Jay Gabler

The acronym BIPOC has come into common use recently; it stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. The term became widely adopted amid the discussions sparked by the death of George Floyd in 2020, as people confronted the reality that different groups have different experiences. © Dmitry Demidovich / Shutterstock.

If you don’t understand your society, you can’t truly understand yourself. That's one reason it's worthwhile to study sociology.You are part of your society, and your actions and beliefs are part of what defines that society. Your actions, in a thousand small ways, help shape your society, and your beliefs both influence and are influenced by your society’s norms and values.

Sociology is the study of society — of people interacting in groups, from small social circles to global society. Sociologists gather information about the social world and systematically analyze that information to understand social phenomena including class, race, gender, culture, social networks, and historical change.

Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber are the three most important figures in sociology. Their ideas about society are still discussed today, and you’re apt to hear their names in all branches of sociology. It’s important to know what they thought and said. Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher who believed that material goods are at the root of the social world.

There is no one correct way to look at society; to understand how society works, sociologists use a range of different approaches and techniques. These are five common approaches, and they are often used in combination with one another. Quantitative analysis is the study of society using numbers and statistics: for example, considering people’s income (a number of dollars, say) in light of their education (a grade level, or a number of years).

Many people are absolutely convinced of the truth of some things about society that are not entirely true. Here are a few of the most common misconceptions about society, proven false by sociology. Social inequality is deserved. Although it’s true that people with many resources in society (saved wealth, good jobs, happy families) have worked hard to earn those resources, it’s not necessarily true that people who lack such resources are lacking them because it’s somehow their fault.

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others,” say the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. One of the central topics studied by sociologists is social inequality, and they think very carefully about the many ways that people in societies are divided. These are the most important means of social inequality, and they all interact with each other to determine each individual’s place in society.