Sociology - Research Paper Example

Moreover, there are significant similarities between sociology and other social sciences (Giddens). Sociology is a distinct social science, however it is not an isolated science and takes information and contributions from other sciences to develop itself. There is a growing trend towards an inter-disciplinary approach for social sciences e.g. social scientists and historians often end up working together on research projects (Macionis). The Scope of Sociology: There is the presence of two schools of thoughts which differ with respect to their interpretation of the scope of sociology and the subject matter of sociology.

These two schools of thoughts are the formal school and the synthetic school. The formal school of sociology suggested that sociology should be given a definite subject matter to make it an identifiable discipline in contrast to vast areas that can be fluctuating and inconsistent. It focused on the study of several forms of social relationships and often characterized sociology as an independent discipline. According to this school of thought, all forms of social interaction should be classified into identifiable strata and then analyzed.

The formal school was criticized on the premise that it focused on mere abstracts and completely neglected the concrete content of social life. Critiques argue that abstracts cannot be studied in isolation unless they are provided with a relevant context formed out of concrete content. The argument is that studies of social relationships shall remain pointless if they are constructed in the abstract without any idea as to how they relate to real life. The synthetic school of sociology suggests that sociology should be recognized as a synthesis of all social sciences and thus they call for widening the scope of sociology.

Proponents of this school argue that sociology has three principle divisions including social morphology, social physiology and general sociology. Social morphology is characterized by the emphasis on geographical or territorial basis of life of people on aspects such as size of population, density and distribution of social classes, etc and focus on study of social structures or definitions of the core forms of social groups and institutes with their classifications. The earlier point implies that the size and quality of population would be an indicative of the kind of social interactions and relationships people have.

Social physiology relates to the origins and nature of various social institutions including morals, economics, law and religion. Contributors of the synthetic school divide sociology into two main sections. The first section, systematic section, deals with describing one by one the many factors of living together that may be relevant to many societies and with respect to their level of relevance. The second subsection, historical sociology, deals with the historical variety and the actual forms of society that have existed in the past or continue to exist today.

On the basis of these two viewpoints, and viewpoints of several key sociologists, it can be concluded that the analysis of various social institutions such as religion, law economics, etc which are the results of social interactions should be the primary concern of sociology. the connections among different parts of society should be comprehensively studied and understood. Furthermore, sociology addresses factors that play a role in social