Reality: The Sociological Perspective

The sociological perspective is extremely diverse, even when it comes to the perception of reality. An event from your perspective could be entirely different from another person 's perspective depending on factors influencing their personal lives. Your opinion may even differ from those in your family who have grown in the same environment. Within the sociological perspective lies different concepts that help explain this diversity. Sociologists must study people using knowledge of what is actual, rather than opinions generated from their own experiences. Some of the concepts I found to be rather interesting were religion, class systems, age cohort, sociology of knowledge, and value free science. The first concept that can influence a …show more content…
Class systems have been around since the start of civilization. These obviously consist of an upper, middle and lower class who each live in their own different reality. A stress factor for a person living in a lower socioeconomic class can be tremendously different from a person living in a higher socioeconomic class. For example, not having enough money for food or gas versus being stressed out for an important business meeting. Stress has the same effects on the body, but the reasons for the stress can change a person 's perspective on reality. The lower class person will hate the oil companies for raising the price, but the businessman working for the oil company will be thankful for the salary and …show more content…
The micro level refers to the I in the situation, while the Macro refers to the society. The sociology of knowledge questions why we see the world the way we do. Karl Monheim is a prime example of a sociologist who questioned the correlation between thought and society. He believed that everyone thought differently in their heads. After all, thinking is a social activity. When we look at the macro and micro level; we are talking about how we think as a complete society vs. in our own heads. I think there is a social context between articulated thoughts too. Your personal knowledge is tied to all of your experience throughout life. Your personal knowledge is also influenced by both the historical location and social location you are in, in time. Location has taught me to change my approach when looking at certain situations. Last but not least I found value free science to be very influential in my perspective. Value free science refers to putting your own values aside in order to look more objectively at a situation. Value free science allows us to discover aspects of reality. Value free science is important to me because I believe it allows you to put yourself in someone else 's shoes. The idea would be to figure out how you 'd react if you were in their shoes. Value free science is rationalized, which is why I find it so