One: From the Sky and From the Ground
My father’s father was a test pilot in the Air Force during the Cold War. I can think of few more exciting, or dangerous, jobs. As a kid I wondered what the world looked like as viewed from the cockpit of a high-flying aircraft. In a sense, sociology can offer such a perspective of the world: a view from above. Individuals might fade from view, giving way to the crisscrossing latticework of power lines and roads, the patchy green polygons of agriculture and parklands interspersed with the gray and brown of buildings. If you’ve ever had the chance to look out the window during a flight, you can see the world we humans have created “from the sky,” from above. The impact of human activity, of human societies, is clear from the sky, but the lived lives of individual human beings all but disappear. I never got to ask my father’s father what it was like on those high-flying missions—he passed away long before I was born.
My mother’s father was a Marine during the Second World War. I never got to ask him about that either—he died when I was a boy, and there was a sort of unspoken agreement that we did not ask grandpa about such things. I did not learn what he had been through until after he was gone, but I realize that his view of the world would have been far different than my test pilot grandfather. He would not have seen the latticework or the polygons but the people that inhabited them, lived in them, fought for them. There is a sort of enduring order from above that is absent on the ground, and I can only imagine how absent such order must have seemed, as the bloodiest conflict in human history ground to a cruel end.
Though my grandfathers each saw the same planet earth, they saw it at different times, and in fundamentally different ways. One of the challenges of sociology is how to see the human world from multiple perspectives at the same time. From above, from the window of an airplane in mid-descent, you can see the structures, both complex and orderly. As the plane gets ever closer to the ground, individual buildings and roads, and then individual houses and cars, sharpen into focus, and finally, near the ground, the people that have made them what they are, come into view. The view from the ground reveals the same social world seen through very different eyes. Disembark from the flight, enter the airport terminal, grab your luggage, and a new world opens up before you. The bustle of travelers, the rolling of wheeled luggage, and the harried conversation of families, friends, and airport staff…from the ground, the personal abounds, replacing the majestic order from above with the messy flux of everyday life.
Sociologists discuss their work in terms of micro, meso, and macro. Microsociology is the view from the ground, involving face-to-face interaction, the basic unit or “atom” of sociology (more on that later). Macrosociology is the view from the sky, seeing society from a distance, from above. Meso-sociology is in between, the view as the plane lands or takes off. Think of these as a set of coordinates rather than an either/or, the distance from the persons or groups a sociologist is studying. Sociology can be more, or less, micro, or macro, and can be more, or less, attentive to the meso-level.
Sociologists often do not merely study society; we try to address the sources of social problems, as well as sketching out possible courses of action to address them. It is worth asking what social problems are, but maybe it’s easier to start by thinking about what social problems are not. A helpful distinction is made by famous U.S. sociologist C. Wright Mills, who distinguished between personal troubles and public issues. Like with the airplane metaphor, it’s not either one or the other; it’s more or less personal or public (and it’s possible for reasonable people to disagree as to what extent it’s one or the other).
Say you overslept and missed class. That’s a “personal problem,” right? It depends on why. Did you miss class because you worked through the night to earn enough money to pay for college? This suggests that your oversleeping may be, at least in part, a consequence of social things that are bigger than any one person. If one person overslept this morning, oversleeping may be a personal trouble, but if rising costs of college mean thousands of students are overworked and overtired every day, this becomes a public issue, social issue, or social problem. Social problems are bigger than us, they affect more than one person, they are part of the way society is built—and that raises the possibility that things could be different.
Maybe you, or others you know, are tempted to push back: is it society’s fault that you overslept? Shouldn’t you have just been more motivated, pushed through, made some different decisions about how to manage your time? That was my reaction many years ago when I first studied sociology. If it’s yours too, sit with it for a while, and consider it as you read further. I will clarify here that the goal of sociology is not to “blame society” but to try to understand that what people do takes place in a social context. And that social context is not inevitable. It is different in different places, and times, and could be different still in the future.
Social problems can be—and should be—studied from multiple points of view. Studying society requires data: reliable and carefully gathered information in the form of texts, interviews, surveys, charts, graphs, and tables. Current events, and things that just happened in the last year or two, are often difficult to study because there isn’t enough good data on them yet. That means sociologists are usually racing behind social developments in order to make sense of them after they happen. When a sociologist can collect data over time on a subject, they can begin to piece together a trend, or a meaningful change, relationship, or development that has been measured over time. Sociology is not journalism; we do not run a daily race to keep up with the news cycle and an often-fickle public’s attention (an important but different kind of challenge). Sociologists must slow down, digging deeper over long periods of time to explain not only how things change but why.
Data and trends need to be explained. After enough data collection and analysis, it’s time to build theory to connect the dots and make sense of what’s happening. Theories can help to explain new events as they unfold or point toward unanswered questions. Some theories connect the dots better than others; and new information can lead to modifying or rejecting a theory. Because the social world is so complicated, theories in sociology are more modest in their goals than theories in the natural sciences, attempting to explain a specific social phenomenon rather than the social world as a whole.
Like the natural sciences, many sociologists use quantitative data. Theoretical and quantitative work typically (but not always) involves seeing “the big picture,” the view from the sky, as it were. Quantitative researchers might also study social networks, using sophisticated computer software to map and examine how people communicate with one another, in cyberspace and in the real world. Many quantitative researchers in sociology write up their research in the form of sociology journal articles, containing charts, graphs, tables, and often, complex statistical analyses of variables, though some quantitative research might be found in books, often alongside other research methods described below.
What if you want to see the social world “from the ground?” Here, sociologists are more likely to use qualitative research. Qualitative research, as the word implies, deals with quality, with language. Many qualitative researchers study a small or specific group of people. They may interview individuals, gaining an in-depth look at people’s hopes, dreams, fears, and goals within that group. Qualitative researchers might write books or lengthy monographs in which they describe, in-depth, their findings.
Because sociology needs many perspectives of the social world, from the sky as well as from the ground, it needs these multiple research methods, as well as people who are involved in bridging the gap between them. Mixed-methods researchers use two or more of the aforementioned approaches, combining them together to attempt to get multiple perspectives on the same subject matter. Each method has its advantages: survey research often can gather together information on a large sub-section of the population, perhaps even a sample of the population which reliably represents a whole group. Quantitative research, for example, sacrifices depth for breadth, gaining a sense of how a few traits (such as gender or income) might line up with one another at the cost of losing the texture and detail of everyday lives. On the other hand, qualitative research has the opposite shortcoming: it gains in-depth information on a small group of people (usually less than 50 individuals, and sometimes as few as five) but loses the “big picture.”
This work, like any piece of writing, will reflect my own point of view. I can’t avoid that and I don’t want to. To look back on oneself in the process of doing one’s work is to be reflexive, reflecting on your own position within your work, within the social world, and the kinds of biases, limitations, and blind spots that necessarily come with having a point of view. This is necessary in sociology because everyone has a point of view that is shaped by the social world they live in. We therefore cannot study anything sociologically without getting tangled up in our own social world and the point of view that has been shaped by it.
Important Words:
Data
Macrosociology
Microsociology
Qualitative
Quantitative
Reflexive
Theory
Trend
Image: takeoff over Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, public domain image, retrieved from https://cdn12.picryl.com/photo/2016/12/31/take-off-abu-dhabi-emirates-travel-vacation-797e35-1024.jpg
