Elementary sociology / Theodore Caplow

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part One. Sociological Theory and Research -- Part Two. Sociological Fields -- Part Three. Macvrosociology.

Sociology is the scientific study of human relationships and their It is one of the most interesting of all subjects but not one of the easiest. Human relationships can be exceedingly complex, and the scientific study of them is always hampered by the fact that the most important part of a relationship-the meaning attached to it by the people involved-is invisible, and cannot be directly observed. The most important unit in sociology is a social system, which is composed of a group of living people engaged in some type of collective activity and related to each other in various ways. Social systems may be as small as a pair of lovers, or as large as an army. Some of them last only for a few moments, like the crowd at a street accident, and some endure through many generations, like a gypsy tribe. Every social system generates a certain number of social facts, which are regularities of behavior imposed on individuals by the system. In a large and durable system, like a nation, there are millions of social facts to be studied; the only practical way to do this is to divide them up into smaller categories, like population, cities, social classes, work, organizations, family life, crime, war, social change, and so forth. This is what we shall be doing in this book, in order to become familiar with some of the important social facts that have been discovered by research.