Department Mission
The mission of the Sociology Department at SIUE is to empower our diverse and intersectional community to develop, critically analyze, and apply our sociological imagination to serve the public good.
What is Sociology?
If you have ever wondered what it means to be a real “man” or “woman,” or why is it that crack cocaine is considered a worse offense than powder cocaine, or why it is you even have to come to college to get a job, then you have a sociological imagination.
Sociology is the systematic study of the human identities and behaviors that create "society." Although most of us think we have a pretty accurate view of what’s happening, in truth we often use our very limited experiences to make sense of the world. For example, we think it’s natural for women to be more emotional than men. Yet, men are very emotional. That’s what anger is, after all. But because we do not want to think of men as emotional, our biases prevent us from seeing men in all their emotional glory.
Biases are not necessarily bad, but they do prevent us from making accurate assessments of how things work. Sociologists acknowledge that the best way to cut down on biases, then, is to stop pretending we do not have any. Instead, we affirm that systematic study and observation is imperative for understanding the world.
Sociology is different from other social-scientific approaches to understanding human behavior in two distinct ways:
- Sociology emphasizes the influences of social groups and the larger society.
We are different from psychology, which primarily studies the individual rather than societal factors in human behavior. For example, a psychologist might be interested in diagnosing a child with ADD or ADHD, while a sociologist might wonder why it is that ADD has increased over the last 30 years and whether factors like country, gender, race, and class affect who is diagnosed with it. In fact, research shows that schools that require stillness and obedience have a lot to do with the increase diagnosis of ADD in the United States as opposed to European countries.
- Sociology seeks to explain the broad range of human behaviors as they are influenced by social institutions and social groups.
Going back to the ADD example above:, sociologists can ask about the economic implications of diagnosing ADD. Are people getting rich with the increased diagnoses? We can ask the social psychological question of how relationships are harmed or helped by diagnoses. We can even look at ADD in popular culture to see how the diagnosis has shifted in the media.
When we understand the larger social forces that influence our own behavior and that of others, then we can understand the viewpoints of those who are different from us. This understanding is important because everyone IS different from us! So we cannot really be just, fair, and rational unless we fully embrace that not everyone shares the same reality we do!
Through systematically gathering information from different groups, Sociology is a powerful tool for the betterment of communities and organizations. Social activists, policy makers, politicians, and other important people are not going to do their jobs well without trying to reduce their bias and they cannot do so without the help of systematic data gathering.
