Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction. In order to carry out their studies, sociologists identify cultural patterns and social forces and determine how they affect individuals and groups. They also develop ways to apply their findings to the real world.
indicate that there is a common social problem that has its source in the way social
life is structured. At this level, the issues are not adequately understood as simply
private troubles. They are best addressed as public issues that require a collective
response to resolve.
Obesity, for example, has been increasingly recognized as a growing problem for
both children and adults in North America. Michael Pollan cites statistics that three
out of five Americans are overweight and one out of five is obese (2006). In Canada
in 2012, just under one in five adults (18.4 percent) were obese, up from 16 percent
of men and 14.5 percent of women in 2003 (Statistics Canada 2013). Obesity is
therefore not simply a private trouble concerning the medical issues, dietary
practices, or exercise habits of specific individuals. It is a widely shared social issue
that puts people at risk for chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes, and
cardiovascular disease. It also creates significant social costs for the medical system.
Pollan argues that obesity is in part a product of the increasingly sedentary and
stressful lifestyle of modern, capitalist society, but more importantly it is a product
of the industrialization of the food chain, which since the 1970s has produced
increasingly cheap and abundant food with significantly more calories due to
processing. Additives like corn syrup, which are much cheaper to produce than
natural sugars, led to the trend of super-sized fast foods and soft drinks in the 1980s.
As Pollan argues, trying to find a processed food in the supermarket without a cheap,
calorie-rich, corn-based additive is a challenge. The sociological imagination in this
example is the capacity to see the private troubles and attitudes associated with being
overweight as an issue of how the industrialization of the food chain has altered the
human/environment relationship, in particular with respect to the types of food we
eat and the way we eat them.
By looking at individuals and societies and how they interact through this lens,
sociologists are able to examine what influences behavior, attitudes, and culture. By
applying systematic and scientific methods to this process, they try to do so without
letting their own biases and pre-conceived ideas influence their conclusions.
Studying Patterns: How Sociologists View Society
All sociologists are interested in the experiences of individuals and how those
experiences are shaped by interactions with social groups and society as a whole. To
a sociologist, the personal decisions an individual makes do not exist in a vacuum.
Cultural patterns and social forces put pressure on people to select one choice over
another. Sociologists try to identify these general patterns by examining the behavior
of large groups of people living in the same society and experiencing the same
societal pressures.
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