Sociology

...education, consumerism, popular music, sexuality, the body, ethnic conflict, poverty, sport, science, health, drug use, the law, war, religion, migration, death, housework, mobile telephones, humour and murder. It is hard to think of any significant area of social life that has never been the subject of a sociological study. Because the subjects it examines are so numerous and so varied, sociology cannot be defined simply in terms of the subjects it studies. It is more useful to define sociology in terms of its approach or approaches to explaining social life rather than its subject matter.

Sociology (compared to, for example, Psychology) is much less concerned with the individual, and much more concerned with humans in groups. The size of the groups studied in Sociology can vary considerably, ranging from studies of delinquent gangs or subcultures within a school, to studies of institutions such as the education system or the family, studies of whole societies and even the globe as a whole. However, whatever the scale and scope of a sociological study, to be sociological it must look beyond the individual to understand and explain human behaviour. Rather than explaining human behaviour simply in terms of individual mental states, sociology sees patterns of behaviour as related to the wider social context in which people can live.