[post for july 5th] Sociology, the rebel.

What exactly is sociology? As most people understand it, sociology is "the study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society". (Webster’s) It is defined as a social science, constantly evolving from the study of different human societies and relationships.

This social science has been used and developed since the Ancient Greeks, yet people still question the legitimacy of the subject today. My question is why is that? I believe that the Ritzer article starts off this question nicely. Right from the start Ritzer tries to justify the science to us by saying, “While they might theorize, speculate, and even rely totally on their imagination for answers to questions about society, they almost always do so on the data and information derived from research”. (78) Whoa, wait, what does he mean they almost always use the data and information they gained, as a science shouldn’t the sociologists always surmise theories based off of their findings? Ritzer later touches on my second question, “there is much less settled, universally agreed upon knowledge base in society then say in, biology or astronomy. Nonetheless, there is a substantial amount of knowledge base in sociology, some of which Is summarized throughout this book” (80) Then he uses basically the next 15 pages to explain the scientific method and how it can be applicable to sociologists. They talked about the different type of scientists (different ways to observe), the ways they gather their data, the ways they process there data, how to process their data, what types of techniques can be taken to become more efficient, and best of all how to evaluate the data. All of these explanations and justification is lead to but just one thing, its issues. The big question here was can “sociology be as objective as a science is presumed to be?” (103)

            When you have sciences such as math, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering (all types), etc. can you consider sociology as reputable and on the same level as the rest.  The fact that we can prove how calculus works, but we can not prove that Darren Brown from the person swap video didn’t cut out the people who knew he switched, or paid random people to act a certain way. The fact that we can use engineering to build and develop massive, real, tangible structures, but we cannot exactly see or feel the emotions went through by Sudhir while writing his book Gang Leader for a Day. How can we tell he didn’t exaggerate somethings, or everything for that matter? 

            Right now I’m actually sitting as caesars Windsor in Canada (as the first stop for our Canada tour) with my family, not only because today is the 4^th but tomorrow is my moms birthday. I’m telling you this because as most of you know this is a huge casino. I recently just saw a movie called Rounders a true story about a young law student in New York who gave it all up to play poker, or more specifically Texas Holdem. This is got me thinking because as we all know, the best poker players are the ones who can “play the man and not the cards” or are easily able to read people. But isn’t reading a person just applied sociology, a method of participant observation.  This guy in this movie was able to take the backgrounds of people, their bankrolls, how they dressed and what they did and summarized just how they would play, and beside it being a movie, he was right in real life. 

          So to answer my own question again, my answer is yes, we should take sociology as a science. We have enough information throughout history along with sociologists developing a method almost always able to justify the validity of a study. But, this is all opinionated as I'm sure many people will disagree with my answer with some of the reasons I explained above. Regardless of your stance, the one thing we should all be able to agree on is something said by the prophet himself,  Colbert,  “We must always be careful what findings we extrapolate from studies by asking ourselves, does this study actually measure what it is supposed to measure” What do you think?