Letter To Sociological Analysis

Sagar Panjwani
Prof. Hippen
SOCI 1101
July 4, 2015

Dear Karim, I hope my letter finds you in great health. I am taking an Introduction to Sociology class this summer and it involves learning of many new concepts and ideas that give me an insight into the world around me and inspire me to look at things from a different perspective. It surprises, amazes and shocks me, all at the same time, as how differently we can view our world with the knowledge of Sociology. I am writing this letter to share some interesting information that I learnt throughout the course. I hope you would enjoy reading it. Sociology is a branch of social sciences and humanities that deals with the study of how humans live and behave in a society. It researches the human

has its own particular area that it caters when studying the social world whereas sociology connects to all other social science studies in some manner while maintaining its own approach. For example, if we compare sociology to history, we notice that sociology compares present and past to understand and make sense of both but mostly maintains its focus on modern society whereas history is more focused towards the study of past. If we compare sociology to geography, we notice that sociology focuses its studies on connection of people to places whereas geography is more focused towards the places

It means to view a particular situation in context to culture, biography and history. It includes considering how larger social forces come into play to affect individual lives. It also gives us capacity to differentiate between personal troubles (the problems that affect an individual e.g. Individual is unemployed.) and public issues (the social problems that affect a great number of people e.g. There is a national recession.) Sociological imagination helps us to look beyond personal troubles to see if there is a public issue that is affecting masses. We can see sociological imagination in play in various examples throughout the coursework. An example for this would be the one I stated above, if an individual is homeless, without a job, we can use sociological imagination to understand that there is an economic recession causing these events in an individual’s life. (Class Lecture PPT on Sociological Imagination) Another example mention in our course relates to how people in this modern world are obsessed with their bodies, they want to be slim, fit and young looking. Looking at this psychology from social imagination point of view we notice that there is a change in definition of beauty historically. In past times, people maybe preferred large to be beautiful. (Page 17, The Real World, Kerry Ferris, Jill Stein, 4th Ed.) Our book also mentions tattooed bodies to be considered as a deviance to social