consider opposing perspectives and develop skill in holding and analyzing opposing positions. The student is encouraged to understand the superficial presentation of many sociological problems and to dig deeper for greater understanding

I would not have adopted a basic sociology textbook for this particular course if an open text was not available. This text will be a useful and thoughtful resource for my health sciences course

Reviewed by Andrew Butz, Instructor, Portland Community College, Sylvania on 1/7/16

The book's comprehensiveness is average, or just above average. However, Chapter 21 needs: 'political process' or 'political opportunity theory' (and less detail on framing theory) of S.M.'s; and it should also have *theories* of social change, as well as 'war/geopolitics/terrorism' as quasi-institutional sources of social change. Chapter 20 should address biodiversity, forests, & oceans, AND the scientific consensus on climate change! Ch. 16 should include 'teacher expectancy effect' & self-fulfilling prophecy within S-I theory. Ch. 15 needs to define/explain fundamentalism. In Ch. 12, the Functionalism theory should include Parsons' concepts of sex-based division of labor (into 'instrumental' & 'expressive' roles). Ch. 9 - 10: Theory section needs reference to World-systems theory; and the Global Wealth & Poverty section needs data tables. Ch. 9 needs to use more than just 3 class levels (beyond upper/middle/ lower) -- and more detailed income & wealth data. Ch. 8 needs Ogburn's tech processes & cultural lag, as well as Habermas' public sphere, & Castells' networks. Chapter 7 needs Durkheim's 'anomie' concept.

The accuracy is average, although it is slightly below average in some parts. For example, the Ch. 1 definitions of: 'sociology' & 'culture' are a bit broad or over-general -- and 'sociological imagination' is too centered on 'the past & history'. In Ch. 3, 'culture's' definition needs 'artifacts' along with 'beliefs/behaviors'; and the statement "folkways are norms without any moral underpinnings" is not fully accurate. Folkways are norms that *may* lack moral underpinning -- or where it is less significantly tied to morality than other norms. In Ch. 4, "3000 BCE" is far too recent a date for the Agricultural Revolution (it's much older) -- as the Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution began emerging in various locations between 8,000 and 5,000 BCE (and Ch. 18 gets this date correct). Likewise, dates shown for pastoral & horticultural societies are too recent. Also, civilized/agric. society needs more detail, including its establishment of private property, governments & other institutions. 'Feudal societies' were *not* just in 9th-C. Europe, & they should be seen as an extension of agricultural society. A 'status' should be clarified as being a social position in society, with a role and *sometimes* a rank (but not always, e.g. 'parent', 'sibling'). Ch. 6 Formal Organizations: bureaucracy features should include 'written records'. AND it needs bureaucracy 'dysfunctions', e.g. groupthink, ritualism, alienation. In Ch. 7, a 'class system' and a 'meritocracy' should not be depicted as separate systems; rather, a meritocracy is one major feature of a class system. While Ch. 11 provides excellent definitions of Racial, Ethnic, and Minority Groups, the functionalist theory is presented too simplistically (should note functions of 'group closure & of segregation). Cinco de Mayo/May 5th is NOT Mexican independence day. [p.240]; the Indian Removal Act of 1830, NOT 1930 [p.242]; and "by 1769 [NOT 1869], the slave trade was internal in the [future] U.S." [p.243]. 'Hispanics' should also be described as 'Latino'. and the Irish Potato Famine of 1845, NOT 1945 [p.249]. In Ch. 13, exchange theory should be NOT be included under the Conflict theory heading. The Ch. 14 opening vignette repeats the misconception that "1/2 of marriages" fail. Ch. 16 'Educ Around the World' section relies too heavily on one non-academic source (NPR) -- so it obscures the top factor for low U.S. scores: higher poverty rates in combination with a less selective/more universal pool of student test-takers. The Policy section, especially on the failed NCLB, needs references (e.g. Diane Ravitch). In Ch. 17, the crucial topics of: 'interest groups', lobbying, & 'pluralism' (functionalism) are nearly absent. And the power-elite (conflict) theory of power should discuss MILLS at least as much as Domhoff. In Ch. 18, 'Capitalism in Practice' should explain 'mixed economies' &/or 'welfare-state capitalism'; and as always, 'socialism in practice' should be distinguished from 'communism' as theory. Failing to do this leads to mischaracterizing thinkers like Proudhon, who was less a socialist like Marx, & more an 'anarchist-communist'. In Ch. 20, Demogr/Pop section should note the year, 2011, when pop. passed 7 billion, and 'human ecology' should be called 'urban ecology'. In Ch. 21, it should be called the 'anti-corporate' or 'global justice' movement, NOT the 'anti-globalization movement' -- which was the label foisted on it by some mainstream media reports. And it is rarely seen as a movement to 'resist change' (such as the Tea Party) -- but rather as a movement versus the status quo of corporate agendas & influence. In Figure 21.4, Agents of social control do not necessarily "bring collective behavior to an end."-> Social control agents can just as well re-direct, as disrupt. Finally, the individual self-improvement movements are labeled ALTERATIVE (no N), not alternative, movements.

It's relatively up-to-date and relevant. Ch. 9 needs more current (& detailed) income & wealth data. In Ch. 7, 'Social Disorganization Theory', & 'Cultural Deviance Theory' are no longer widely studied and have largely been supplanted by Control Theories & Differential Association Theory. Chpt. 7 also needs more data references & updates especially for corporate crime. Ch. 3 is very strong on ethnomethodology & on 'hipsters' -- and on cultural change. The Ch. 2 Jimmy Buffett example seems very dated. And the Ch. 1 data, such as on home foreclosures, has become a bit outdated.

It's quite clear. However, the Ch. 1 table on SNAP/food stamps is a bit unclear. And the 'figuration' concept is an unconventional & perhaps challenging idea with which to begin the Introduction. In Ch. 2, 'objectivity' needs to be qualified (its limits & the role of values) early in the chapter. The Ch. 4 'society' forms should be rooted in the concept of 'social structure', & 'institutions' need to be more explicitly defined. In Ch. 5, Cooley (L-G Self) & Mead's ideas (esp. of the 'game stage' following 'play stage' & the typical age of children in these stages) need more explanation. In Ch. 8, the world-systems terms (core, periphery...) need explanation.

Mostly excellent. However, some chapters (e.g. Ch. 2 & 7) need more research literature references. And some key concepts are lacking a bold typeface (such as 'institutional discrimination' in Ch. 11).

Generally very good. However, its narrative flow is a bit clunky or awkward in places, including parts of the Ch. 1/Intro -- and in Ch. 2 the Disney vignette & Scientific Method descriptions are too lengthy/wordy. In Ch. 9, the brief global strat information should much more clearly & explicitly direct readers to the next chapter/Ch.10. In Ch. 12, the 3 paradigms should be presented just once, as applied to both gender AND sex. Finally, concluding Chapter 21 with 'modernization' is appropriate -- BUT it should be emphasized as both a master trend of change as well as a contested concept (especially for traditionalist & fundamentalist movements).

It's relatively free of interface issues. However, some of the charts/graphics image resolution is below-average quality.

It's quite good. However, in Ch. 11, p.232: 'caucasus' is misspelled as 'caucus'.

It's generally good, e.g. the Ch. 14 focus on corporal punishment. However, the Ch. 1 Intro feels a bit generic & could have more specificity to make it more vivid & engaging. And about the Individ-Society Connections inset (on LGBT): The way it is framed might overly gear it to a narrow/minority reader? In Ch. 7, more detailed crime demographics are needed! The Ch. 11 opening vignette should be much more compelling, vis-a-vis the recently explicit & extreme examples of law enforcement discrim/prej.

This is very good quality for a multi-author, open source textbook.

Reviewed by Karen Lewis, Assistant Professor, Dickinson State University on 1/7/16

The Introduction to Sociology text is comprehensive covering all the topics typically covered in a general Introduction to Sociology course. The text is brief and only covers the three main theoretical perspectives so Feminist theory, Rational... read more

The information is accurate and well researched. References and Further research provides students with additional sources to find information. The text is unbiased in written material and presents topics from a neutral position.

The content is up to date and edits to include updated statistics would be easy to incorporate in the future. The fundamental concepts are presented.

The book is straightforward and easy to read. Having a glossary at the end of each chapter will help students understand the key terms. The references and suggestions for further research will also assist students in gathering more information on each chapter.

The text formation is consistent throughout the chapters. Key words are in bold to find faster and a glossary after each chapter. Each term is defined in context within the text and then listed at the end of the chapter.

I think the text has good modularity that can cater to the topics instructors want to focus on. Instructors would not have difficulty changing the chapter to focus on sub-unit areas such as theory without disorganization or disruptions for the students.

The text is comparable to more other Introduction to Sociology texts out on the market today. It is written in a clear, neutral, and logical order. The topics are listed in a logical progression for student learning with basic chapter and introduction fist and special focus on topics in the later chapters.

I did not see any interface issues or distractions/ distortions of images. The graphics are well integrated into the content and context of the course.

I did not recognize any grammatical errors during my review.

I did not find the text to be culturally insensitive or offensive. It covers racial, ethnic, and religious groups. The book is inclusive of various groups in examples.

I have enjoined reading and review the text. We are planning on adopting the text in the fall of 2016.

Reviewed by Misti Wuori, Adjunct Professor and Director of Extended Learning, Mayville State University on 1/7/16

This textbook is very comprehensive, especially for use in a semester-based (15 week) course. read more

This textbook is very comprehensive, especially for use in a semester-based (15 week) course.

I found the text to be accurate.

The examples provided are mostly relevant. I do not find the example of the Parrotheads to be relevant to today's students, and some of the technology pictures are already outdated. I think the examples involving social media and online, virtual communities and relationships could be updated as that is rapidly changing and some of these examples make the text feel dated in places. This is understandably challenging for any textbook.

I find the writing style, examples, and discussion points are very clearly written and mostly jargon free for an introductory audience. I feel this textbook limits the jargon and explains sociological concepts significantly more clearly than the textbook I have adopted.

I appreciate the application of the sociological perspectives in most chapters and find this consistency good. Even more "real-life" examples illustrating the sociological perspectives with current social issues would be welcome.

The modularity is good, and may help with my concerns with covering all the content in a semester long course. I would use 12 chapters entirely, with smaller sections of 4-5 other chapters. The learning objectives for each chapter are very good.

I would prefer to see more examples of the application of research methods, globalization, global and social change, and demography throughout the textbook because it is difficult to cover all the chapters fully in a semester long course.

The textbook is very easy to read, easy to navigate, and displays nicely on my laptop. I would like to see more hyperlinked content, especially in the references (especially web references) and further research sections as well as on charts and other graphics.

I did not see any obvious grammatical issues.

I would like to see more demographics and examples incorporating American Indians. If American Indians are left out of a particular social equality ranking due to low numbers, this should be clearly stated. I feel the contemporary needs of both rural and urban American Indian populations are underrepresented in this text.

I found the writing style, very easy to understand explanations, and real-life examples make for a very interesting and engaging textbook, especially for first year college students and dual credit students. The "Making Connections" examples given really make the connection between sociology and one's individual actions very clearly, and do a very nice job of explaining what sociology is for an introductory audience. The key terms, section summary, and section quiz at the end of each chapter are very well-written for a first year (100 level) course. I find the section (end of chapter) quiz questions and short answer questions in this resource much more useful than those in my current textbook for preparing students for exams. Good references and further research sections are provided. These end of chapter resources, in addition to the "Making Connections" examples, reflect the key terms and concepts I want my students to learn from each chapter very well. The PDF format of the textbook is much easier to read and use online than I anticipated. I intend to seriously explore adopting this textbook for my online and dual credit Introduction to Sociology courses in 2016-2017. I already supplement my current textbook with a number of hyperlinked articles, websites, discussion forums, and other materials in the LMS. For this reason, I feel the benefits of the open resource materials for students outweigh the need to have the most recent edition of a textbook, especially for an intro-level sociology course.

Reviewed by Angela Addae, Graduate Associate, University of Arizona on 6/10/15

The text is fairly comprehensive for an introductory level course, but it often lacks detail--even for an Intro text. For example, the text excludes discussion on feminist perspectives and it fails to attribute theoretical paradigms to the... read more

Overall, the content is accurate and provides numerous illustrations and citations to support claims.

The text addresses issues that are relevant to a modern context but can also transcend the present day to continually engage students for years to come.

The text is clear, concise, and avoids disciplinary jargon.

Writing and content are consistent throughout the text and has the appearance of a single author.

The text is divided in a manner that makes sense. Instructors can adopt chapters as a whole or choose to focus on relevant sections with ease.

The text flows in a manner that is logical, clear, and easy to follow.

Interface rating: 2

The interface leaves much to be desired. For a digital text, the text does not take advantage of colors, hyperlinks, or interactive features that are not available for print texts.

The text is grammatically correct.

Though book is not culturally offensive, it could be more culturally inclusive, particularly in the examples and illustrations.

Overall, this is book is a solid, economical option for an introductory text. Its strengths outweigh its weaknesses. In addition, the quizzes at the end of each section are particularly helpful for reviewing the material.

Reviewed by Kristine Smith, Professor, University of Northwestern - St. Paul on 7/15/14

This textbook provided a comprehensive study of introductory sociology. The engaging graphs, figures and applications extended the mental grasp of the subject matter. The reviews and summaries at the end of the each chapter provided a helpful... read more

The text provided accuracy in learning and research through precise citations, further areas for research and well documented chapter references.

The text definitely provided pertinent and relevant social issues to its research and theory. The longevity of the applications and extensions are exceptional and very engaging.

Yes, this text is clearly and concise written which promotes a high level of understanding while avoiding ambiguity.

Yes, there was an adherence to a consistent format and writing style. The overall consistency in format, tone and writing enhances understanding and trust for the reader.

Yes, the text does an excellent job of skillfully presenting each chapter as a concise learning opportunity, yet within the thematic flow of the entire text.

Overall the text flows with ease, logical and validity.

The text's interface provides a smooth flow and connection for the reader within the different modes of content delivery.

There were no grammatical errors detected within this textbook.

Yes, the textbook is inclusive and comprehensive in its respectful tone and content.

I enjoyed and respected the content and format of this textbook.

Reviewed by Rita Isola, Instructor- Sociology- Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Capilano University on 10/9/13

Comprehensiveness rating: 2 see less

I have rated this textbook's overall comprehensiveness a 2/5 (poor). It does not include Feminist Theory as theoretical perspective. At the end of each chapter the authors discuss the topic from the point of view of the major theoretical perspectives in sociology. They include Structural Functionalism (Functionalism), Symbolic Interactionist Theory and Conflict Theory but Feminist Theory has been left out for the most part. There is the occasional mention of the feminist perspective but it is subsumed under Conflict Theory. I would urge the authors to unlink Feminist Theory from Conflict Theory and treat it independently.

I have rated this textbook 3/5 (good). It is accurate, and error-free. My previous comment points out the short thrift that this text gives to Feminist theories in Sociology. This reflects a 'male-streaming' bias which is reflected by my lower score fr this section on Content Accuracy.

I have rated this text 4/5 (very good) in terms of relevance and longevity. The content is up to date and the examples and diagrams will for the most part withstand the test of time. My only query on relevancy is in Chapter 2 (Sociological Research) and the discussion about Jimmy Buffet and his fans known as Parrot Heads. This may be completely irrelevant to most of our first and second year students who may have never heard of Jimmy Buffet and certainly won't have heard of Parrot Heads!

I have rated this text 5/5 (excellent) for its attention to lucid, accessible prose. All of the chapters I have read and reviewed are well written and the authors have a done an excellent job explaining and describing sociological ideas. This is especially evident in Chapter 2- Sociological Research - which in some textbooks is a dry, tedious chapter. In this textbook it is well paced, interesting and makes you want to go out and do research.

I have rated this textbook 5/5 (excellent) for consistency in terms of terminology and framework. The authors have done an excellent job in maintaining the overall consistency between chapters.

I have rated the textbook 5/5 (excellent) for its integrity both as a whole work and one that can be easily divided into stand alone chapters. It avoids being self referential by adhering to an internal framework in which each chapter begins with a general description of the topic, introduction to main concepts and ideas, connections to social issues and public policy and finally ending with a link back to the theoretical perspectives.

I have rated this textbook 5/5 (excellent) for its presentation of ideas in a logical, clear fashion.

I have rated this textbook 5/5 (excellent) in terms of the text's interface. My review of the images, charts and graphs confirm that there is an ease of flow and navigation that the reader will appreciate.

I have rated this textbook 5/5 (excellent) as I did not come upon any grammatical errors in the chapters I reviewed.

I agree that this text is culturally relevant and is not culturally insensitive or offensive. The examples used in the text to illustrate sociological ideas are taken from a wide range of cultural experiences - from the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic to illustrate cultural relativism to same sex marriages in the discussion of the changing definition of the family.

This textbook has many strengths: it is well organized, has a fresh lay-out that is easy to read and offers an excellent summary, section quizzes, references and resources at the end of each chapter. I would be excited to adopt it in my sociology 100 class (Current Issues) except that this textbook is written with an American sociology student in mind. It would not be appropriate for adoption in a Canadian classroom without a lot of changes. The second critique which is a more substantive one that would affect my decision to use this text or not, is the way in which Feminist Theory is incorporated into the text. Below is an outline of the major changes needed for Chapters 1-5,8,10,15,18 and 21 in order to de-Americanize it. I will follow with my comments on the Feminist Theory. . Chapter 1. Page 11,p 2 :The US housing market…replace with a Canadian example p.3-5 : SNAP – Food Stamps..replace Table 1.1 Food Stamps Used by State…replace Page 16 Making Connections: How Do Working Moms Impact Society…change to reflect Canadian stats. Page 22 Why Study Sociology p.1 Elizabeth Eckford…change this example to one that resonates with Canadian events Page 26 Section Quiz: Question #14 (Kenneth and M Clark) change this question.. Chapter 2 Page 51 Section Quiz: Question # 13 b) In 2003 States like Arizona…change Chapter 3 Page 62 Formal Norms p3. "For example money is highly valued in the United States…" change Informal Norms "In the U.S"..change Page 74 Section Quiz: Question #2 "The American Flag"…change question Chapter 4 Culturally neutral no changes needed Chapter 5 Page 107 p 4 "U.S Fathers…" change to discuss Canadian fathers Page 107 Heading: School – "Most American Children spend about 7 hours a day.." Page 108 "For example in the U.S"… Page 109 "Americans", "American Males"…changes needed throughout this section on Agents of socialization Page 110 p2 "In the U.S socialization"… Page 112 p2. "71 Million Americans who lived in prisons… Page 113 references to the United States military… Page 116 Section Quiz: Question #16 Replace Chapter 8 Page 167 Categorizing Technology: US patent office…replace this discussion to reflect Canadian issues Page 168 p1. Radio: "older Americans"..replace (North Americans could work) P2 American TV …replace this discussion Page 172 Include a paragraph or two on the concentration and ownership of media in Canada Page 181 Section Quiz: Question #6 Replace this question Page 183 Short Answer: Replace this question regarding the US government Chapter 10 Page 212 Global Stratification and Classification: replace "American with North American" Chapter 15 Page 339 Learning Objectives 15.3 Religion in the US….change 340 Making Connections: "On the otherhand, the McDonaldization of the United States…" change Pages 348-350 Change to reflect Religion in Canada Appropriate changes need to be made in the section quiz, short answers, references and resources at the end of this chapter. Chapter 18 Page 402 Learning Objectives 18.3 Work in the United States…change Page 402 Capitalism in Practice p2 "In the U.S" change p3 " In the U.S" change Page 411-413 Work in the US needs to be replaced with Work in Canada Appropriate changes need to be made in the section quiz, short answers, references and resources and further research at the end of this chapter. Chapter 21 Page 482-483 Levels of Social Movements: local "Chicago.." change, National "gay rights" change and replace with Canadian examples Page 490 Go to Population "In the US" change Page 493 Section Quiz: Question #1 Change Final Comments Finally, I would like to suggest that before "Canadianizing" or "de-Americanizing" the text a more important project remains- and that is to include the feminist perspective in a serious and thoughtful way. Throughout the text it is either ignored or subsumed under conflict theory. For example in Chapter 18 Work and the Economy, there is no mention of feminist perspectives on this topic and a first year sociology student would leave this chapter with the mistaken idea that no feminist perspective on work and the economy exists. This is an important omission especially in light of the fact that the literature and research on both local and global economies, work and the division of labour is thickly populated with the voices and research of women from many different feminist perspectives. In Chapter 15 on Religion the problem is not omission but oversimplification: On page 341, the authors note that: "The Feminist perspective is a conflict theory view that focuses specifically on gender inequality". This view seriously oversimplifies the many different strands of feminist theory that exist in sociology; Cultural Feminism for example, a Feminist perspective, wholeheartedly rejects many of the assumptions held by the conflict view and focuses on gender differences not gender inequality. Thank you for the opportunity to review this text and I hope that my comments are helpful. This review originated in the BC Open Textbook Collection and is licensed under CC BY-ND.

Reviewed by Charles Quist-Adade, Chair and Faculty, Sociology Dept, Kwantlen Polytechnic University on 10/9/13

Yes. The text does a really good job by capturing a wide range of sociological theories, concepts, and issues in both the content and glossary. read more

Yes. The text does a really good job by capturing a wide range of sociological theories, concepts, and issues in both the content and glossary.

I agree. The text is well-written and scrupulously edited. It adopts an appropriate scholarly and objective tone.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Yes. I am impressed by the text's accessible, flowing and logical language. It should be easy read for first year students, non-sociology students, and laypersons.

Yes, it is. I did not find any inconsistencies.

I agree absolutely.

Yes, The textbook uses appropriate language that is respectful of people of different racial, ethnic and other backgrounds.

The is well researched and written book. The language is accessible and the research and data are up to date. However, it has a huge downside, it is written for American students/audience. Its paucity in Canadian content is a worry. Canadian students will be hugely disadvantaged using this text, as it fails to provide Canadian examples/illustrations. I recommend a revamping of the text to include Canadian content and context, in order to make it relevant to the Canadian reader. This review originated in the BC Open Textbook Collection and is licensed under CC BY-ND.

Reviewed by Neil Guppy, Professor, University of British Columbia on 10/9/13

Yes, see attached comments read more

Yes, see attached comments

Some errors exist. See attached document

Relevance/Longevity rating: 1

Test is far too US-centric, see attached document

Well written and basically jargon free.

Yes, good modular structure

The flow is coherent and sufficiently flexible to allow people to adopt alternative orders.

Display features are fine, save for the US-centric focus

Well written

The text makes no reference to Canada. This is its core weakness

Report on "Introduction to Sociology" N Guppy (UBC) August, 2013 In reviewing the OpenStax College textbook, Introduction to Sociology, I preface my comments, briefly, with two pieces of background. First, I say a bit about my own teaching experience as it bears on this review. Second, I describe a little about how sociology in BC/Canada differs from the United States. The remainder of the review addresses the substance of the book. I end by suggesting what some challenges would be in adapting this book for a BC audience. In all of this I have paid attention to, and responded to, the various issues raised in the BC Open Textbook review criteria. Experience Two issues are germane here. First I have taught versions of Introduction to Sociology at UBC since 1979 so I am quite familiar with the material typically covered in the course for which this book was designed. In my introductory course teaching I have used a range of different textbooks. I have also reviewed introductory level textbooks for various publishers, both in Canada and the United States so I am well acquainted with the range of material available and used in these courses. Second, I have recently spent ten months adapting one of the best-selling US Introductory Sociology textbooks for use in Canada. From this I know, firsthand, how much the standard US sociology book needs to be changed to work as an effective learning aid in Canada (compare George Ritzer's Introduction to Sociology, Sage Publications with George Ritzer and Neil Guppy's Introduction to Sociology, Canadian Version, Sage Publications). At its core the OpenStax text is a US centric-book. I also am aware that this latter experience, adapting a US text, might imply that I am in a conflict of interest in reviewing this book. I obviously do not hold that view because, in my judgement, insights from this experience outweigh any possible personal benefit I might accrue. Nevertheless, it is important that readers of my review are apprised of what some might interpret as a conflict of interest. Sociology in Context Mathematics and physics are disciplines whose basic content does not differ across societies. The fundamental core of these disciplines are largely invariant even if for various reasons scholars in different countries may begin in different places or stress different topics. Such would not be the case in literature, as a third disciplinary example, where every country would be expected to have, to a large degree, its own literary themes and traditions. Sociology is much like the latter. Societies differ and sociology, at its centre, is focused upon those differences. India's caste system is much different from the class structure of Europe. Labour migration in China is fundamentally different from such migration in Mexico. Social movements in the Arab world follow different rhythms than do related movements in the industrial west. As these examples illustrate there are parallels across societies – caste versus class is about differentiation, for example – but sociology in India would approach things quite differently than would sociology in Europe. This is true too of Canada versus the United States. Here are a few examples. Both societies are riven with differences that fracture social cohesion – in Canada the French-English divide is often paralleled with the differences between Blacks and Whites, and increasingly Hispanics, in the US. To understand these divisions requires quite separate analytic tools even though at one level it is a difference of ethnicity versus race. A second example comes in examining social mobility. The United States experiences greater levels of individual or circulation mobility than is true of Canada, although in both countries the cultural myths we live by exaggerate just how much such mobility actually occurs (inheritance of poverty or privilege is rampant, as Blacks and Aboriginal peoples will testify). [In both countries a large amount of the mobility that does occur is structural not individual, which suggests of course some sociological similarities across societies as would be expected.] Not to belabour the point too much, but from a different angle the Canada-US difference is seen in how the discipline of sociology in North America articulates with European influences. These are much greater in Canada than in the US. Canadian scholars have found much more merit in using political economy perspectives shaped in part by Europeans, than have US sociologists. To a large extent that is a function of a much, much greater manufacturing presence, at least historically, in the US (and the idea of US exceptionalism) and a much less developed resource economy which is, of course, the lifeblood of many, many Canadian communities (whether in harvesting or transporting raw materials). OpenStax College Introduction to Sociology In my judgement this is an adequate, one-semester, introductory book for sociology. It highlights the core concepts, foundational scholars, and emerging theories that any competent sociologist in BC would employ to introduce students to the discipline. Most people who adopted such a book would add some of their own emphases and tastes, but the fundamental conceptual core is sound (with a few exceptions as noted below). Where the book is much weaker is with evidence, research, and illustration. Anyone using this book for BC students would have to do an enormous amount of work, relative to the amount involved if other books were used, in supplementing the evidence and examples. In my judgement many sociologists in the province would deem this book totally unsatisfactory for introducing sociology to BC students. I will illustrate this latter issue in much of what follows. I should also note that in my judgement the book would not be used in most research intensive universities in the United States. The reasons for this are complicated, and have at least something to do with the snobbishness of such institutions. However the book just does not integrate solid research into its exposition of sociology. This is seen, for example, in the repeated use of Wikipedia commons as a source for evidence. But more profoundly it occurs because the book is more descriptive than explanatory. For example, the book describes social mobility (and structural mobility) but if fails to explain what social forces act to enable or constrain rates of mobility – either circulation mobility or structural mobility. This latter lacunae is the core reason that schools stressing research as opposed to social description would avoid this book. The book is organized as a set of modules whose order can be changed. This is a very good feature since sociologists have idiosyncratic habits in teaching the discipline (this is unlike math or physics where a linear approach needs to occur as topics build on one another). There is no correct place to begin to dissect society – the analysis doesn't necessarily start at ‘one' or with ‘A'. Alternative starting points are feasible and there is no consensus in the discipline as to exactly where one ought to begin (and in my judgement the best starting place differs by time and place). Sociology is less about covering topics and building one upon the other, and more about understanding a way of thinking, a particular process of observing and analyzing. That process can be effectively highlighted in multiple ways. There are clear learning objectives at the beginning of each module which is very helpful both for students and instructors. All of the basic features of contemporary textbooks are available – powerpoints, text banks, and the like. The materials at the end of each module (chapter) are generally well done and supply a variety of good learning aids for students. The opening example chosen to begin the book is clever, unique, and compelling. Sociology is about linkages between individuals and societies. The book starts, quite reasonably, with an emphasis on how individuals act in crowds, and how crowds differ (e.g., rock concert crowds, political protest agitators, throngs of shoppers). The comparative framing of this is good and would clearly work in a BC classroom. Problems begin on page 11 where issues of foreclosure are introduced. The Canadian/BC experience is substantially different from what has occurred in the US. Contrary to patterns south of the border, Canadian unemployment is not at record highs, foreclosures have not significantly increased in Canada, and subprime mortgages remain relatively rare in Canada. All of this material is therefore misleading, if not outright erroneous, for the Canadian case. This first example, discussed throughout most of the third page of Chapter one, is meant to illustrate how social context (foreclosures, unemployment) can help people to understand their personal predicaments (their private troubles). But, of course, that example simply doesn't work in Canada. The Canadian context is different and so the example just doesn't ring true to students. The core point of page three, understanding private troubles in the context of public issues, is good sociology – but that will be lost on students who will correctly point out that these public issues are not as germane in Canada. Using ill-conceived examples is bad teaching and leads to students misunderstanding the core message. The US experience is simply not directly transferable to the Canadian context. The second example in the Chapter, meant to reinforce the same basic point about social context, focuses upon food stamps. But food stamps are a core part of the US welfare system and are not used in Canada (where food banks would be more appropriate). Again the example not only lacks resonance, but effectively misleads students about the very workings of society. Table 1.1 reinforces the food stamps point and so the

Reviewed by Murray Shaw, Sociology Instructor, Douglas College on 10/9/13

The coverage of topics in this text is comprehensive. In a 1-semester [4 month] course, out of the 21 chapters, I would use 14 full chapters, and incorporate parts of other chapters. The glossaries and references listed by section at the end of each chapter are useful, and the multiple choice and short answer questions are a helpful study aid for students. One issue is that the index at the end of the text could be lengthier and more detailed.

In my courses, I make reference to sociological theories and methods throughout the course, and I found that the explanations of theories in chapter 1 and subsequent chapters are very clear and concise, and lend themselves to illustrations and examples. I particularly liked the fairly extensive explanations of theories in chapter 4, Society and Social Interaction. This is a chapter that I have not seen in other texts. Chapter 2 provides very clear explanations and illustrations of the different stages of the research process, in particular the explanations of hypotheses, x and y variables , and how to develop operational definitions. In regards to biases, the explanations of research methods in chapter 2 are very clear and lend themselves to illustrations, though they seem biased toward a scientific model, which is in my experience pretty standard for introductory sociology texts. In this text even qualitative methods like participant observation and ethnography are presented almost solely in terms of the scientific model; as procedures for hypothesis testing. I understand that there are good reasons for emphasizing that sociology is a "social science," employing the same level of rigor developing knowledge as other scientific disciplines. Notwithstanding this, it results in a lack of coverage of qualitative perspectives and approaches that are more concerned with exploring interactional processes, than testing hypotheses. In reading through the text, I did notice a few other small issues: -Page 41: Although the example of the comic writer who employed deception to make undercover observations at a dot.com firm is sociologically interesting, it is not itself sociological research, and by the standards of sociology could be seen as methodologically and maybe ethically flawed. Maybe it could be presented differently, and not as exemplifying "the lengths to which a sociologist will go to uncover material"(41), because he is not a sociologist and it is not sociological research. -Page 61: "American teenagers are encouraged to value celibacy." Certainly today, not all American [or Canadian] teenagers receive such encouragement from all agents of socialization. A more specific statement would fix this overgeneralization. -Page 85: "Eventually, concerns over the exploitation of workers led to the formation of labor unions and laws that set mandatory conditions for employees." Here, again a slightly longer and more nuanced statement could make it clear that these changes came about not just because of public and official ‘concerns' about the welfare of workers, but also as a result of activism on the part of emerging labour movements, and serious conflicts over a number of decades. -Page 85: "Since the economy of information societies is driven by knowledge and not material goods, power lies with those in charge of storing and distributing information." This statement makes it sound as though control over the production and distribution of material goods is no longer an important source of power. This statement could be qualified: "Since the economy of information societies is driven by knowledge and not [just] material goods, [much of the] power [in modern societies] lies with those in charge of storing and distributing information."

One of the strong points of the text is that sociological concepts and theories are explained very clearly. The examples and illustrations could easily be updated in future editions as required, and where necessary could be replaced with illustrations from other cultures, for example, Canada.

One of the strongest points of the text is that the explanations of theories and concepts are very clear and understandable.

I did not find any problems with consistency, or any areas where concepts were applied that had not been previously explained.

For my purposes, the text's modularity is good. In a one-semester course, I generally use 12-13 chapters of a text, along with readings from other sources. With this text, in any particular section of the course, in addition to the relevant chapter, I could also use parts of other chapters that I would not cover in whole. For example, the section on Bureaucracy (130-33) could be a useful when explaining Weber's theories of the rationalization of modern society, and the section on "baby boomers"(282-84) could be useful for explaining population dynamics and social inequality and conflict. I can see that for all the sections of my course, in addition to the main chapter that I would use, there are sections from other part of the text that could easily be incorporated.

The topics follow the standard format for introductory sociology texts, with the most general theories and concepts in sociology presented first, leading into application of these to substantive areas of social life and social issues. I find that the ordering of topics within chapters is very good; one explanation leads into the next. For example, by the time the differences between sociology and psychology are briefly explained [102], these differences are both easy to grasp and their importance apparent. Also, I find that the explanations of concepts are relatively brief, which means that if I pursue a topic in class, I can fill in the detail with my own material. If not, the students are not bogged down with lengthy content that will not be discussed in class. One thing that I really like about this text is that Sociological theories are introduced very briefly in chapter 1, and then explained in more depth in chapter 4, Society and Social Interaction, a chapter that is not included in other texts I have used and seen. I think this is a good idea, because it presents theory after students have had several classes' exposure to sociological concepts. In all other texts I have used and seen, the "theory section" is all in chapter 1, which I have found to be a bit too much for students brand new to the discipline. If I used this text, I would add chapter 4 to my courses.

I did not see any problems in this regard.

I did not come across any grammatical errors.

The text is culturally inclusive, although [as discussed in the final section] the use of the US as the reference point for the text is problematic if the text is to be used in Canadian colleges.

This is a text that I would use, if it was adapted to the Canadian context. It is very clear and understandable, and all of the sections lend themselves well to illustrations, discussions, and other activities. So, while I do like the text, the issue of using a text with American content in a Canadian college course is very problematic. It seems to me that one aspect of this problem could be fixed fairly easily, as the US illustrations and examples could be replaced by Canadian ones, although I would keep some of the US illustrations, as they lead into examination of similarities and differences between these two very closely linked cultures. The other aspect of this problem is the use of the US context as the reference point for the explanations of concepts, structures and processes throughout the text. Canadian examples and illustrations can be fairly easily substituted for American ones, but sections in which explanations centre around conditions in the US may be more difficult to change, and would require considerable rewriting. So, for the most part, it is a great text and one that I would definitely use, if it were not for the cultural issue. Because the text uses the US as its reference point I could not use it in its present form. This review originated in the BC Open Textbook Collection and is licensed under CC BY-ND.

1 An Introduction to Sociology
2 Sociological Research
4 Society and Social Interaction
5 Socialization
6 Groups and Organization
7 Deviance, Crime, and Social Control
8 Media and Technology
9 Social Stratification in the United States
10 Global Inequality
11 Race and Ethnicity
12 Gender, Sex, and Sexuality
13 Aging and the Elderly
14 Relationships, Marriage, and Family
15 Religion
16 Education
17 Government and Politics
18 Work and the Economy
19 Health and Medicine
20 Population, Urbanization, and the Environment
21 Social Movements and Social Change

Ancillary Material

About the book.

Introduction to Sociology 3e aligns to the topics and objectives of many introductory sociology courses. It is arranged in a manner that provides foundational sociological theories and contexts, then progresses through various aspects of human and societal interactions. The new edition is focused on driving meaningful and memorable learning experiences related to critical thinking about society and culture. The text includes comprehensive coverage of core concepts, discussions and data relevant to a diverse audience, and features that draw learners into the discipline in powerful and personal ways. Overall, Introduction to Sociology 3e aims to center the course and discipline as crucial elements for understanding relationships, society, and civic engagement; the authors seek to lay the foundation for students to apply what they learn throughout their lives and careers.

The authors, reviewers, and the entire team worked to build understanding of the causes and impacts of discrimination and prejudice. Introduction to Sociology 3e contains dozens of examples of discrimination and its outcomes regarding social science, society, institutions, and individuals. The text seeks to strike a balance between confronting the damaging aspects of our culture and history and celebrating those who have driven change and overcome challenges. The core discussion of these topics are present in Chapter 11 on Race and Ethnicity, and Chapter 12 on Gender, Sex, and Sexuality, but their causes and effects are extensively discussed in the context of other topics, including education, law enforcement, government, healthcare, the economy, and so on. Together and when connected by an instructor, these elements have potential for deep and lasting effects.

About the Contributors

Tonja R. Conerly , San Jacinto College

Kathleen Holmes , Northern Essex Community College

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Chapter 1. An Introduction to Sociology

Learning objectives.

1.1. What Is Sociology?

Explain concepts central to sociology
Describe the different levels of analysis in sociology: micro-sociology and macro-sociology
Understand how different sociological perspectives have developed

1.2. The History of Sociology

Explain why sociology emerged when it did
Describe the central ideas of the founders of sociology
Describe how sociology became a separate academic discipline

1.3. Theoretical Perspectives

Explain what sociological theories are and how they are used
Describe sociology as a multi-perspectival social science, which is divided into positivist, interpretive and critical paradigms
Understand the similarities and differences between structural functionalism, critical sociology, and symbolic interactionism

1.4. Why Study Sociology?

Explain why it is worthwhile to study sociology
Identify ways sociology is applied in the real world

Introduction to Sociology

Concerts, sports games, and political rallies can have very large crowds. When you attend one of these events, you may know only the people you came with. Yet you may experience a feeling of connection to the group. You are one of the crowd. You cheer and applaud when everyone else does. You boo and yell alongside them. You move out of the way when someone needs to get by, and you say “excuse me” when you need to leave. You know how to behave in this kind of crowd.

It can be a very different experience if you are travelling in a foreign country and find yourself in a crowd moving down the street. You may have trouble figuring out what is happening. Is the crowd just the usual morning rush, or is it a political protest of some kind? Perhaps there was some sort of accident or disaster. Is it safe in this crowd, or should you try to extract yourself? How can you find out what is going on? Although you are in it, you may not feel like you are part of this crowd. You may not know what to do or how to behave.

Even within one type of crowd, different groups exist and different behaviours are on display. At a rock concert, for example, some may enjoy singing along, others may prefer to sit and observe, while still others may join in a mosh pit or try crowd surfing. On February 28, 2010, Sydney Crosby scored the winning goal against the United States team in the gold medal hockey game at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. Two hundred thousand jubilant people filled the streets of downtown Vancouver to celebrate and cap off two weeks of uncharacteristically vibrant, joyful street life in Vancouver. Just over a year later, on June 15, 2011, the Vancouver Canucks lost the seventh hockey game of the Stanley Cup finals against the Boston Bruins. One hundred thousand people had been watching the game on outdoor screens. Eventually 155,000 people filled the downtown streets. Rioting and looting led to hundreds of injuries, burnt cars, trashed storefronts and property damage totaling an estimated $4.2 million. Why was the crowd response to the two events so different?

A key insight of sociology is that the simple fact of being in a group changes your behaviour. The group is a phenomenon that is more than the sum of its parts. Why do we feel and act differently in different types of social situations? Why might people of a single group exhibit different behaviours in the same situation? Why might people acting similarly not feel connected to others exhibiting the same behaviour? These are some of the many questions sociologists ask as they study people and societies.

A dictionary defines sociology as the systematic study of society and social interaction. The word “sociology” is derived from the Latin word socius (companion) and the Greek word logos (speech or reason), which together mean “reasoned speech about companionship”. How can the experience of companionship or togetherness be put into words or explained? While this is a starting point for the discipline, sociology is actually much more complex. It uses many different methods to study a wide range of subject matter and to apply these studies to the real world.

The sociologist Dorothy Smith (1926 – ) defines the social as the “ongoing concerting and coordinating of individuals’ activities” (Smith 1999). Sociology is the systematic study of all those aspects of life designated by the adjective “social.” These aspects of social life never simply occur; they are organized processes. They can be the briefest of everyday interactions—moving to the right to let someone pass on a busy sidewalk, for example—or the largest and most enduring interactions—such as the billions of daily exchanges that constitute the circuits of global capitalism. If there are at least two people involved, even in the seclusion of one’s mind, then there is a social interaction that entails the “ongoing concerting and coordinating of activities.” Why does the person move to the right on the sidewalk? What collective process lead to the decision that moving to the right rather than the left is normal? Think about the T-shirts in your drawer at home. What are the sequences of linkages and social relationships that link the T-shirts in your chest of drawers to the dangerous and hyper-exploitive garment factories in rural China or Bangladesh? These are the type of questions that point to the unique domain and puzzles of the social that sociology seeks to explore and understand.

What Are Society and Culture?

Sociologists study all aspects and levels of society. A society is a group of people whose members interact, reside in a definable area, and share a culture. A culture includes the group’s shared practices, values, beliefs, norms and artifacts. One sociologist might analyze video of people from different societies as they carry on everyday conversations to study the rules of polite conversation from different world cultures. Another sociologist might interview a representative sample of people to see how email and instant messaging have changed the way organizations are run. Yet another sociologist might study how migration determined the way in which language spread and changed over time. A fourth sociologist might study the history of international agencies like the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund to examine how the globe became divided into a First World and a Third World after the end of the colonial era.

These examples illustrate the ways society and culture can be studied at different levels of analysis , from the detailed study of face-to-face interactions to the examination of large-scale historical processes affecting entire civilizations. It is common to divide these levels of analysis into different gradations based on the scale of interaction involved. As discussed in later chapters, sociologists break the study of society down into four separate levels of analysis: micro, meso, macro, and global. The basic distinction, however, is between micro-sociology and macro-sociology .

The study of cultural rules of politeness in conversation is an example of micro-sociology. At the micro- level of analysis, the focus is on the social dynamics of intimate, face-to-face interactions. Research is conducted with a specific set of individuals such as conversational partners, family members, work associates, or friendship groups. In the conversation study example, sociologists might try to determine how people from different cultures interpret each other’s behaviour to see how different rules of politeness lead to misunderstandings. If the same misunderstandings occur consistently in a number of different interactions, the sociologists may be able to propose some generalizations about rules of politeness that would be helpful in reducing tensions in mixed-group dynamics (e.g., during staff meetings or international negotiations). Other examples of micro-level research include seeing how informal networks become a key source of support and advancement in formal bureaucracies or how loyalty to criminal gangs is established.

Macro -sociology focuses on the properties of large-scale, society-wide social interactions: the dynamics of institutions, classes, or whole societies. The example above of the influence of migration on changing patterns of language usage is a macro-level phenomenon because it refers to structures or processes of social interaction that occur outside or beyond the intimate circle of individual social acquaintances. These include the economic and other circumstances that lead to migration; the educational, media, and other communication structures that help or hinder the spread of speech patterns; the class, racial, or ethnic divisions that create different slangs or cultures of language use; the relative isolation or integration of different communities within a population; and so on. Other examples of macro-level research include examining why women are far less likely than men to reach positions of power in society or why fundamentalist Christian religious movements play a more prominent role in American politics than they do in Canadian politics. In each case, the site of the analysis shifts away from the nuances and detail of micro-level interpersonal life to the broader, macro-level systematic patterns that structure social change and social cohesion in society.

The relationship between the micro and the macro remains one of the key problems confronting sociology. The German sociologist Georg Simmel pointed out that macro-level processes are in fact nothing more than the sum of all the unique interactions between specific individuals at any one time (1908), yet they have properties of their own which would be missed if sociologists only focused on the interactions of specific individuals. Émile Durkheim’s classic study of suicide (1897) is a case in point. While suicide is one of the most personal, individual, and intimate acts imaginable, Durkheim demonstrated that rates of suicide differed between religious communities—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—in a way that could not be explained by the individual factors involved in each specific case. The different rates of suicide had to be explained by macro-level variables associated with the different religious beliefs and practices of the faith communities. We will return to this example in more detail later. On the other hand, macro-level phenomena like class structures, institutional organizations, legal systems, gender stereotypes, and urban ways of life provide the shared context for everyday life but do not explain its nuances and micro-variations very well. Macro-level structures constrain the daily interactions of the intimate circles in which we move, but they are also filtered through localized perceptions and “lived” in a myriad of inventive and unpredictable ways.

The Sociological Imagination

Although the scale of sociological studies and the methods of carrying them out are different, the sociologists involved in them all have something in common. Each of them looks at society using what pioneer sociologist C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination , sometimes also referred to as the “sociological lens” or “sociological perspective.” In a sense, this was Mills’ way of addressing the dilemmas of the macro/micro divide in sociology. Mills defined sociological imagination as how individuals understand their own and others’ pasts in relation to history and social structure (1959). It is the capacity to see an individual’s private troubles in the context of the broader social processes that structure them. This enables the sociologist to examine what Mills called “personal troubles of milieu” as “public issues of social structure,” and vice versa.

Mills reasoned that private troubles like being overweight, being unemployed, having marital difficulties, or feeling purposeless or depressed can be purely personal in nature. It is possible for them to be addressed and understood in terms of personal, psychological, or moral attributes, either one’s own or those of the people in one’s immediate milieu. In an individualistic society like our own, this is in fact the most likely way that people will regard the issues they confront: “I have an addictive personality;” “I can’t get a break in the job market;” “My husband is unsupportive;” etc. However, if private troubles are widely shared with others, they indicate that there is a common social problem that has its source in the way social life is structured. At this level, the issues are not adequately understood as simply private troubles. They are best addressed as public issues that require a collective response to resolve.

Obesity, for example, has been increasingly recognized as a growing problem for both children and adults in North America. Michael Pollan cites statistics that three out of five Americans are overweight and one out of five is obese (2006). In Canada in 2012, just under one in five adults (18.4 percent) were obese, up from 16 percent of men and 14.5 percent of women in 2003 (Statistics Canada 2013). Obesity is therefore not simply a private trouble concerning the medical issues, dietary practices, or exercise habits of specific individuals. It is a widely shared social issue that puts people at risk for chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. It also creates significant social costs for the medical system.

Pollan argues that obesity is in part a product of the increasingly sedentary and stressful lifestyle of modern, capitalist society, but more importantly it is a product of the industrialization of the food chain, which since the 1970s has produced increasingly cheap and abundant food with significantly more calories due to processing. Additives like corn syrup, which are much cheaper to produce than natural sugars, led to the trend of super-sized fast foods and soft drinks in the 1980s. As Pollan argues, trying to find a processed food in the supermarket without a cheap, calorie-rich, corn-based additive is a challenge. The sociological imagination in this example is the capacity to see the private troubles and attitudes associated with being overweight as an issue of how the industrialization of the food chain has altered the human/environment relationship, in particular with respect to the types of food we eat and the way we eat them.

By looking at individuals and societies and how they interact through this lens, sociologists are able to examine what influences behaviour, attitudes, and culture. By applying systematic and scientific methods to this process, they try to do so without letting their own biases and pre-conceived ideas influence their conclusions.

Studying Patterns: How Sociologists View Society

All sociologists are interested in the experiences of individuals and how those experiences are shaped by interactions with social groups and society as a whole. To a sociologist, the personal decisions an individual makes do not exist in a vacuum. Cultural patterns and social forces put pressure on people to select one choice over another. Sociologists try to identify these general patterns by examining the behaviour of large groups of people living in the same society and experiencing the same societal pressures.

Understanding the relationship between the individual and society is one of the most difficult sociological problems, however. Partly this is because of the reified way these two terms are used in everyday speech. Reification refers to the way in which abstract concepts, complex processes, or mutable social relationships come to be thought of as “things.” A prime example of this is when people say that “society” caused an individual to do something or to turn out in a particular way. In writing essays, first-year sociology students sometimes refer to “society” as a cause of social behaviour or as an entity with independent agency. On the other hand, the “individual” is a being that seems solid, tangible, and independent of anything going on outside of the skin sack that contains its essence. This conventional distinction between society and the individual is a product of reification in so far as both society and the individual appear as independent objects. A concept of “the individual” and a concept of “society” have been given the status of real, substantial, independent objects. As we will see in the chapters to come, society and the individual are neither objects, nor are they independent of one another. An “individual” is inconceivable without the relationships to others that define his or her internal subjective life and his or her external socially defined roles.

The problem for sociologists is that these concepts of the individual and society and the relationship between them are thought of in terms established by a very common moral framework in modern democratic societies, namely that of individual responsibility and individual choice. Often in this framework, any suggestion that an individual’s behaviour needs to be understood in terms of that person’s social context is dismissed as “letting the individual off” of taking personal responsibility for their actions.

Talking about society is akin to being morally soft or lenient. Sociology, as a social science, remains neutral on these type of moral questions. The conceptualization of the individual and society is much more complex. The sociological problem is to be able to see the individual as a thoroughly social being and yet as a being who has agency and free choice. Individuals are beings who do take on individual responsibilities in their everyday social roles and risk social consequences when they fail to live up to them. The manner in which they take on responsibilities and sometimes the compulsion to do so are socially defined however. The sociological problem is to be able to see society as a dimension of experience characterized by regular and predictable patterns of behaviour that exist independently of any specific individual’s desires or self-understanding. Yet at the same time a society is nothing but the ongoing social relationships and activities of specific individuals.

Making Connections: Sociology in the Real World

The individual in society: choices of aboriginal gang members.

In 2010 the CBC program The Current aired a report about several young aboriginal men who were serving time in prison in Saskatchewan for gang-related activities (CBC 2010). They all expressed desires to be able to deal with their drug addiction issues, return to their families, and assume their responsibilities when their sentences were complete. They wanted to have their own places with nice things in them. However, according to the CBC report, 80 percent of the prison population in the Saskatchewan Correctional Centre were aboriginal and 20 percent of those were gang members. This is consistent with national statistics on aboriginal incarceration which showed that in 2010–2011, the aboriginal incarceration rate was 10 times higher than for the non-aboriginal population. While aboriginal people account for about 4 percent of the Canadian population, in 2013 they made up 23.2 percent of the federal penitentiary population. In 2001 they made up only 17 percent of the penitentiary population. Aboriginal overrepresentation in prisons has continued to grow substantially (Office of the Correctional Investigator 2013).The outcomes of aboriginal incarceration are also bleak. The federal Office of the Correctional Investigator summarized the situation as follows. Aboriginal inmates are:

Routinely classified as higher risk and higher need in categories such as employment, community reintegration, and family supports
Released later in their sentence (lower parole grant rates); most leave prison at Statutory Release or Warrant Expiry dates
Overrepresented in segregation and maximum security populations
Disproportionately involved in use-of-force interventions and incidents of prison self-injury
More likely to return to prison on revocation of parole, often for administrative reasons, not criminal violations (2013)

The federal report notes that “the high rate of incarceration for aboriginal peoples has been linked to systemic discrimination and attitudes based on racial or cultural prejudice, as well as economic and social disadvantage, substance abuse and intergenerational loss, violence and trauma” (2013).

This is clearly a case in which the situation of the incarcerated inmates interviewed on the CBC program has been structured by historical social patterns and power relationships that confront aboriginal people in Canada generally. How do we understand it at the individual level however, at the level of personal decision making and individual responsibilities? One young inmate described how, at the age of 13, he began to hang around with his cousins who were part of a gang. He had not grown up with “the best life” with family members suffering from addiction issues and traumas. The appeal of what appeared as a fast and exciting lifestyle—the sense of freedom and of being able to make one’s own life, instead of enduring poverty—was compelling. He began to earn money by “running dope” but also began to develop addictions. He was expelled from school for recruiting gang members. The only job he ever had was selling drugs. The circumstances in which he and the other inmates had entered the gang life and the difficulties getting out of it they knew awaited them when they left prison reflect a set of decision-making parameters fundamentally different than those facing most non-aboriginal people in Canada.

A key basis of the sociological perspective is the concept that the individual and society are inseparable. It is impossible to study one without the other. German sociologist Norbert Elias called the process of simultaneously analyzing the behaviour of individuals and the society that shapes that behaviour figuration . He described it through a metaphor of dancing. There can be no dance without the dancers, but there can be no dancers without the dance. Without the dancers, a dance is just an idea about motions in a choreographer’s head. Without a dance, there is just a group of people moving around a floor. Similarly, there is no society without the individuals that make it up, and there are also no individuals who are not affected by the society in which they live (Elias 1978).

Since ancient times, people have been fascinated by the relationship between individuals and the societies to which they belong. The ancient Greeks might be said to have provided the foundations of sociology through the distinction they drew between physis (nature) and nomos (law or custom). Whereas nature or physis for the Greeks was “what emerges from itself” without human intervention, nomos in the form of laws or customs, were human conventions designed to constrain human behaviour. Histories by Herodotus (484–425 BCE) was a proto-anthropological work that described the great variations in the nomos of different ancient societies around the Mediterranean, indicating that human social life was not a product of nature but a product of human creation. If human social life was the product of an invariable human or biological nature, all cultures would be the same. The concerns of the later Greek philosophers Socrates (469–399 BCE), Plato (428–347 BCE), and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) with the ideal form of human community (the polis or city-state) can be derived from the ethical dilemmas of this difference between human nature and human norms. The modern sociological term “norm” (i.e., a social rule that regulates human behaviour) comes from the Greek term nomos .

In the 13th century, Ma Tuan-Lin, a Chinese historian, first recognized social dynamics as an underlying component of historical development in his seminal encyclopedia, General Study of Literary Remains . The study charted the historical development of Chinese state administration from antiquity in a manner akin to contemporary institutional analyses. The next century saw the emergence of the historian some consider to be the world’s first sociologist, the Berber scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) of Tunisia. His Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History is known for going beyond descriptive history to an analysis of historical processes of change based on an understanding of “the nature of things which are born of civilization” (Khaldun quoted in Becker and Barnes 1961). Key to his analysis was the distinction between the sedentary life of cities and the nomadic life of pastoral peoples like the Bedouin and Berbers. The nomads, who exist independent of external authority, developed a social bond based on blood lineage and “ esprit de corps” (‘Asabijja) ,” which enabled them to mobilize quickly and act in a unified and concerted manner in response to the rugged circumstances of desert life. The sedentaries of the city entered into a different cycle in which esprit de corp is subsumed to institutional power and political factions and the need to be focused on subsistence is replaced by a trend toward increasing luxury, ease and refinements of taste. The relationship between the two poles of existence, nomadism and sedentary life, was at the basis of the development and decay of civilizations” (Becker and Barnes 1961).

However, it was not until the 19th century that the basis of the modern discipline of sociology can be said to have been truly established. The impetus for the ideas that culminated in sociology can be found in the three major transformations that defined modern society and the culture of modernity: the development of modern science from the 16th century onward, the emergence of democratic forms of government with the American and French Revolutions (1775–1783 and 1789–1799 respectively), and the Industrial Revolution beginning in the 18th century. Not only was the framework for sociological knowledge established in these events, but also the initial motivation for creating a science of society. Early sociologists like Comte and Marx sought to formulate a rational, evidence-based response to the experience of massive social dislocation and unprecedented social problems brought about by the transition from the European feudal era to capitalism. Whether the intention was to restore order to the chaotic disintegration of society, as in Comte’s case, or to provide the basis for a revolutionary transformation in Marx’s, a rational and scientifically comprehensive knowledge of society and its processes was required. It was in this context that “society” itself, in the modern sense of the word, became visible as a phenomenon to early investigators of the social condition.

The development of modern science provided the model of knowledge needed for sociology to move beyond earlier moral, philosophical, and religious types of reflection on the human condition. Key to the development of science was the technological mindset that Max Weber termed the disenchantment of the world : “principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” (1919). Modern science abandoned the medieval view of the world in which God, “the unmoved mover,” defined the natural and social world as a changeless, cyclical creation ordered and given purpose by divine will. Instead modern science combined two philosophical traditions that had historically been at odds: Plato’s rationalism and Aristotle’s empiricism. Rationalism sought the laws that governed the truth of reason and ideas, and in the hands of early scientists like Galileo and Newton, found its highest form of expression in the logical formulations of mathematics. Empiricism sought to discover the laws of the operation of the world through the careful, methodical, and detailed observation of the world. The new scientific worldview therefore combined the clear and logically coherent conceptual formulation of propositions from rationalism with an empirical method of inquiry based on observation through the senses. Sociology adopted these core principles to emphasize that claims about society had to be clearly formulated and based on evidence-based procedures.

The emergence of democratic forms of government in the 18th century demonstrated that humans had the capacity to change the world. The rigid hierarchy of medieval society was not a God-given eternal order, but a human order that could be challenged and improved upon through human intervention. Society came to be seen as both historical and the product of human endeavours. Age of Enlightenment philosophers like Locke, Voltaire, Montaigne, and Rousseau developed general principles that could be used to explain social life. Their emphasis shifted from the histories and exploits of the aristocracy to the life of ordinary people. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) extended the critical analysis of her male Enlightenment contemporaries to the situation of women. Significantly for modern sociology they proposed that the use of reason could be applied to address social ills and to emancipate humanity from servitude. Wollstonecraft for example argued that simply allowing women to have a proper education would enable them to contribute to the improvement of society, especially through their influence on children. On the other hand, the bloody experience of the democratic revolutions, particularly the French Revolution, which resulted in the “Reign of Terror” and ultimately Napoleon’s attempt to subjugate Europe, also provided a cautionary tale for the early sociologists about the need for sober scientific assessment of society to address social problems.

The Industrial Revolution in a strict sense refers to the development of industrial methods of production, the introduction of industrial machinery, and the organization of labour in new manufacturing systems. These economic changes emblemize the massive transformation of human life brought about by the creation of wage labour, capitalist competition, increased mobility, urbanization, individualism, and all the social problems they wrought: poverty, exploitation, dangerous working conditions, crime, filth, disease, and the loss of family and other traditional support networks, etc. It was a time of great social and political upheaval with the rise of empires that exposed many people—for the first time—to societies and cultures other than their own. Millions of people were moving into cities and many people were turning away from their traditional religious beliefs. Wars, strikes, revolts, and revolutionary actions were reactions to underlying social tensions that had never existed before and called for critical examination. August Comte in particular envisioned the new science of sociology as the antidote to conditions that he described as “moral anarchy.”

Sociology therefore emerged as an extension of the new worldview of science; as a part of the Enlightenment project and its appreciation of historical change, social injustice, and the possibilities of social reform; and as a crucial response to the new and unprecedented types of social problems that appeared in the 19th century. It did not emerge as a unified science, however, as its founders brought distinctly different perspectives to its early formulations.

August Comte: The Father of Sociology

The term sociology was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836) in an unpublished manuscript (Fauré et al. 1999). In 1838, the term was reinvented by Auguste Comte (1798–1857). The contradictions of Comte’s life and the times he lived through can be in large part read into the concerns that led to his development of sociology. He was born in 1798, year 6 of the new French Republic, to staunch monarchist and Catholic parents, who lived comfortably off the father’s earnings as a minor bureaucrat in the tax office. Comte originally studied to be an engineer, but after rejecting his parents’ conservative views and declaring himself a republican and free spirit at the age of 13, he got kicked out of school at 18 for leading a school riot, which ended his chances of getting a formal education and a position as an academic or government official.

He became a secretary of the utopian socialist philosopher Claude Henri de Rouvroy Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) until they had a falling out in 1824 (after St. Simon perhaps purloined some of Comte’s essays and signed his own name to them). Nevertheless, they both thought that society could be studied using the same scientific methods utilized in the natural sciences. Comte also believed in the potential of social scientists to work toward the betterment of society and coined the slogan “order and progress” to reconcile the opposing progressive and conservative factions that had divided the crisis-ridden, post-revolutionary French society. Comte proposed a renewed, organic spiritual order in which the authority of science would be the means to reconcile the people in each social strata with their place in the order. It is a testament to his influence that the phrase “order and progress” adorns the Brazilian coat of arms (Collins and Makowsky 1989).

Comte named the scientific study of social patterns positivism . He described his philosophy in a well-attended and popular series of lectures, which he published as The Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–1842) and A General View of Positivism (1848). He believed that using scientific methods to reveal the laws by which societies and individuals interact would usher in a new “positivist” age of history. His main sociological theory was the law of three stages , which held that all human societies and all forms of human knowledge evolve through three distinct stages from primitive to advanced: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive.The key variable in defining these stages was the way a people understand the concept of causation or think about their place in the world.

In the theological stage, humans explain causes in terms of the will of anthropocentric gods (the gods cause things to happen). In the metaphysical stage, humans explain causes in terms of abstract, “speculative” ideas like nature, natural rights, or “self-evident” truths. This was the basis of his critique of the Enlightenment philosophers whose ideas about natural rights and freedoms had led to the French Revolution but also to the chaos of its aftermath. In his view, the “negative” or metaphysical knowledge of the philosophers was based on dogmatic ideas that could not be reconciled when they were in contraction. This lead to irreconcilable conflict and moral anarchy. Finally, in the positive stage, humans explain causes in terms of scientific procedures and laws (i.e., “positive” knowledge based on propositions limited to what can be empirically observed). Comte believed that this would be the final stage of human social evolution because science would reconcile the division between political factions of order and progress by eliminating the basis for moral and intellectual anarchy. The application of positive philosophy would lead to the unification of society and of the sciences (Comte 1830).

Although Comte’s positivism is a little odd by today’s standards, it inaugurated the development of the positivist tradition within sociology. In principle, positivism is the sociological perspective that attempts to approach the study of society in the same way that the natural sciences approach the natural world. In fact, Comte’s preferred term for this approach was “social physics”—the “sciences of observation” applied to social phenomena, which he saw as the culmination of the historical development of the sciences. More specifically, for Comte, positivism:

“Regards all phenomena as subjected to invariable natural laws”
Pursues “an accurate discovery of these laws, with a view of reducing them to the smallest possible number”
Limits itself to analyzing the observable circumstances of phenomena and to connecting them by the “natural relations of succession and resemblance” instead of making metaphysical claims about their essential or divine nature (Comte 1830)

While Comte never in fact conducted any social research and took, as the object of analysis, the laws that governed what he called the general human “mind” of a society (difficult to observe empirically), his notion of sociology as a positivist science that might effectively socially engineer a better society was deeply influential. Where his influence waned was a result of the way in which he became increasingly obsessive and hostile to all criticism as his ideas progressed beyond positivism as the “science of society” to positivism as the basis of a new cult-like, technocratic “religion of humanity.” The new social order he imagined was deeply conservative and hierarchical, a kind of a caste system with every level of society obliged to reconcile itself with its “scientifically” allotted place. Comte imagined himself at the pinnacle of society, taking the title of “Great Priest of Humanity.” The moral and intellectual anarchy he decried would be resolved, but only because the rule of sociologists would eliminate the need for unnecessary and divisive democratic dialogue. Social order “must ever be incompatible with a perpetual discussion of the foundations of society” (Comte 1830).

Karl Marx: The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a German philosopher and economist. In 1848 he and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) co-authored the Communist Manifesto . This book is one of the most influential political manuscripts in history. It also presents in a highly condensed form Marx’s theory of society, which differed from what Comte proposed. Whereas Comte viewed the goal of sociology as recreating a unified, post-feudal spiritual order that would help to institutionalize a new era of political and social stability, Marx developed a critical analysis of capitalism that saw the material or economic basis of inequality and power relations as the cause of social instability and conflict. The focus of sociology, or what Marx called historical materialism (the “materialist conception of history”), should be the “ruthless critique of everything existing,” as he said in a letter to his friend Arnold Ruge. In this way the goal of sociology would not simply be to scientifically analyze or objectively describe society, but to use a rigorous scientific analysis as a basis to change it. This framework became the foundation of contemporary critical sociology .

Marx rejected Comte’s positivism with its emphasis on describing the logical laws of the general “mind.” For Marx, Comte’s sociology was a form of idealism , a way of explaining the nature of society based on the ideas that people hold. In an idealist perspective, people invent ideas of “freedom,” “morality,” or “causality,” etc. and then change their lives and society’s institutions to conform to these ideas. This type of understanding could only ever lead to a partial analysis of social life according to Marx. Instead he believed that societies grew and changed as a result of the struggles of different social classes over control of the means of production. Historical materialism is an approach to understanding society that explains social change and human ideas in terms of underlying changes in the “mode of production” or economy; i.e., the historical transformations in the way human societies act upon their material world (the environment and its resources) in order to use it to meet their needs. Marx argues therefore that the consciousness or ideas people have about the world develop from changes in this material, economic basis. As such, the ideas of people in hunter-gatherer societies will be different than the ideas of people in feudal societies, which in turn will be different from the ideas of people in capitalist societies.

The source of historical change and transition between different historical types of society was class struggle. At the time Marx was developing his theories, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism had led to a massive increase in the wealth of society but also massive disparities in wealth and power between the owners of the factories (the bourgeoisie) and workers (the proletariat). Capitalism was still a relatively new economic system, an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of goods and the means to produce them. It was also a system that was inherently unstable and prone to crisis, yet increasingly global in its reach.

As Marx demonstrated in his masterpiece Capital (1867), capitalism’s instability is based on the processes by which capitalists accumulate their capital or assets, namely by engaging in cold-blooded competition with each other through the sale of commodities in the competitive market. There is a continuous need to expand markets for goods and to reduce the costs of production in order to create ever cheaper and more competitive products. This leads to a downward pressure on wages, the introduction of labour-saving technologies that increase unemployment, the failure of non-competitive businesses, periodic economic crises and recessions, and the global expansion of capitalism as businesses seek markets to exploit and cheaper sources of labour. Yet as he pointed out, it was the workers’ labour that actually produces wealth. The capitalists who owned the factories and means of production were in a sense parasitic on workers’ labour. The injustice of the system was palpable. Marx predicted that inequalities of capitalism would become so extreme that workers would eventually recognize their common class interests, develop a common “class consciousness” or understanding of their situation, and revolt. Class struggle would lead to the destruction of the institution of private capital and to the final stage in human history, which he called “communism.”

Although Marx did not call his analysis sociology, his sociological innovation was to provide a social analysis of the economic system. Whereas Adam Smith (1723–1790) and the political economists of the 19th century tried to explain the economic laws of supply and demand solely as a market mechanism (similar to the abstract discussions of stock market indices and investment returns in business pages of newspapers today), Marx’s analysis showed the social relationships that had created the market system and the social repercussions of their operation. As such, his analysis of modern society was not static or simply descriptive. He was able to put his finger on the underlying dynamism and continuous change that characterized capitalist society. In a famous passage from The Communist Manifesto , he and Engels described the restless and destructive penchant for change inherent in the capitalist mode of production:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty, and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all which is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind (Marx and Engels 1848).

Marx was also able to create an effective basis for critical sociology in that what he aimed for in his analysis was, as he put it in another letter to Arnold Ruge, “the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age.” While he took a clear and principled value position in his critique, he did not do so dogmatically, based on an arbitrary moral position of what he personally thought was good and bad. He felt rather that a critical social theory must engage in clarifying and supporting the issues of social justice that were inherent within the existing struggles and wishes of the age. In his own work, he endeavoured to show how the variety of specific work actions, strikes, and revolts by workers in different occupations for better pay, safer working conditions, shorter hours, the right to unionize, etc. contained the seeds for a vision of universal equality, collective justice, and ultimately the ideal of a classless society.

Harriet Martineau: The First Woman Sociologist?

Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) was one of the first women sociologists in the 19th century. There are a number of other women who might compete with her for the title of the first woman sociologist, such as Catherine Macauley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Flora Tristan, and Beatrice Webb, but Martineau’s specifically sociological credentials are strong. She was for a long time known principally for her English translation of Comte’s Course in Positive Philosophy. Through this popular translation she introduced the concept of sociology as a methodologically rigorous discipline to an English-speaking audience. But she also created a body of her own work in the tradition of the great social reform movements of the 19th century and introduced a sorely missing woman’s perspective into the discourse on society.

It was a testament to her abilities that after she became impoverished at the age of 24 with the death of her father, brother, and fiancé, she was able to earn her own income as the first woman journalist in Britain to write under her own name. From the age of 12, she suffered from severe hearing loss and was obliged to use a large ear trumpet to converse. She impressed a wide audience with a series of articles on political economy in 1832. In 1834 she left England to engage in two years of study of the new republic of the United States and its emerging institutions: prisons, insane asylums, factories, farms, Southern plantations, universities, hospitals, and churches. On the basis of extensive research, interviews and observations, she published Society in America and worked with abolitionists on the social reform of slavery (Zeitlin 1997). She also worked for social reform in the situation of women: the right to vote, have an education, pursue an occupation, and enjoy the same legal rights as men. Together with Florence Nightingale, she worked on the development of public health care, which led to early formulations of the welfare system in Britain (McDonald 1998).

Particularly innovative was her early work on sociological methodology, How to Observe Manners and Morals (1838) . In this volume she developed the ground work for a systematic social-scientific approach to studying human behaviour. She recognized that the issues of the researcher/subject relationship would have to be addressed differently in a social, as opposed to a natural, science. The observer, or “traveller,” as she put it, needed to respect three criteria to obtain valid research: impartiality, critique, and sympathy. The impartial observer could not allow herself to be “perplexed or disgusted” by foreign practices that she could not personally reconcile herself with. Yet at the same time she saw the goal of sociology to be the fair but critical assessment of the moral status of a culture. In particular, the goal of sociology was to challenge forms of racial, sexual, or class domination in the name of autonomy: the right of every person to be a “self-directing moral being.” Finally, what distinguished the science of social observation from the natural sciences was that the researcher had to have unqualified sympathy for the subjects being studied (Lengermann and Niebrugge 2007). This later became a central principle of Max Weber’s interpretive sociology , although it is not clear that Weber read Martineau’s work.

A large part of her research in the United States analyzed the situations of contradiction between stated public morality and actual moral practices. For example, she was fascinated with the way that the formal democratic right to free speech enabled slavery abolitionists to hold public meetings, but when the meetings were violently attacked by mobs, the abolitionists and not the mobs were accused of inciting the violence (Zeitlin 1997). This emphasis on studying contradictions followed from the distinction she drew between morals —society’s collective ideas of permitted and forbidden behaviour—and manners— the actual patterns of social action and association in society. As she realized the difficulty in getting an accurate representation of an entire society based on a limited number of interviews, she developed the idea that one could identify key “Things” experienced by all people—age, gender, illness, death, etc.—and examine how they were experienced differently by a sample of people from different walks of life (Lengermann and Niebrugge 2007). Martineau’s sociology therefore focused on surveying different attitudes toward “Things” and studying the anomalies that emerged when manners toward them contradicted a society’s formal morals.

Émile Durkheim: The Pathologies of the Social Order

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) helped establish sociology as a formal academic discipline by establishing the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895 and by publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method in 1895. He was born to a Jewish family in the Lorraine province of France (one of the two provinces along with Alsace that were lost to the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871). With the German occupation of Lorraine, the Jewish community suddenly became subject to sporadic anti-Semitic violence, with the Jews often being blamed for the French defeat and the economic/political instability that followed. Durkheim attributed this strange experience of anti-Semitism and scapegoating to the lack of moral purpose in modern society.

As in Comte’s time, France in the late 19th century was the site of major upheavals and sharp political divisions: the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune (1871) in which 20,000 workers died, the fall and capture of Emperor Napoleon III (Napoleon I’s nephew), the creation of the Third Republic, and the Dreyfus Affair. This undoubtedly led to the focus in Durkheim’s sociology on themes of moral anarchy, decadence, disunity, and disorganization. For Durkheim, sociology was a scientific but also a “moral calling” and one of the central tasks of the sociologist was to determine “the causes of the general temporary malajustment being undergone by European societies and remedies which may relieve it” (1897). In this respect, Durkheim represented the sociologist as a kind of medical doctor, studying social pathologies of the moral order and proposing social remedies and cures. He saw healthy societies as stable, while pathological societies experienced a breakdown in social norms between individuals and society. The state of normlessness or anomie —the lack of norms that give clear direction and purpose to individual actions—was the result of “society’s insufficient presence in individuals” (1897).

His father was the eighth in a line of father-son rabbis. Although Émile was the second son, he was chosen to pursue his father’s vocation and was given a good religious and secular education. He abandoned the idea of a religious or rabbinical career, however, and became very secular in his outlook. His sociological analysis of religion in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) was an example of this. In this work he was not interested in the theological questions of God’s existence or purpose, but in developing a very secular, sociological question: Whether God exists or not, how does religion function socially in a society? He argued that beneath the irrationalism and the “barbarous and fantastic rites” of both the most primitive and the most modern religions is their ability to satisfy real social and human needs. “There are no religions which are false” (Durkheim 1912) he said. Religion performs the key function of providing social solidarity in a society. The rituals, the worship of icons, and the belief in supernatural beings “excite, maintain or recreate certain mental states” (Durkheim 1912) that bring people together, provide a ritual and symbolic focus, and unify them. This type of analysis became the basis of the functionalist perspective in sociology. He explained the existence and persistence of religion on the basis of the necessary function it performed in unifying society.

Durkheim was also a key figure in the development of positivist sociology . He did not adopt the term positivism , because of the connection it had with Comte’s quasi-religious sociological cult. However, in Rules of the Sociological Method he defined sociology as the study of objective social facts . Social facts are those things like law, custom, morality, religious beliefs and practices, language, systems of money, credit and debt, business or professional practices, etc. that are defined externally to the individual. Social facts:

Precede the individual and will continue to exist after he or she is gone
Consist of details and obligations of which individuals are frequently unaware
Are endowed with an external coercive power by reason of which individuals are controlled

For Durkheim, social facts were like the facts of the natural sciences. They could be studied without reference to the subjective experience of individuals. He argued that “social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual” (Durkheim 1895). Individuals experience them as obligations, duties, and restraints on their behaviour, operating independently of their will. They are hardly noticeable when individuals consent to them but provoke reaction when individuals resist.

In this way, Durkheim was very influential in defining the subject matter of the new discipline of sociology. For Durkheim, sociology was not about just any phenomena to do with the life of human beings but only those phenomena which pertained exclusively to a social level of analysis. It was not about the biological or psychological dynamics of human life, for example, but about the social facts through which the lives of individuals were constrained. Moreover, the dimension of human experience described by social facts had to be explained in its own terms. It could not be explained by biological drives or psychological characteristics of individuals. It was a dimension of reality sui generis (of its own kind, unique in its characteristics). It could not be explained by, or reduced to, its individual components without missing its most important features. As Durkheim put it, “a social fact can only be explained by another social fact” (Durkheim 1895).

This is the framework of Durkheim’s famous study of suicide. In Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897), Durkheim attempted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his rules of social research by examining suicide statistics in different police districts. Suicide is perhaps the most personal and most individual of all acts. Its motives would seem to be absolutely unique to the individual and to individual psychopathology. However, what Durkheim observed was that statistical rates of suicide remained fairly constant year by year and region by region. There was no correlation between rates of suicide and rates of psychopathology. Suicide rates did vary, however, according to the social context of the suicides: namely the religious affiliation of suicides. Protestants had higher rates of suicide than Catholics, whereas Catholics had higher rates of suicide than Jews. Durkheim argued that the key factor that explained the difference in suicide rates (i.e., the statistical rates, not the purely individual motives for the suicides) were the different degrees of social integration of the different religious communities, measured by the amount of ritual and degree of mutual involvement in religious practice. The religious groups had differing levels of anomie, or normlessness, which Durkheim associated with high rates of suicide. Durkheim’s study was unique and insightful because he did not try to explain suicide rates in terms of individual psychopathology. Instead, he regarded the regularity of the suicide rates as a factual order, implying “the existence of collective tendencies exterior to the individual” (Durkheim 1897), and explained their variation with respect to another social fact: “Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social groups of which the individual forms a part” (Durkheim 1897).

Max Weber: Verstehende Soziologie

Prominent sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) established a sociology department in Germany at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in 1919. Weber wrote on many topics related to sociology including political change in Russia, the condition of German farm workers, and the history of world religions. He was also a prominent public figure, playing an important role in the German peace delegation in Versailles and in drafting the ill-fated German (Weimar) constitution following the defeat of Germany in World War I.

Weber is known best for his 1904 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . He noted that in modern industrial societies, business leaders and owners of capital, the higher grades of skilled labour, and the most technically and commercially trained personnel were overwhelmingly Protestant. He also noted the uneven development of capitalism in Europe, and in particular how capitalism developed first in those areas dominated by Protestant sects. He asked, “Why were the districts of highest economic development at the same time particularly favourable to a revolution in the Church?” (i.e., the Protestant Reformation (1517–1648)) (Weber 1904). His answer focused on the development of the Protestant ethic— the duty to “work hard in one’s calling”—in particular Protestant sects such as Calvinism, Pietism, and Baptism.

As opposed to the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church in which poverty was a virtue and labour simply a means for maintaining the individual and community, the Protestant sects began to see hard, continuous labour as a spiritual end in itself. Hard labour was firstly an ascetic technique of worldly renunciation and a defence against temptations and distractions: the unclean life, sexual temptations, and religious doubts. Secondly, the Protestant sects believed that God’s disposition toward the individual was predetermined and could never be known or influenced by traditional Christian practices like confession, penance, and buying indulgences. However, one’s chosen occupation was a “calling” given by God, and the only sign of God’s favour or recognition in this world was to receive good fortune in one’s calling. Thus material success and the steady accumulation of wealth through personal effort and prudence was seen as a sign of an individual’s state of grace. Weber argued that the ethic , or way of life, that developed around these beliefs was a key factor in creating the conditions for both the accumulation of capital, as the goal of economic activity, and for the creation of an industrious and disciplined labour force.

In this regard, Weber has often been seen as presenting an idealist explanation of the development of capital, as opposed to Marx’s historical materialist explanation. It is an element of cultural belief that leads to social change rather than the concrete organization and class struggles of the economic structure. It might be more accurate, however, to see Weber’s work building on Marx’s and to see his Protestant ethic thesis as part of a broader set of themes concerning the process of rationalization . Why did the Western world modernize and develop modern science, industry, and democracy when, for centuries, the Orient, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East were technically, scientifically, and culturally more advanced than the West? Weber argued that the modern forms of society developed in the West because of the process of rationalization: the general tendency of modern institutions and most areas of life to be transformed by the application of instrumental reason—rational bureaucratic organization, calculation, and technical reason—and the overcoming of “magical” thinking (which we earlier referred to as the “disenchantment of the world”). As the impediments toward rationalization were removed, organizations and institutions were restructured on the principle of maximum efficiency and specialization, while older, traditional (inefficient) types of organization were gradually eliminated.

The irony of the Protestant ethic as one stage in this process was that the rationalization of capitalist business practices and organization of labour eventually dispensed with the religious goals of the ethic. At the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber pessimistically describes the fate of modern humanity as an “iron cage.” The iron cage is Weber’s metaphor for the condition of modern humanity in a technical, rationally defined, and “efficiently” organized society. Having forgotten its spiritual or other purposes of life, humanity succumbs to an order “now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production” (Weber 1904). The modern subject in the iron cage is “only a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march” (Weber 1922).

Weber also made a major contribution to the methodology of sociological research. Along with the philosophers Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), Weber believed that it was difficult if not impossible to apply natural science methods to accurately predict the behaviour of groups as positivist sociology hoped to do. They argued that the influence of culture on human behaviour had to be taken into account. What was distinct about human behaviour was that it is essentially meaningful. Human behaviour could not be understood independently of the meanings that individuals attributed to it. A Martian’s analysis of the activities in a skateboard park would be hopelessly confused unless it understood that the skateboarders were motivated by the excitement of risk taking and the pleasure in developing skills. This insight into the meaningful nature of human behaviour even applied to the sociologists themselves, who, they believed, should be aware of how their own cultural biases could influence their research. To deal with this problem, Weber and Dilthey introduced the concept of Verstehen , a German word that means to understand in a deep way. In seeking Verstehen , outside observers of a social world—an entire culture or a small setting—attempt to understand it empathetically from an insider’s point of view.

In his essay “The Methodological Foundations of Sociology,” Weber described sociology as “a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects” (Weber 1922). In this way he delimited the field that sociology studies in a manner almost opposite to that of Émile Durkheim. Rather than defining sociology as the study of the unique dimension of external social facts, sociology was concerned with social action : actions to which individuals attach subjective meanings. “Action is social in so far as, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals), it takes account of the behaviour of others and is thereby oriented in its course” (Weber 1922). The actions of the young skateboarders can be explained because they hold the experienced boarders in esteem and attempt to emulate their skills even if it means scraping their bodies on hard concrete from time to time. Weber and other like-minded sociologists founded interpretive sociology whereby social researchers strive to find systematic means to interpret and describe the subjective meanings behind social processes, cultural norms, and societal values. This approach led to research methods like ethnography, participant observation, and phenomenological analysis whose aim was not to generalize or predict (as in positivistic social science), but to systematically gain an in-depth understanding of social worlds. The natural sciences may be precise, but from the interpretive sociology point of view their methods confine them to study only the external characteristics of things.

Georg Simmel: A Sociology of Forms

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was one of the founding fathers of sociology, although his place in the discipline is not always recognized. In part, this oversight may be explained by the fact that Simmel was a Jewish scholar in Germany at the turn of 20th century, and until 1914 was unable to attain a proper position as a professor due to anti-Semitism. Despite the brilliance of his sociological insights, the quantity of his publications, and the popularity of his public lectures as Privatdozent at the University of Berlin, his lack of a regular academic position prevented him from having the kind of student following that would create a legacy around his ideas. It might also be explained by some of the unconventional and varied topics that he wrote on: the structure of flirting, the sociology of adventure, the importance of secrecy, the patterns of fashion, the social significance of money, etc. He was generally seen at the time as not having a systematic or integrated theory of society. However, his insights into how social forms emerge at the micro-level of interaction and how they relate to macro-level phenomena remain valuable in contemporary sociology.

Simmel’s sociology focused on the key question, “How is society possible?” His answer led him to develop what he called formal sociology , or the sociology of social forms. In his essay “The Problem of Sociology,” Simmel reaches a strange conclusion for a sociologist: “There is no such thing as society ‘as such.’” “Society” is just the name we give to the “extraordinary multitude and variety of interactions [that] operate at any one moment” (Simmel 1908). This is a basic insight of micro-sociology. However useful it is to talk about macro-level phenomena like capitalism, the moral order, or rationalization, in the end what these phenomena refer to is a multitude of ongoing, unfinished processes of interaction between specific individuals . Nevertheless, the phenomena of social life do have recognizable forms, and the forms do guide the behaviour of individuals in a regularized way. A bureaucracy is a form of social interaction that persists from day to day. One does not come into work one morning to discover that the rules, job descriptions, paperwork, and hierarchical order of the bureaucracy have disappeared. Simmel’s questions were: How do the forms of social life persist? How did they emerge in the first place? What happens when they get fixed and permanent?

Simmel notes that “society exists where a number of individuals enter into interaction” (1908). What he means is that whenever people gather, something happens that would not have happened if the individuals had remained alone. People attune themselves to one another in a way that is very similar to musicians tuning their instruments to one another. A pattern or form of interaction emerges that begins to guide or coordinate the behaviour of the individuals. An example Simmel uses is of a cocktail party where a subtle set of instructions begins to emerge which defines what can and cannot be said. In a cocktail party where the conversation is light and witty, the effect would be jarring of someone suddenly trying to sell you an insurance policy or talking about the spousal abuse they had suffered. The person would be thought of as being crass or inappropriate. Similarly in the pleasant pastime of flirtation, if one of the parties began to press the other to consummate the flirtation by having sex, the flirtation would be over. Flirtation is a form of interaction in which the answer to the question of having sex—yes or no—is perpetually suspended.

In both examples, Simmel argued that the social interaction had taken on a specific form . Both were examples of what he called the play form of social interaction, or pure “sociability”: the pleasure people experience from the mere fact of being together, regardless of the content of the interaction (Simmel 1910). If the cocktail party conversation suddenly turns to a business proposition or an overly personal confession, it is no longer playful. The underlying form of the interaction has been violated, even if the participants were not consciously aware that they had adopted a particular form of interaction. Simmel proposed that sociology would be the study of the social forms that recur in different contexts and with different social contents. The same play form governs the interaction in two different contexts with two different contents of interaction: one is the free-ranging content of polite conversation; the other is sexual desire. Among other common forms that Simmel studied were superiority and subordination, cooperation, competition, division of labour, and money transactions. These forms can be applied in a variety of different contexts to give social form to a variety of different contents or specific drives: erotic, spiritual, acquisitive, defensive, playful, etc. The emphasis on forms is why Simmel called his approach to the study of society “formal sociology.”

Simmel’s focus on how social forms emerge became very important for micro-sociology, symbolic interactionism, and the studies of hotel lobbies, cigarette girls, and street-corner societies, etc. popularized by the Chicago School in the mid-20th century. His analysis of the creation of new social forms was particularly tuned in to capturing the fragmentary everyday experience of modern social life that was bound up with the unprecedented nature and scale of the modern city. In his lifetime, the city of Berlin where he lived and taught for most of his career had become a major European metropolis of 4 million people by 1900, after the unification of Germany in the 1870s. However, his work was not confined to micro-level interactions. He developed an analysis of the tragedy of culture in which he argued that the cultural creations of “subjective culture”—like the emergent social forms created by people in their face-to-face interactions, as well as art, literature, political analyses, etc.—tended to detach themselves from lived experience and become fixed and elaborated in the form of “objective culture”—the accumulated products of human cultural creation. There are intrinsic limits to an individual’s ability to organize, appreciate, and assimilate these forms. As the quantity of objective culture increases and becomes more complex, it becomes progressively more alienating, incomprehensible, and overwhelming. It takes on a life of its own and the individual can no longer see him- or herself reflected in it. Music, for example, can be enriching, but going to an orchestral performance of contemporary music can often be baffling, as if you need an advanced music degree just to be able to understand that what you are hearing is music.

In his famous study “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel described how the built environment and the sheer size and anonymity of the city had become a social form, which he called the “metropolitan way of life.” Although the metropolis, its architecture, and the variety of ways of life it contained were products of human creation and expression, as an entity it confronted the individual as a kind of overwhelming monstrosity that threatened to swallow him or her up in its “social-technological mechanism” (Simmel 1903). As a means of self-protection against the city’s overpowering sensory input, people cut themselves off from potentially enriching contact with others and become cold, callous, indifferent, impatient, and blasé.

Making Connections: Social Policy & Debate

How do working moms impact society.

What constitutes a “typical family” in Canada has changed tremendously over the past decades. One of the most notable changes has been the increasing number of mothers who work outside the home. Earlier in Canadian society, most family households consisted of one parent working outside the home and the other being the primary child care provider. Because of traditional gender roles and family structures, this was typically a working father and a stay-at-home mom. Research shows that in 1951 only 24 percent of all women worked outside the home (Li 1996). In 2009, 58.3 percent of all women did, and 64.4 percent of women with children younger than three years of age were employed (Statistics Canada 2011).

Sociologists interested in this topic might approach its study from a variety of angles. One might be interested in its impact on a child’s development, another may explore its effect on family income, while a third might examine how other social institutions have responded to this shift in society. A sociologist studying the impact of working mothers on a child’s development might ask questions about children raised in child care settings. How is a child socialized differently when raised largely by a child care provider rather than a parent? Do early experiences in a school-like child care setting lead to improved academic performance later in life? How does a child with two working parents perceive gender roles compared to a child raised with a stay-at-home parent? Another sociologist might be interested in the increase in working mothers from an economic perspective. Why do so many households today have dual incomes? Has this changed the income of families substantially? How do women’s dual roles in the household and in the wider economy affect their occupational achievements and ability to participate on an equal basis with men in the workforce? What impact does the larger economy play in the economic conditions of an individual household? Do people view money—savings, spending, debt—differently than they have in the past?

Curiosity about this trend’s influence on social institutions might lead a researcher to explore its effect on the nation’s educational and child care systems. Has the increase in working mothers shifted traditional family responsibilities onto schools, such as providing lunch and even breakfast for students? How does the creation of after-school care programs shift resources away from traditional school programs? What would the effect be of providing a universal, subsidized child care program on the ability of women to pursue uninterrupted careers?

As these examples show, sociologists study many real-world topics. Their research often influences social policies and political issues. Results from sociological studies on this topic might play a role in developing federal policies like the Employment Insurance maternity and parental benefits program, or they might bolster the efforts of an advocacy group striving to reduce social stigmas placed on stay-at-home dads, or they might help governments determine how to best allocate funding for education. Many European countries like Sweden have substantial family support policies, such as a full year of parental leave at 80 percent of wages when a child is born and heavily subsidized, high-quality daycare and preschool programs. In Canada, a national subsidized daycare program existed briefly in 2005 but was scrapped in 2006 by the Conservative government and replaced with a $100-a-month direct payment to parents for each child. Sociologists might be interested in studying whether the benefits of the Swedish system—in terms of children’s well-being, lower family poverty, and gender equality—outweigh the drawbacks of higher Swedish tax rates.

Sociologists study social events, interactions, and patterns. They then develop theories to explain why these occur and what can result from them. In sociology, a theory is a way to explain different aspects of social interactions and create testable propositions about society (Allan 2006). For example, Durkheim’s proposition that differences in suicide rate can be explained by differences in the degree of social integration in different communities is a theory.

As this brief survey of the history of sociology suggests, however, there is considerable diversity in the theoretical approaches sociology takes to studying society. Sociology is a multi-perspectival science : a number of distinct perspectives or paradigms offer competing explanations of social phenomena. Paradigms are philosophical and theoretical frameworks used within a discipline to formulate theories, generalizations, and the research performed in support of them. They refer to the underlying organizing principles that tie different constellations of concepts, theories, and ways of formulating problems together (Drengson 1983). Talcott Parsons’ reformulation of Durkheim’s and others work as structural functionalism in the 1950s is an example of a paradigm because it provided a general model of analysis suited to an unlimited number of research topics. Parsons proposed that any identifiable structure (e.g., roles, families, religions, or states) could be explained by the particular function it performed in maintaining the operation of society as a whole. Critical sociology and symbolic interactionism would formulate the explanatory framework and research problem differently.

The multi-perspectival approach of sociology can be confusing to the newcomer, especially given most people’s familiarity with the more “unified perspective” of the natural sciences where divisions in perspective are less visible. The natural sciences are largely able to dispense with issues of multiple perspective and build cumulative explanations based on the “facts” because the objects they study are indifferent to their observation. The chemical composition and behaviour of a protein can be assumed to be the same wherever it is observed and by whomever it is observed. The same cannot be said of social phenomena, which are mediated by meanings and interpretations, divided by politics and value orientations, subject to historical change and human agency, characterized by contradictions and reconciliations, and transfigured if they are observed at a micro or macro-level. Social reality is different , depending on the historical moment, the perspective, and the criteria from which it is viewed.

Nevertheless, the different sociological paradigms do rest on a form of knowledge that is scientific, if science is taken in the broad sense to mean the use of reasoned argument, the ability to see the general in the particular, and the reliance on evidence from systematic observation of social reality. Within this general scientific framework, however, sociology is broken into the same divisions that separate the forms of modern knowledge more generally. By the time of the Enlightenment the unified perspective of Christendom had broken into three distinct spheres of knowledge: the natural sciences, hermeneutics (or interpretive sciences), and critique (Habermas 1972). Sociology is similarly divided into three types of sociological knowledge, each with its own strengths, limitations, and practical uses: positivist sociology , interpretive sociology , and critical sociology . Within these three types of sociological knowledge, four paradigms have come to dominate sociological thinking: structural functionalism , critical sociology , feminism , and symbolic interactionism .

The positivist perspective in sociology—introduced above with regard to the pioneers of the discipline August Comte and Émile Durkheim—is most closely aligned with the forms of knowledge associated with the natural sciences. The emphasis is on empirical observation and measurement (i.e., observation through the senses), value neutrality or objectivity, and the search for law-like statements about the social world (analogous to Newton’s laws of gravity for the natural world). Since mathematics and statistical operations are the main forms of logical demonstration in the natural scientific explanation, positivism relies on translating human phenomena into quantifiable units of measurement. It regards the social world as an objective or “positive” reality, in no essential respects different from the natural world. Positivism is oriented to developing a knowledge useful for controlling or administering social life, which explains its ties to the projects of social engineering going back to Comte’s original vision for sociology. Two forms of positivism have been dominant in sociology since the 1940s: quantitative sociology and structural functionalism .

Quantitative Sociology

In contemporary sociology, positivism is based on four main “rules” that define what constitutes valid knowledge and what types of questions may be reasonably asked (Bryant 1985):

The rule of empiricism: We can only know about things that are actually given in experience. We cannot validly make claims about things that are invisible, unobservable, or supersensible like metaphysical, spiritual, or moral truths.
The rule of value neutrality: Scientists should remain value-neutral in their research because it follows from the rule of empiricism that “values” have no empirical content that would allow their validity to be scientifically tested.
The unity of the scientific method: All sciences have the same basic principles and practices whether their object is natural or human.
Law-like statements: The type of explanation sought by scientific inquiry is the formulation of general laws (like the law of gravity) to explain specific phenomena (like the falling of a stone).

Much of what is referred to today as quantitative sociology fits within this paradigm of positivism. Quantitative sociology uses statistical methods such as surveys with large numbers of participants. Researchers analyze data using statistical techniques to see if they can uncover patterns of human behaviour. Law-like relationships between variables are often posed in the form of statistical relationships or multiple linear regression formulas that quantify the degree of influence different causal or independent variables have on a particular outcome (or dependent variable). For example, the degree of religiosity of an individual in Canada, measured by the frequency of church attendance or religious practice, can be predicted by a combination of different independent variables such as age, gender, income, immigrant status, and region (Bibby 2012).

Structural Functionalism

Structural Functionalism also falls within the positivist tradition in sociology due to Durkheim’s early efforts to describe the subject matter of sociology in terms of objective social facts —“social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual” (Durkheim 1895)—and to explain them in terms of their social functions. Durkheim argued that in order to study society, sociologists have to look beyond individuals to social facts: the laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and all of the cultural rules that govern social life (Durkheim 1895). Each of these social facts serves one or more functions within a society. For example, one function of a society’s laws may be to protect society from violence, while another is to punish criminal behaviour, while another is to preserve public health.

Following Durkheim’s insight, structural functionalism sees society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of individuals who make up that society. In this respect, society is like a body that relies on different organs to perform crucial functions. In fact the English philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) likened society to a human body. He argued that just as the various organs in the body work together to keep the entire system functioning and regulated, the various parts of society work together to keep the entire society functioning and regulated (Spencer 1898). By parts of society, Spencer was referring to such social institutions as the economy, political systems, health care, education, media, and religion. Spencer continued the analogy by pointing out that societies evolve just as the bodies of humans and other animals do (Maryanski and Turner 1992).

As we have seen, Émile Durkheim developed a similar analogy to explain the structure of societies and how they change and survive over time. Durkheim believed that earlier, more primitive societies were held together because most people performed similar tasks and shared values, language, and symbols. There was a low division of labour, a common religious system of social beliefs, and a low degree of individual autonomy. Society was held together on the basis of mechanical solidarity : a shared collective consciousness with harsh punishment for deviation from the norms. Modern societies, according to Durkheim, were more complex. People served many different functions in society and their ability to carry out their function depended upon others being able to carry out theirs. Modern society was held together on the basis of a division of labour or organic solidarity: a complex system of interrelated parts, working together to maintain stability, i.e., an organism (Durkheim 1893). According to this sociological paradigm, the parts of society are interdependent. The academic relies on the mechanic for the specialized skills required to fix his or her car, the mechanic sends his or her children to university to learn from the academic, and both rely on the baker to provide them with bread for their morning toast. Each part influences and relies on the others.

According to American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1881–1955), in a healthy society, all of these parts work together to produce a stable state called dynamic equilibrium (Parsons 1961). Parsons was a key figure in systematizing Durkheim’s views in the 1940s and 1950s. He argued that a sociological approach to social phenomena must emphasize the systematic nature of society at all levels of social existence: the relation of definable “structures” to their “functions” in relation to the needs or “maintenance” of the system. His AGIL schema provided a useful analytical grid for sociological theory in which an individual, an institution, or an entire society could be seen as a system composed of structures that satisfied four primary functions:

Adaptation (A): how the system adapts to its environment
Goal attainment (G): how the system determines what its goals are and how it will attain them
Integration (I): how the system integrates its members into harmonious participation and social cohesion
(Latent) Pattern Maintenance (L): how basic cultural patterns, values, belief systems, etc. are regulated and maintained

So for example, the social system as a whole relied on the economy to distribute goods and services as its means of adaptation to the natural environment; on the political system to make decisions as it means of goal attainment ; on roles and norms to regulate social behaviour as its means of social integration; and on culture to institutionalize and reproduce common values as its means of latent pattern maintenance. Following Durkheim, he argued that these explanations of social functions had to be made at the level of systems and not involve the specific wants and needs of individuals. In a system, there is an interrelation of component parts where a change in one component affects the others regardless of the perspectives of individuals.

Another noted structural functionalist, Robert Merton (1910–2003), pointed out that social processes often have many functions. Manifest functions are the consequences of a social process that are sought or anticipated, while latent functions are the unsought consequences of a social process. A manifest function of college education, for example, includes gaining knowledge, preparing for a career, and finding a good job that utilizes that education. Latent functions of your college years include meeting new people, participating in extracurricular activities, or even finding a spouse or partner. Another latent function of education is creating a hierarchy of employment based on the level of education attained. Latent functions can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful. Social processes that have undesirable consequences for the operation of society are called dysfunctions . In education, examples of dysfunction include getting bad grades, truancy, dropping out, not graduating, and not finding suitable employment.

The main criticisms of both quantitative positivism and structural functionalism have to do with the way in which social phenomena are turned into objective social facts. On one hand, interpretive sociology suggests that the quantification of variables in quantitative sociology reduces the rich complexity and ambiguity of social life to an abstract set of numbers and statistical relationships that cannot capture the meaning it holds for individuals. Measuring someone’s depth of religious belief or “religiosity” by the number of times they attend church in a week explains very little about the religious experience. Similarly, interpretive sociology argues that structural functionalism , with its emphasis on systems of structures and functions tends to reduce the individual to the status of a sociological dupe, assuming pre-assigned roles and functions without any individual agency or capacity for self-creation.

On the other hand, critical sociology challenges the conservative tendencies of quantitative sociology and structural functionalism. Both types of positivist analysis represent themselves as being objective, or value-neutral, which is a problem in the context of critical sociology’s advocacy for social justice. However, both types of positivism also have conservative assumptions built into their basic approach to social facts. The focus in quantitative sociology on observable facts and law-like statements presents a historical and deterministic picture of the world that cannot account for the underlying historical dynamics of power relationships and class or other contradictions. One can empirically observe the trees but not the forest so to speak. Similarly, the focus on the needs and the smooth functioning of social systems in structural functionalism supports a conservative viewpoint because it tends to see the functioning and dynamic equilibrium of society as good or normal, whereas change is pathological. In Davis and Moore’s famous essay “Some Principles of Stratification” (1944) for example, the authos argued that social inequality was essentially “good” because it functioned to preserve the motivation of individuals to work hard to get ahead. Critical sociology challenges both the justice and practical consequences of social inequality.

Table 1.1. Sociological Theories or Perspectives. Different sociological perspectives enable sociologists to view social issues through a variety of useful lenses.

Interpretive Sociology

The interpretive perspective in sociology is aligned with the hermeneutic traditions of the humanities like literature, philosophy, and history. The focus is on understanding or interpreting human activity in terms of the meanings that humans attribute to it. Max Weber’s Verstehende (understanding) sociology is often cited as the origin of this perspective in sociology because of his emphasis on the centrality of meaning and intention in social action:

Sociology… is a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects. In “action” is included all human behaviour when and in so far as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to it…. [Social action is] action mutually oriented to that of each other (Weber 1922).

This emphasis on the meaningfulness of social action is taken up later by phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interactionism. The interpretive perspective is concerned with developing a knowledge of social interaction as a meaning-oriented practice. It promotes the goal of greater mutual understanding and the possibility of consensus among members of society.

Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic interactionism provides a theoretical perspective that helps scholars examine the relationship of individuals within their society. This perspective is centred on the notion that communication—or the exchange of meaning through language and symbols—is how people make sense of their social worlds. As pointed out by Herman and Reynolds (1994), this viewpoint sees people as active in shaping their world, rather than as entities who are acted upon by society (Herman and Reynolds 1994). This approach looks at society and people from a micro-level perspective.

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) is considered one of the founders of symbolic interactionism. His work in Mind, Self and Society (1934) on the “self” as a social structure and on the stages of child development as a sequence of role-playing capacities provides the classic analyses of the perspective.

His student Herbert Blumer (1900–1987) synthesized Mead’s work and popularized the theory. Blumer coined the term “symbolic interactionism” and identified its three basic premises:

Humans act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things.
The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society.
These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he or she encounters (Blumer 1969).

In other words, human interaction is not determined in the same manner as natural events. Nor do people directly react to each other as forces acting upon forces or as stimuli provoking automatic responses. Rather people interact indirectly , by interpreting the meaning of each other’s actions, gestures, or words. Interaction is symbolic in the sense that it occurs through the mediation, exchange, and interpretation of symbols. One person’s action refers beyond itself to a meaning that calls out for the response of the other: it indicates what the receiver is supposed to do; it indicates what the actor intends to do; and together they form a mutual definition of the situation, which enables joint action to take place. Social life can be seen as the stringing together or aligning of multiple joint actions.

Social scientists who apply symbolic-interactionist thinking look for patterns of interaction between individuals. Their studies often involve observation of one-on-one interactions. For example, while a structural functionalist studying a political protest might focus on the function protest plays in realigning the priorities of the political system, a symbolic interactionist would be more interested in seeing the ways in which individuals in the protesting group interact, or how the signs and symbols protesters use enable a common definition of the situation—e.g., an environmental or social justice “issue”—to get established.

The focus on the importance of symbols in building a society led sociologists like Erving Goffman (1922–1982) to develop a framework called dramaturgical analysis . Goffman used theatre as an analogy for social interaction and recognized that people’s interactions showed patterns of cultural “scripts.” In social encounters, individuals make a claim for a positive social status within the group—they present a “face”—but it is never certain that their audience will accept their claim. There is always the possibility that individuals will make a gaff that prevents them from successfully maintaining face. They have to manage the impression they are making in the same way and often using the same type of “props” as an actor. Moreover, because it can be unclear what part a person may play in a given situation, he or she has to improvise his or her role as the situation unfolds. This led to Goffman’s focus on the ritual nature of social interaction—the way in which the “scripts” of social encounters become routine, repetitive, and unconscious. Nevertheless, the emphasis in Goffman’s analysis, as in symbolic interactionism as a whole, is that the social encounter, and social reality itself, is open and unpredictable. Social reality is not predetermined by structures, functions, roles, or history (Goffman 1958).

Symbolic interactionism has also been important in bringing to light the experiences and worlds of individuals who are typically excluded from official accounts of the world. Howard Becker’s Outsiders (1963) for example described the process of labelling in which individuals come to be characterized or labelled as deviants by authorities. The sequence of events in which a young person is picked up by police for an offence, defined as a “young offender,” processed by the criminal justice system, and then introduced to the criminal subculture through contact with experienced convicts is told from the subjective point of view of the young person. The significance of labelling theory is to show that individuals are not born deviant or criminal, but become criminal through an institutionalized symbolic interaction with authorities. As Becker says:

… social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction creates deviance , and by applying those roles to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by other of rules and sanctions to an “offender.” The deviant is one to whom that label has been successfully applied; deviant behavior is behaviour that people so label (1963).

Studies that use the symbolic interactionist perspective are more likely to use qualitative research methods, such as in-depth interviews or participant observation, because they seek to understand the symbolic worlds in which research subjects live.

Research done from this perspective is often scrutinized because of the difficulty of remaining objective. Others criticize the extremely narrow focus on symbolic interaction. Proponents, of course, consider this one of its greatest strengths.

One of the problems of sociology that focuses on micro-level interactions is that it is difficult to generalize from very specific situations, involving very few individuals, to make social scientific claims about the nature of society as a whole. The danger is that, while the rich texture of face-to-face social life can be examined in detail, the results will remain purely descriptive without any explanatory or analytical strength. In a similar fashion, it is very difficult to get at the historical context or relations of power that structure or condition face-to-face symbolic interactions. The perspective on social life as an unstructured and unconstrained domain of agency and subjective meanings has difficulty accounting for the ways that social life does become structured and constrained.

Making Connections: The Big Picture

A global culture.

Sociologists around the world are looking closely for signs of what would be an unprecedented event: the emergence of a global culture. In the past, empires such as those that existed in China, Europe, Africa, and Central and South America linked people from many different countries, but those people rarely became part of a common culture. They lived too far from each other, spoke different languages, practised different religions, and traded few goods. Today, increases in communication, travel, and trade have made the world a much smaller place. More and more people are able to communicate with each other instantly—wherever they are located—by telephone, video, and text. They share movies, television shows, music, games, and information over the internet. Students can study with teachers and pupils from the other side of the globe. Governments find it harder to hide conditions inside their countries from the rest of the world.

Sociologists are researching many different aspects of this potential global culture. Some are exploring the dynamics involved in the social interactions of global online communities, such as when members feel a closer kinship to other group members than to people residing in their own country. Other sociologists are studying the impact this growing international culture has on smaller, less-powerful local cultures. Yet other researchers are exploring how international markets and the outsourcing of labour impact social inequalities. Sociology can play a key role in people’s ability to understand the nature of this emerging global culture and how to respond to it.

Critical Sociology

The critical perspective in sociology has its origins in social activism, social justice movements, revolutionary struggles, and radical critique. As Karl Marx put it, its focus was the “ruthless critique of everything existing” (Marx 1843). The key elements of this analysis are the emphases on power relations and the understanding of society as historical—subject to change, struggle, contradiction, instability, social movement and radical transformation. Rather than objectivity and value neutrality, the tradition of critical sociology promotes practices of liberation and social change in order to achieve universal social justice. As Marx stated, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (1845). This is why it is misleading to call critical sociology “conflict theory” as some introductory textbooks do. While conflict is certainly central to the critical analyses of power and domination, the focus of critical sociology is on developing types of knowledge and political action that enable emancipation from power relations (i.e., from the conditions of conflict in society). Historical materialism, feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism, queer studies, and poststructuralism are all examples of the critical perspective in sociology.

One of the outcomes of a systematic analysis such as these is that it generates questions about the relationship between our everyday life and issues concerning social justice and environmental sustainability. In line with the philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment, critical sociology is sociology with an “emancipatory interest” (Habermas 1972); that is, a sociology that seeks not simply to understand or describe the world, but to use sociological knowledge to change and improve the world, to emancipate people from conditions of servitude. What does the word critical mean in this context? Critical sociologists argue that it is important to understand that the critical tradition in sociology is not about complaining or being “negative.” Nor is it about adopting a moral position from which to judge people or society. It is not about being “subjective” or “biased” as opposed to “objective.” As Herbert Marcuse put it in One Dimensional Man (1964), critical sociology involves two value judgments:

The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather that it can be and ought to be made worth living
The judgment that, in a given society, specific possibilities exist for the amelioration of human life and specific ways and means of realizing these possibilities

Critical sociology therefore rejects the notion of a value-free social science, but does not thereby become a moral exercise or an individual “subjective” value preference as a result. Being critical in the context of sociology is about using objective, empirical knowledge to assess the possibilities and barriers to improving or “ameliorating” human life.

Historical Materialism

The tradition of historical materialism that developed from Karl Marx’s work is one of the central frameworks of critical sociology. As we noted in the discussion of Marx above, historical materialism concentrates on the study of how our everyday lives are structured by the connection between relations of power and economic processes. The basis of this approach begins with the macro-level question of how specific relations of power and specific economic formations have developed historically. These form the context in which the institutions, practices, beliefs, and social rules (norms) of everyday life are situated. The elements that make up a culture—a society’s shared practices, values, beliefs, and artifacts—are structured by the society’s economic mode of production : the way human societies act upon their environment and its resources in order to use them to meet their needs. Hunter-gatherer, agrarian, feudal, and capitalist modes of production have been the economic basis for very different types of society throughout world history.

It is not as if this relationship is always clear to the people living in these different periods of history, however. Often the mechanisms and structures of social life are obscure. For example, it might not have been clear to the Scots who were expelled from their ancestral lands in Scotland during the Highland clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries and who emigrated to the Red River settlements in Rupert’s Land (now Manitoba) that they were living through the epochal transformation from feudalism to capitalism. This transition was nevertheless the context for the decisions individuals and families made to emigrate from Scotland and attempt to found the Red River Colony. It might also not have been clear to them that they were participating in the development of colonial power relationships between the indigenous people of North America and the Europeans that persist up until today. Through contact with the Scots and the French fur traders, the Cree and Anishinabe were gradually drawn out of their own indigenous modes of production and into the developing global capitalist economy as fur trappers and provisioners for the early European settlements. It was a process that eventually led to the loss of control over their lands, the destruction of their way of life, the devastating spread of European diseases, the imposition of the Indian Act, the establishment of the residential school system, institutional and everyday racism, and an enduring legacy of intractable social problems.

In a similar way, historical materialism analyzes the constraints that define the way individuals review their options and make their decisions in present-day society. From the types of career to pursue to the number of children to have, the decisions and practices of everyday life must be understood in terms of the 20th century shift to corporate ownership and the 21st century context of globalization in which corporate decisions about investments are made.

The historical materialist approach emphasizes three components (Naiman 2012). The first is that everything in society is related—it is not possible to study social processes in isolation. The second is that everything in society is dynamic (i.e., in a process of continuous social change). It is not possible to study social processes as if they existed outside of history. The third is that the tensions that form around relationships of power and inequality in society are the key drivers of social change. In the language of Marx, these tensions are based on “contradictions” built into the organization of the economic or material relationships that structure our livelihoods, our relationships to each other, our relationship to the environment, and our place within the global community. It is not possible to study social processes as if they were independent of the historical formations of power that both structure them and destabilize them.

Another major school of critical sociology is feminism. From the early work of women sociologists like Harriet Martineau, feminist sociology has focused on the power relationships and inequalities between women and men. How can the conditions of inequality faced by women be addressed? As Harriet Martineau put it in Society in America (1837):

All women should inform themselves of the condition of their sex, and of their own position. It must necessarily follow that the noblest of them will, sooner or later, put forth a moral power which shall prostrate cant [hypocracy], and burst asunder the bonds (silken to some but cold iron to others) of feudal prejudice and usages. In the meantime is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race? If so, what is the ground of this limitation?

Feminist sociology focuses on analyzing the grounds of the limitations faced by women when they claim the right to equality with men.

Inequality between the genders is a phenomenon that goes back at least 4,000 years (Lerner 1986). Although the forms and ways in which it has been practised differ between cultures and change significantly through history, its persistence has led to the formulation of the concept of patriarchy. Patriarchy refers to a set of institutional structures (like property rights, access to positions of power, relationship to sources of income) that are based on the belief that men and women are dichotomous and unequal categories. Key to patriarchy is what might be called the dominant gender ideology toward sexual differences: the assumption that physiological sex differences between males and females are related to differences in their character, behaviour, and ability (i.e., their gender). These differences are used to justify a gendered division of social roles and inequality in access to rewards, positions of power, and privilege. The question that feminists ask therefore is: How does this distinction between male and female, and the attribution of different qualities to each, serve to organize our institutions (e.g., the family, law, the occupational structure, religious institutions, the division between public and private) and to perpetuate inequality between the sexes?

Feminism is a distinct type of critical sociology. There are considerable differences between types of feminism, however; for example, the differences often attributed to the first wave of feminism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the second wave of feminism from the 1950s to the 1970s, and the third wave of feminism from the 1980s onward. Despite the variations between different types of feminist approach, there are four characteristics that are common to the feminist perspective:

Gender is a central focus or subject matter of the perspective.
Gender relations are viewed as a problem: the site of social inequities, strains, and contradictions.
Gender relations are not immutable: they are sociological and historical in nature, subject to change and progress.
Feminism is about an emancipatory commitment to change: the conditions of life that are oppressive for women need to be transformed.

One of the keen sociological insights that emerged with the feminist perspective in sociology is that “the personal is political.” Many of the most immediate and fundamental experiences of social life—from childbirth to who washes the dishes to the experience of sexual violence—had simply been invisible or regarded as unimportant politically or socially. Dorothy Smith’s development of standpoint theory was a key innovation in sociology that enabled these issues to be seen and addressed in a systematic way (Smith 1977). She recognized from the consciousness-raising exercises and encounter groups initiated by feminists in the 1960s and1970s that many of the immediate concerns expressed by women about their personal lives had a commonality of themes. These themes were nevertheless difficult to articulate in sociological terms let alone in the language of politics or law.

Part of the issue was sociology itself. Smith argued that instead of beginning sociological analysis from the abstract point of view of institutions or systems, women’s lives could be more effectively examined if one began from the “actualities” of their lived experience in the immediate local settings of “everyday/everynight” life. She asked, What are the common features of women’s everyday lives? From this standpoint, Smith observed that women’s position in modern society is acutely divided by the experience of dual consciousness . Every day women crossed a tangible dividing line when they went from the “particularizing work in relation to children, spouse, and household” to the institutional world of text-mediated, abstract concerns at work, or in their dealings with schools, medical systems, or government bureaucracies. In the abstract world of institutional life, the actualities of local consciousness and lived life are “obliterated” (Smith 1977). While the standpoint of women is grounded in bodily, localized, “here and now” relationships between people, due to their obligations in the domestic sphere, society is organized through “relations of ruling,” which translate the substance of actual lived experiences into abstract bureaucratic categories. Power and rule in society, especially the power and rule that constrain and coordinate the lives of women, operate through a problematic “move into transcendence” that provides accounts of social life as if it were possible to stand outside of it. Smith argued that the abstract concepts of sociology, at least in the way that it was taught at the time, only contributed to the problem.

Whereas critical sociologists often criticize positivist and interpretive sociology for their conservative biases, the reverse is also true. In part the issue is about whether sociology can be “objective,” or value-neutral, or not. However, at a deeper level the criticism is often aimed at the radical nature of critical analyses. Marx’s critique of capitalism and the feminist critique of patriarchy for example led to very interesting insights into how structures of power and inequality work, but from a point of view that sees only the most revolutionary transformation of society as a solution.

Critical sociology is also criticized from the point of view of interpretive sociology for overstating the power of dominant groups to manipulate subordinate groups. For example, media representations of women are said to promote unobtainable standards of beauty or to reduce women to objects of male desire. This type of critique suggests that individuals are controlled by media images rather than recognizing their independent ability to reject media influences or to interpret media images for themselves. In a similar way, critical sociology is criticized for implying that people are purely the products of macro-level historical forces rather than individuals with a capacity for individual and collective agency. To be fair, Marx did argue that “Men make their own history;” it is just that they “do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances encountered, given, and transmitted from the past” (Marx 1851).

Farming and Locavores: How Sociological Perspectives Might View Food Consumption

The consumption of food is a commonplace, daily occurrence, yet it can also be associated with important moments in our lives. Eating can be an individual or a group action, and eating habits and customs are influenced by our cultures. In the context of society, our nation’s food system is at the core of numerous social movements, political issues, and economic debates. Any of these factors might become a topic of sociological study.

A structural-functional approach to the topic of food consumption might be interested in the role of the agriculture industry within the nation’s economy and how this has changed from the early days of manual-labour farming to modern mechanized production. Food production is a primary example of how human systems adapt to environmental systems. In many respects the concerns of environmentalists and others with respect to the destructive relationship between industrial agriculture and the ecosystem are the results of a dysfunctional system of adaptation. The concept of sustainable agriculture points to the changes needed to return the interface between humans and the natural environment to a state of dynamic equilibrium.

A sociologist viewing food consumption through a symbolic interactionist lens would be more interested in micro-level topics, such as the symbolic use of food in religious rituals, or the role it plays in the social interaction of a family dinner. This perspective might also study the interactions among group members who identify themselves based on their sharing a particular diet, such as vegetarians (people who don’t eat meat) or locavores (people who strive to eat locally produced food). The increasing concern that people have with their diets speaks to the way that the life of the biological body is as much a symbolic reality, interpreted within contemporary discourses on health risks and beauty, as it is a biological reality.

A critical sociologist might be interested in the power differentials present in the regulation of food, exploring where people’s right to information intersects with corporations’ drive for profit and how the government mediates those interests. Or a critical sociologist might be interested in the power and powerlessness experienced by local farmers versus large farming conglomerates. In the documentary Food Inc., the plight of farmers resulting from Monsanto’s patenting of seed technology is depicted as a product of the corporatization of the food industry. Another topic of study might be how nutrition varies between different social classes.

When Bernard Blishen picked up the phone one day in 1961, he was surprised to hear Chief Justice Emmett Hall on the other end of the line asking him to be the research director for the newly established Royal Commission on Health Services. Publically funded health care had been introduced for the first time in Canada that year by a socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) government in Saskatchewan amid bitter controversy. Doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike and private health care insurers mounted an expensive anti-public health care campaign. Because it was a Conservative government commission, appointed by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, Blishen’s colleagues advised him that it was going to be a whitewash document to defend the interests of private medical care. However, Blishen took on the project as a challenge, and when the commission’s report was published it advocated that the Saskatchewan plan be adopted nationally (Vaughan 2004).

Blishen went on to work in the field of medical sociology and also created a widely used index to measure socioeconomic status known as the Blishen scale. He received the Order of Canada in 2011 in recognition of his contributions to the creation of public health care in Canada.

Since it was first founded, many people interested in sociology have been driven by the scholarly desire to contribute knowledge to this field, while others have seen it as way not only to study society, but also to improve it. Besides the creation of public health care in Canada, sociology has played a crucial role in many important social reforms such as equal opportunity for women in the workplace, improved treatment for individuals with mental and learning disabilities, increased recognition and accommodation for people from different ethnic backgrounds, the creation of hate crime legislation, the right of aboriginal populations to preserve their land and culture, and prison system reforms.

The prominent sociologist Peter L. Berger (1929– ), in his 1963 book Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective , describes a sociologist as “someone concerned with understanding society in a disciplined way.” He asserts that sociologists have a natural interest in the monumental moments of people’s lives, as well as a fascination with banal, everyday occurrences. Berger also describes the “aha” moment when a sociological theory becomes applicable and understood:

[T]here is a deceptive simplicity and obviousness about some sociological investigations. One reads them, nods at the familiar scene, remarks that one has heard all this before and don’t people have better things to do than to waste their time on truisms—until one is suddenly brought up against an insight that radically questions everything one had previously assumed about this familiar scene. This is the point at which one begins to sense the excitement of sociology (Berger 1963).

Sociology can be exciting because it teaches people ways to recognize how they fit into the world and how others perceive them. Looking at themselves and society from a sociological perspective helps people see where they connect to different groups based on the many different ways they classify themselves and how society classifies them in turn. It raises awareness of how those classifications—such as economic and status levels, education, ethnicity, or sexual orientation—affect perceptions.

Sociology teaches people not to accept easy explanations. It teaches them a way to organize their thinking so that they can ask better questions and formulate better answers. It makes people more aware that there are many different kinds of people in the world who do not necessarily think the way they do. It increases their willingness and ability to try to see the world from other people’s perspectives. This prepares them to live and work in an increasingly diverse and integrated world.

Sociology in the Workplace

Employers continue to seek people with what are called “transferable skills.” This means that they want to hire people whose knowledge and education can be applied in a variety of settings and whose skills will contribute to various tasks. Studying sociology can provide people with this wide knowledge and a skill set that can contribute to many workplaces, including:

An understanding of social systems and large bureaucracies
The ability to devise and carry out research projects to assess whether a program or policy is working
The ability to collect, read, and analyze statistical information from polls or surveys
The ability to recognize important differences in people’s social, cultural, and economic backgrounds
Skills in preparing reports and communicating complex ideas
The capacity for critical thinking about social issues and problems that confront modern society (Department of Sociology, University of Alabama)

Sociology prepares people for a wide variety of careers. Besides actually conducting social research or training others in the field, people who graduate from college with a degree in sociology are hired by government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations in fields such as social services, counselling (e.g., family planning, career, substance abuse), designing and evaluating social policies and programs, health services, polling and independent research, market research, and human resources management. Even a small amount of training in sociology can be an asset in careers like sales, public relations, journalism, teaching, law, and criminal justice.

Please “Friend” Me: Students and Social Networking

The phenomenon known as Facebook was designed specifically for students. Whereas earlier generations wrote notes in each other’s printed yearbooks at the end of the academic year, modern technology and the internet ushered in dynamic new ways for people to interact socially. Instead of having to meet up on campus, students can call, text, and Skype from their dorm rooms. Instead of a study group gathering weekly in the library, online forums and chat rooms help learners connect. The availability and immediacy of computer technology has forever changed the ways students engage with each other.

Now, after several social networks have vied for primacy, a few have established their place in the market and some have attracted niche audience. While Facebook launched the social networking trend geared toward teens and young adults, now people of all ages are actively “friending” each other. LinkedIn distinguished itself by focusing on professional connections, serving as a virtual world for workplace networking. Newer offshoots like Foursquare help people connect based on the real-world places they frequent, while Twitter has cornered the market on brevity.

These newer modes of social interaction have also spawned questionable consequences, such as cyberbullying and what some call FAD, or Facebook addiction disorder. In an international study of smartphone users aged 18 to 30, 60 percent say they are “compulsive” about checking their smartphones and 42 percent admit to feeling “anxious” when disconnected; 75 percent check their smartphones in bed; more than 33 percent check them in the bathroom and 46 percent email and check social media while eating (Cisco 2012). An International Data Corporation (IDC) study of 7,446 smartphone users aged 18 to 44 in the United States in 2012 found that:

Half of the U.S. population have smartphones and of those 70 percent use Facebook. Using Facebook is the third most common smartphone activity, behind email (78 percent) and web browsing (73 percent).
61 percent of smartphone users check Facebook every day.
62 percent of smartphone users check their device first thing on waking up in the morning and 79 percent check within 15 minutes. Among 18-to-24-year-olds the figures are 74 percent and 89 percent, respectively.
Smartphone users check Facebook approximately 14 times a day.
84 percent of the time using smartphones is spent on texting, emailing and using social media like Facebook, whereas only 16 percent of the time is spent on phone calls. People spend an average of 132 minutes a day on their smartphones including 33 minutes on Facebook.
People use Facebook throughout the day, even in places where they are not supposed to: 46 percent use Facebook while doing errands and shopping; 47 percent when they are eating out; 48 percent while working out; 46 percent in meetings or class; and 50 percent while at the movies.

The study noted that the dominant feeling the survey group reported was “a sense of feeling connected” (IDC 2012). Yet, in the international study cited above, two-thirds of 18- to 30-year-old smartphone users said they spend more time with friends online than they do in person.

All of these social networks demonstrate emerging ways that people interact, whether positive or negative. Sociologists ask whether there might be long-term effects of replacing face-to-face interaction with social media. In an interview on the Conan O’Brian Show that ironically circulated widely through social media, the comedian Louis CK described the use of smartphones as “toxic.” They do not allow for children who use them to build skills of empathy because the children do not interact face to face, or see the effects their comments have on others. Moreover, he argues, they do not allow people to be alone with their feelings. “The thing is, you need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away” (NewsComAu 2013). What do you think? How do social media like Facebook and communication technologies like smartphones change the way we communicate? How could this question be studied?

AGIL schema Talcott Parsons’ division of society into four functional requisites: A daptation, G oal attainment, I ntegration, and L atent pattern maintenance

anomie a social condition or normlessness in which a lack of clear norms fails to give direction and purpose to individual actions

capitalism an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership and production of goods and their sale in a competitive market

content the specific reasons or drives that motivate individuals to interact

critical sociology a theoretical perspective that focuses on inequality and power relations in society in order to achieve social justice and emancipation through their transformation

culture includes the group’s shared practices, values, beliefs, norms and artifacts

disenchantment of the world the replacement of magical thinking by technological rationality and calculation

dominant gender ideology the belief that physiological sex differences between males and females are related to differences in their character, behaviour, and ability

dramaturgical analysis a technique sociologists use in which they view society through the metaphor of theatrical performance

dual consciousness the experience of a fissure or dividing point in everyday life where one crosses a line between irreconcilable forms of consciousness or perspective

dynamic equilibrium a stable state in which all parts of a healthy society are working together properly

dysfunctions social patterns that have undesirable consequences for the operation of society

feminism the critical analysis of the way gender differences in society structure social inequality

figuration the process of simultaneously analyzing the behaviour of an individual and the society that shapes that behaviour

formal sociology a sociology that analytically separates the contents from the forms of social interaction to study the common forms that guide human behaviour

function the part a recurrent activity plays in the social life as a whole and the contribution it makes to structural continuity

functionalism (functionalist perspective) a theoretical approach that sees society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of individuals that make up that society

historical materialism an approach to understanding society that explains social change, human ideas, and social organization in terms of underlying changes in the economic (or material) structure of society

idealism an approach to understanding society that emphasizes that the nature of society and social change is determined by a society’s ideas, knowledge, and beliefs

idealist one who believes in idealism

interpretive sociology a perspective that explains human behaviour in terms of the meanings individuals attribute to it

labelling a social process in which an individual’s social identity is established through the imposition of a definition by authorities

latent functions the unrecognized or unintended consequences of a social process

law of three stages the three stages of evolution that societies develop through: theological, metaphysical, and positive

macro-sociology a wide-scale view of the role of social structures within a society

manifest functions sought consequences of a social process

mechanical solidarity social solidarity or cohesion through a shared collective consciousness with harsh punishment for deviation from the norms

metaphysical stage a stage of social evolution in which people explain events in terms of abstract or speculative ideas

micro-sociology the study of specific relationships between individuals or small groups

mode of production the way human societies act upon their environment and its resources in order to use them to meet their needs

multi-perspectival science a science that is divided into competing or diverse paradigms

organic solidarity social solidarity or cohesion through a complex division of labour and restitutive law

paradigms philosophical and theoretical frameworks used within a discipline to formulate theories, generalizations, and the experiments performed in support of them

patriarchy institutions of male power in society

positive stage a stage of social evolution in which people explain events in terms of scientific principles and laws

positivism (positivist perspective or positivist sociology) the scientific study of social patterns based on methodological principles of the natural sciences

Protestant ethic the duty to work hard in one’s calling

quantitative sociology statistical methods such as surveys with large numbers of participants

rationalization the general tendency of modern institutions and most areas of life to be transformed by the application of instrumental reason

reification referring to abstract concepts, complex processes or mutable social relationships as “things”

social action actions to which individuals attach subjective meanings

social facts the external laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and cultural rules that govern social life

social reform an approach to social change that advocates slow, incremental improvements in social institutions rather than rapid, revolutionary change of society as a whole

social solidarity the social ties that bind a group of people together such as kinship, shared location, and religion

society is a group of people whose members interact, reside in a definable area, and share a culture

sociological imagination the ability to understand how your own unique circumstances relate to that of other people, as well as to history in general and societal structures in particular

sociology the systematic study of society and social interaction

standpoint theory the examination of how society is organized and coordinated from the perspective of a particular social location or perspective in society

structural functionalism see functionalism

symbolic interactionism a theoretical perspective through which scholars examine the relationship of individuals within their society by studying their communication (language and symbols)

theological stage a stage of social evolution in which people explain events with respect to the will of God or gods

theory a proposed explanation about social interactions or society

tragedy of culture the tendency for the products of human cultural creation to accumulate and become increasingly complex, specialized, alienating, or oppressive

Verstehen German for “understanding”; in sociology it refers to the use of empathy, or putting oneself in another’s place, to understand the motives and logic of another’s action

Section Summary

1.1. What Is Sociology? Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction. In order to carry out their studies, sociologists identify cultural patterns and social forces and determine how they affect individuals and groups. They also develop ways to apply their findings to the real world.

1.2. The History of Sociology Sociology was developed as a way to study and try to understand the changes to society brought on by the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of the earliest sociologists thought that societies and individuals’ roles in society could be studied using the same scientific methodologies that were used in the natural sciences, while others believed that is was impossible to predict human behaviour scientifically, and still others debated the value of such predictions. Those perspectives continue to be represented within sociology today.

1.3. Theoretical Perspectives Sociologists develop theories to explain social events, interactions, and patterns. A theory is a proposed explanation of those patterns. Theories have different scales. Macro-level theories, such as structural functionalism and conflict theory, attempt to explain how societies operate as a whole. Micro-level theories, such as symbolic interactionism, focus on interactions between individuals.

1.4. Why Study Sociology? Studying sociology is beneficial both for the individual and for society. By studying sociology people learn how to think critically about social issues and problems that confront our society. The study of sociology enriches students’ lives and prepares them for careers in an increasingly diverse world. Society benefits because people with sociological training are better prepared to make informed decisions about social issues and take effective action to deal with them.

Section Quiz

1.1. What Is Sociology? 1. Which of the following best describes sociology as a subject?

the study of individual behaviour
the study of cultures
the study of society and social interaction
the study of economics

2. Wright Mills once said that sociologists need to develop a sociological __________ to study how society affects individuals.

imagination

3. A sociologist defines society as a group of people who reside in a defined area, share a culture, and who:

work in the same industry
speak different languages
practise a recognized religion

4. Seeing patterns means that a sociologist needs to be able to:

compare the behaviour of individuals from different societies
compare one society to another
identify similarities in how social groups respond to social pressure
compare individuals to groups

1.2. The History of Sociology 5. Which of the following was a topic of study in early sociology?

6. Which founder of sociology believed societies changed due to class struggle?

Émile Comte
Herbert Spencer

7. The difference between positivism and interpretive sociology relates to:

whether individuals like or dislike their society
whether research methods use statistical data or person-to-person research
whether sociological studies can predict or improve society
all of the above

8. Which would a quantitative sociologists use to gather data?

a large survey
a literature search
an in-depth interview
a review of television programs

9. Weber believed humans could not be studied purely objectively because they were influenced by:

their culture
their genetic makeup
the researcher

1.3. Theoretical Perspectives 10. Which of these theories is most likely to look at the social world on a micro-level?

structural functionalism
conflict theory
symbolic interactionism

11. Who believed that the history of society was one of class struggle?

Émile Durkheim
Erving Goffmann
George Herbert Mead

12. Who coined the phrase symbolic interactionism?

Herbert Blumer
Lester F. Ward
W. I. Thomas

13. A symbolic interactionist may compare social interactions to:

human organs
theatrical roles

14. Which research technique would most likely be used by a symbolic interactionist?

participant observation
quantitative data analysis
none of the above

15. Which sociologist described sociology as the study of social forms?

1.4. Why Study Sociology? 16. Studying Sociology helps people analyze data because they learn:

interview techniques
to apply statistics
to generate theories

17. Berger describes sociologists as concerned with:

monumental moments in people’s lives
common everyday life events
both a and b

Short Answer

What do you think C. Wright Mills meant when he said that to be a sociologist, one had to develop a sociological imagination?
Describe a situation in which a choice you made was influenced by societal pressures.
What do you make of Karl Marx’s contributions to sociology? What perceptions of Marx have you been exposed to in your society, and how do those perceptions influence your views?
Do you tend to place more value on qualitative or quantitative research? Why? Does it matter what topic is being studied?
Which theory do you think better explains how societies operate—structural functionalism or conflict theory? Why?
Do you think the way people behave in social interactions is more due to the cause and effect of external social constraints or more like actors playing a role in a theatrical production? Why?
How do you think taking a sociology course might affect your social interactions?
What sort of career are you interested in? How could studying sociology help you in this career?

Further Research

1.1. What Is Sociology? Sociology is a broad discipline. Different kinds of sociologists employ various methods for exploring the relationship between individuals and society. Check out more about sociology at http://openstaxcollege.org/l/what-is-sociology .

1.2. The History of Sociology Many sociologists helped shape the discipline. To learn more about prominent sociologists and how they changed sociology check out http://openstaxcollege.org/l/ferdinand-toennies .

1.3. Theoretical Perspectives People often think of all conflict as violent, but many conflicts can be resolved nonviolently. To learn more about nonviolent methods of conflict resolution check out the Albert Einstein Institution http://openstaxcollege.org/l/ae-institution

1.4. Why Study Sociology? Social communication is rapidly evolving due to ever improving technologies. To learn more about how sociologists study the impact of these changes check out http://openstaxcollege.org/l/media

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Solutions to Section Quiz

1. C | 2. B | 3. A | 4. C | 5. B | 6. B | 7. C | 8. A | 9. B | 10. D | 11. B | 12. A | 13. D | 14. B | 15. B | 16. D | 17. C

Image Attributions

Figure 1.1 Canada Day National Capital by Derek Hatfield ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canada_Day_National_Capital.jpg ) used under CC BY 2.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en )

Figure 1.2. Il (secondo?) bacio più famoso della storia: Vancouver Riot Kiss by Pasquale Borriello (https://www.flickr.com/photos/pazca/5844049845/in/photostream/) used under CC BY 2.0 ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ )

Figure 1.4 c Ibn Khaldun by Waqas Ahmed ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ibn_Khaldun.jpg ) used under CC BY-SA 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en );

Figure 1.5. Newton-WilliamBlake by William Blake ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(Blake)#mediaviewer/File:Newton-WilliamBlake.jpg ) is in the public domain ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Material_in_the_public_domain )

Figure 1.6 Hon. T.C. Douglas by Lieut. G. Barry Gilroy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tommycropped.jpg ) is in public domain

Figure 1.8. Harriet Martineau portrait ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Harriet_martineau_portrait.jpg ) is in the public domain ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Material_in_the_public_domain ).

Figure 1.9. Emile Durkheim ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Emile_Durkheim.jpg) is in the public domain ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Material_in_the_public_domain ).

Figure 1.10. Max Weber ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Max_Weber_1917.jpg ) is in the public domain ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Material_in_the_public_domain ).

Figure 1.11. Georg Simmel by Julius Cornelius Schaarwächter ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Georg_Simmel.jpg ) is in the public domain ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Material_in_the_public_domain ).

Figure 1.14. Hon. T.C. Douglas, Premier of Saskatchewan by Lieut. G. Barry Gilroy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tommycropped.jpg ) is in public domain.

Figure 1.15. The Last of the Clan by Thomas Faed ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Faed_-_The_Last_of_the_Clan.JPG ) is in the public domain ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Material_in_the_public_domain ).

Introduction to Sociology - 1st Canadian Edition Copyright © 2014 by William Little and Ron McGivern is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World

Three top tips for writing sociology essays

The Craft of Writing in Sociology

By Andrew Balmer and Anne Murcott
September 19 th 2017

As the academic semester gets underway, we talked to three senior colleagues in Sociology at the University of Manchester to come up with their ‘pet peeves’ when marking student’s essays. Here are some of their comments, and some of our top tips to help you to improve your work.

First, lecturers said they were frustrated with the way that students write their opening paragraphs:

“A main peeve of mine in student writing is poor introductions. Three common errors regularly stand out: throat clearing sentences (e.g. ‘globalisation is an important topic’, ‘Marx was an important writer’); dictionary definitions for core sociological concepts; and introductions that merely restate the question. What I really want to see from an introduction is a brief account of how the student is approaching the question at hand, what key questions the essay will address, and what answer the student will come to at the end of the essay.” – Senior Lecturer in Sociology

This was a point on which our three colleagues agreed: students often waste the introduction. Here is top tip number one to help you improve your essays:

1. Give the reader a guide to your argument. Much as you would give someone directions in how to get to where they’re going, tell your reader what steps you will take, what the key turning points will be, why it is important to take this route and, ultimately, where you will end up. In other words, tell your reader exactly what you will conclude and why, right at the beginning.

Another point on which our colleagues agreed was that sociological essays can be imprecise, and are sometimes written in a style which is meant to sound intellectual, but which is more confusing than it is enlightening. As one senior lecturer put it:

“A pet peeve of mine is imprecise language, for example peppering an essay with terms like ‘however’, ‘therefore’, and ‘consequently’, but without attending to the logical relationship between sentences that those words are supposed to signal. If the logical connector is wrong then the argument fails. This kind of error is often motivated, I think, by students wanting their essays to ‘sound academic’, when often they would have been more convincing by using simpler language more precisely.” – Senior Lecturer in Sociology

It is worth planning the time needed to rework your essays because a good argument can be let down by poor presentation. Here is top tip number two:

2. Your written work should prioritise clarity and concision over entertainment and erudition when making an argument. Students often write in a style which they think makes their points sound important, but get lost in the meaning of what they are saying by doing so. It might be that you have quite a command of English and want to show off your knowledge of polysyllabic or unusual words, or it might be that you wish to imitate the sociological writers whom you admire. Whatever additional reasons you have for writing, there is none more important in a sociological essay than making your argument clear. Words such as ‘however’ and ‘moreover’ should be used to indicate how your ideas are linked together, not to start a sentence with a good word. Be sure that when you edit your work, you edit for the argument, prioritising the word choices which best help to make your point. Such decisions will reflect maturity and consideration in your written work, and it is these which will truly impress a reader.

A final element which our three colleagues all listed in their top pet peeves was poor structure:

“I am often frustrated by the poor structuring of an essay. In other words, with the order in which ideas are presented, either at the level of the whole essay or at paragraph level. Essays that ping-pong from one idea to another, and then back to the original idea, indicate that the student has not really thought their argument through. A trickier thing to get right is the structuring of paragraphs, and some students seem keen to cram in as many (often unconnected) points into one paragraph as possible.” – Senior Lecturer in Sociology

The key point to learn when it comes to structuring your work is to make your writing serve your argument. You should present the main turns of your argument clearly, so as to reach a natural conclusion. Here is top tip number three for improving your essays:

3. Redraft your work for your argument, before you edit and proof-read it. Students often write to tight deadlines and do not plan enough time for a good second draft of their work. Instead, they write a first draft and then edit it as they proof-read it. When writing the first draft of an essay you will still be working out what the argument is. This is because writing helps you to think, so as you write your full first draft you will be meandering around a little, finding the best route as you go. Instead of merely editing this and checking the grammar, you should seriously re-draft the essay in light of the argument you now know you wish to make. This will help you to write a good introduction, since you can now say clearly from the outset what you will go on to argue, and a good conclusion, for you will now be able to say exactly what you have argued and why. Re-drafting for the argument means taking out material, adding in material and ensuring that each paragraph has a main point to contribute. It is an essential step in producing a good essay, which must be undertaken prior to editing for sense and proof-reading for typographical mistakes.

These tips point you towards the most important part of learning to write good sociological essays: bringing everything you do into the service of producing an argument which responds to the question and provides a satisfying answer.

Featured image credit: meeting by Eric Bailey. CC0 Public Domain via Pexels .

Andrew Balmer is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester and member of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives. He is co-author of a new book, The Craft of Writing in Sociology: Developing the Argument in Undergraduate Essays and Dissertations , published by Manchester University Press. Andrew can be found on Twitter @AndyBalmer .

Anne Murcott is Honorary Professor at the University of Nottingham and Honorary Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. She is author of numerous books and edited collections, including The Craft of Writing in Sociology .

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Section Quiz

1.1 what is sociology.

Which of the following best describes sociology as a subject?

The study of individual behavior
The study of cultures
The study of society and social interaction
The study of economics

C. Wright Mills once said that sociologists need to develop a sociological __________ to study how society affects individuals.

imagination

A sociologist defines society as a group of people who reside in a defined area, share a culture, and who:

work in the same industry
speak different languages
practice a recognized religion

Seeing patterns means that a sociologist needs to be able to:

compare the behavior of individuals from different societies
compare one society to another
identify similarities in how social groups respond to social pressure
compare individuals to groups

1.2 The History of Sociology

Which of the following was a topic of study in early sociology?

Which founder of sociology believed societies changed due to class struggle?

Emile Comte
Herbert Spencer

Weber believed humans could not be studied purely objectively because they were influenced by:

their culture
their genetic makeup
the researcher

1.3 Theoretical Perspectives in Sociology

Which of these theories is most likely to look at the social world on a micro level?

Structural functionalism
Conflict theory
Symbolic interactionism

Who believed that the history of society was one of class struggle?

Emile Durkheim
Erving Goffmann
George Herbert Mead

Who coined the phrase symbolic interactionism?

Herbert Blumer
Lester F. Ward
W. I. Thomas

A symbolic interactionist may compare social interactions to:

human organs
theatrical roles

Which research technique would most likely be used by a symbolic interactionist?

Participant observation
Quantitative data analysis
None of the above

1.4 Why Study Sociology?

Kenneth and Mamie Clark used sociological research to show that segregation was:

of no importance

What did the Clarks use in their experiment noted in Exercise 1.13 ?

children and dogs
adults and dolls
children and dolls
adults and pets

Studying sociology helps people analyze data because they learn:

interview techniques
to apply statistics
to generate theories
all of the above

Berger describes sociologists as concerned with:

monumental moments in people’s lives
common everyday life events
both a and b
none of the above

Berger writes that sociology

is not an academic discipline
makes the strange familiar
makes the familiar strange
is not a science

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Top 277 Awesome Sociology Essay Topics & Questions for 2024
🔬 Sociology Questions. Introduction. Sociology is very flexible, and at the same time, requires all of your attention and accuracy. There is even a joke among sociologists: add 'sociology of' before any issue, and you are ready to find your research topic—sociology of Christmas, sociology of ballet, sociology of Italian mafia, etc.
Essay Questions for Sociolgy Final Exam Flashcards
Complete definition of Sociology. Sociology is the scientific study of human behavior, social groups, and society. Sociology is credited to Auguste Comte (1798-1857) Sociology is derived from two words: Socius, which means "companion" or "associate" Logos, which means "word" "words about human associations or society".
A Level Sociology Essays
Essays will either be 20 or 30 marks depending on the paper but the general advice for answering them remains the same: Use the PEEC method for the main paragraphs: POINT - EXPLAIN - EXPAND - CRITICISE. Use the overall structure below - PEEC (3 to 5 times) framed by an introduction, then overall evaluations and conclusion towards the end.
How to Write a Sociological Essay: Explained with Examples
Step 1: Make an Outline. So you have to write a sociological essay, which means that you already either received or have a topic in mind. The first thing for you to do is PLAN how you will attempt to write this essay. To plan, the best way is to make an outline.
Sociology Exam 1 Essay Questions Flashcards
Sociology Exam 1 Essay Questions. Get a hint. The sociological perspective helps us recognize that the lives of individuals are shaped by the forces of society. In a short essay, explain how the sociological perspective reveals the interaction between the individual and society. To illustrate this perspective, explain how society plays a part ...
PDF Cambridge Sociology Student Guidebook Written by students, for students
The first year paper in sociology is called SOC1: an introduction to sociology and the guide can be found . here. Supervision topics . In general, your first essay question is chosen for you by your supervisor and they'll get in touch by email. As you progress through your degree, you become more self-directed when it comes to topics. But in
Ch. 1 Section Summary
1.1 What Is Sociology? Sociology is the systematic and scientific study of society and social interaction. In order to carry out their studies, sociologists identify cultural patterns and social forces and determine how they affect individuals and groups. They also develop ways to apply their findings to the real world.
Essay Questions
ESSAY QUESTIONS: Here is the study guide for your essay questions for exam #1. Of these five, I will select three and you will pick two of those three selected to write on. It is important that you support all your answers with course material, films watched and readings if possible when preparing your essays. 1.
Ch. 1 Introduction to Sociology
Chapter Outline. 1.1 What Is Sociology? 1.2 The History of Sociology. 1.3 Theoretical Perspectives. 1.4 Why Study Sociology? We all belong to many groups; you're a member of your sociology class, and you're a member of your family; you may belong to a political party, sports team, or the crowd watching a sporting event; you're a citizen of ...
How to Write a Sociology Essay: Ultimate Guide
How to Make an Outline for Your Sociology Essay. Work on the Essay Structure. Write a Draft. Start with an introduction. Provide the background information. Discuss your research question. Write body in sociology writing. Write a conclusion. Make Up a Level Sociology Essay.
Introduction to Sociology
Introduction to Sociology 3e aligns to the topics and objectives of many introductory sociology courses. It is arranged in a manner that provides foundational sociological theories and contexts, then progresses through various aspects of human and societal interactions. The new edition is focused on driving meaningful and memorable learning experiences related to critical thinking about ...
Unit 1
1. Have a basic understanding of the discipline of sociology and the sorts of questions it seeks to answer. 2. Identify early and significant sociologists by name. 3. Define and describe what is meant by sociological imagination. 4. Identify and describe some of the different domains in sociology. Core Readings.
Introduction to Sociology
Sociology is the study of society and individuals' interactions within society. According to Griffiths et al. (2015), society is "a group of people who live in a defined geographic area, who interact with one another, and who share a common culture" (p. 6). Sociology studies the social sphere of people's lives: social structure, social ...
1.1 What Is Sociology?
Sociology is the scientific and systematic study of groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions, from small and personal groups to very large groups. A group of people who live in a defined geographic area, who interact with one another, and who share a common culture is what sociologists call a society.
In-Class Activities
Class Activity: As a class or in groups, identify a sociological research topic. Ask a question about this topic. Formulate a hypothesis. Create 10 closed-ended survey questions addressing your hypothesis. Use a program like Plickers or an electronic polling tool to have students in class answer the questions.
Chapter 1. An Introduction to Sociology
For Marx, Comte's sociology was a form of idealism, a way of explaining the nature of society based on the ideas that people hold. In an idealist perspective, people invent ideas of "freedom," "morality," or "causality," etc. and then change their lives and society's institutions to conform to these ideas.
Introduction to Sociology 3e
ISBN-13: 978-1-951693-36-7. License: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Introduction to Sociology 3e aligns to the topics and objectives of many introductory sociology courses. It is arranged in a manner that provides foundational sociological theories and contexts, then progresses through various aspects of human and societal interactions.
Final Exam Essay Questions
Long Essay Questions 2 of 4 will be chosen 12-15 sentences, 2-3 brief paragraphs. 1. Define mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity, then compare and contrast them in terms of levels of integration and regulation (make sure to clearly define both integration and regulation in your answer as well).
Three top tips for writing sociology essays
Here is top tip number three for improving your essays: 3. Redraft your work for your argument, before you edit and proof-read it. Students often write to tight deadlines and do not plan enough time for a good second draft of their work. Instead, they write a first draft and then edit it as they proof-read it. When writing the first draft of an ...
Sociology Exam Questions and Answers
Conclusion: Include a summary of the ideas and conflicting views noted in the essay. [REMEMBER TO LINK TO THE ITEM 2 TIMES OR MORE] A Model Introduction and Paragraph Dissected: 'Evaluate the usefulness of Functionalism and Sub-cultural theories of crime and deviance for an. understanding of why working-class people commit crime.'
Ch. 1 Section Quiz
tool. 3. A sociologist defines society as a group of people who reside in a defined area, share a culture, and who: interact. work in the same industry. speak different languages. practice a recognized religion. 4. Seeing patterns means that a sociologist needs to be able to:
Assignments and Discussions
Discussion: Society and Formal Organizations. Analyze bureaucracies and meritocracy. Assignment: Society and Groups. Explain a primary group, secondary group, in-group, out-group, and a reference group. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control. Discussion: Deviance. Discuss formal deviance norms in the U.S. Assignment: Deviance in the News.
Introduction to Sociology
Identify two differences Sociology and Psychology. Sociology looks at society on a large scale, where Psychology studies an individual. Psychology can be said to be a science that deals with individual mental behavior. Sociology on the other hand a science that deals with the development of human society.

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📝 How to Write a Sociology Essay?

🏁 Get Prepared

✍️ Writing Process

🔎 References

Research Paper Analysis: How to Analyze a Research Article + Example

A Level Sociology Essays – How to Write Them

How to write an A-level sociology essay

Skills in the A Level Sociology Exam

AO1: Knowledge and Understanding

AO2: Application

AO3: Analysis and Evaluation

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Introduction to Sociology - 3e

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Table of Contents

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Chapter 1. An Introduction to Sociology

Introduction to Sociology

What Are Society and Culture?

The Sociological Imagination

Studying Patterns: How Sociologists View Society

Making Connections: Sociology in the Real World

August Comte: The Father of Sociology

Karl Marx: The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing

Harriet Martineau: The First Woman Sociologist?

Émile Durkheim: The Pathologies of the Social Order

Max Weber: Verstehende Soziologie

Georg Simmel: A Sociology of Forms

Making Connections: Social Policy & Debate

Quantitative Sociology

Structural Functionalism

Interpretive Sociology

Symbolic Interactionism

Making Connections: The Big Picture

Critical Sociology

Historical Materialism

Farming and Locavores: How Sociological Perspectives Might View Food Consumption

Sociology in the Workplace

Please “Friend” Me: Students and Social Networking

Section Summary

Section Quiz

Short Answer

Further Research

Solutions to Section Quiz

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Three top tips for writing sociology essays

The Craft of Writing in Sociology

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Section Quiz

1.2 The History of Sociology