AN INTRODUCTION OF SOCIOLOGY

    AN INTRODUCTION OF SOCIOLOGY

Introduction

Auguste Comte was the first scholar to use the word “sociology” in order to refer to the science of association.

The word sociology was derived from the latin word ‘socius’ which means the society and the greek word ‘logus’ which means the study. Therefore the meaning of sociology is the study of society.

What is sociology?

Sociology is quite simply a way of studying people. Sociologist want to know why people behave, why they make groups, why they go into war, why they worship, why they marry, vote, cooperate to each other. All such things happen when the people interact with one another. Thus sociology can be define as the scientific study of social relations, institutions and society.

Sociology is the scientific study of the social aspect of human life. It studies about the human interaction with the help of scientific methods. Sociologists therefore are concerned with activities of the human beings in society.

In brief, we can say that sociology is the study of human society and social behavior.

Nature of sociology

Sociology is scientific discipline. It is a science in the sense that it involves objective and systematic method of investigation and evaluation of social reality. But it cannot be directly modeled on the patterns of natural science because human behavior is different from the world of nature. The subject matter of natural science is relatively static and unchanging whereas the human behavior as a subject matter of sociology is flexible and changeable.

What is science?

Science refers to the application of objective methods of investigation, reasoning and logic to develop knowledge about given phenomenon. There are three goals of science. The first is to explain why something happens. The second is to make a generalization that is to go beyond between the individual cases and make statement that apply to connectivity. The third is to predict, to specify that will happen in future.

The idea of scientific research is to acquire objective knowledge free of bias and prejudice. The proper method science is to have constant test of explanatory proposition by matching them against facts – whether obtained experimentally by matching proposition. In this context, sociology is a science because it fulfills the basic requirements of objective knowledge of social reality and applies scientific methods