SOC 201 Chapter 3: Chapter 3.3
Document Summary
In addition to being fuzzy, the social world is big so big that it is impossible to look at the whole of it at once. Therefore, most sociologists specialize by taking chunks of society and making these their particular concerns. Sociologists also tend to specialize in how they approach the study of their chunks. Understanding how sociologists divide things up will help you to understand how sociologists approach their work. The first has to do with what chunk of society a sociologist chooses to study; the second and third are a bit more complex and have to do with how particular sociologists approach their research. There are many topic areas within sociology indeed, some sociologist, somewhere, probably is studying every social thing that exists. Table 3. 1 lists some of the more popular subjects that are of interest to sociologists. Some sociologists focus their attention on only one area; others may divide their attention between two, three, or more areas.
