SOC 104 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: The Sociological Imagination, Sociocultural System, Macrosociology
5 Jul 2016
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Chapter 1: sociology and the study of society. We currently live in a world that places tremendous emphasis on the individual, including personal motivation, feelings, opinions, values, and beliefs, we tend to explain human behaviour by focusing on the individual psychological component. Individuals create society, but society, in turn, creates them. The social world affects us in all our behaviours, including that most personal and private of human behaviours, suicide. Most people would focus on the feelings and personal state on the individual at the time of death-whether the person was depressed, lonely, on drugs, insecure, afraid of failure and so on. Sociologists would focus on general patterns, or regularities, in this behaviour. Emile durkheim published a classic study of suicide. If it were based primarily on individual motives, then it should be random, showing no particular pattern-in the population. He also found patterns of suicide were consistent through time and in different countries.
