sociology summary

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Below is the article summary. For the full article, see sociology.

sociology, Science of society, social institutions, and social relationships, and specifically the systematic study of the development, structure, interaction, and collective behaviour of organized human groups. It emerged at the end of the 19th century through the work of Émile Durkheim in France, Max Weber and Georg Simmel in Germany, and Robert E. Park and Albion Small in the U.S. Sociologists use observational techniques, surveys and interviews, statistical analysis, controlled experiments, and other methods to study subjects such as the family, ethnic relations, schooling, social status and class, bureaucracy, religious movements, deviance, the elderly, and social change.

census Summary

Census, an enumeration of people, houses, firms, or other important items in a country or region at a particular time. Used alone, the term usually refers to a population census—the type to be described in this article. However, many countries take censuses of housing, manufacturing, and

penology Summary

Penology, the division of criminology that concerns itself with the philosophy and practice of society in its efforts to repress criminal activities. As the term signifies (from Latin poena, “pain,” or “suffering”), penology has stood in the past and, for the most part, still stands for the policy

Auguste Comte Summary

Auguste Comte was a French philosopher known as the founder of sociology and of positivism. Comte gave the science of sociology its name and established the new subject in a systematic fashion. Comte’s father, Louis Comte, a tax official, and his mother, Rosalie Boyer, were strongly royalist and

Herbert Spencer Summary

Herbert Spencer was an English sociologist and philosopher, an early advocate of the theory of evolution, who achieved an influential synthesis of knowledge, advocating the preeminence of the individual over society and of science over religion. His magnum opus, The Synthetic Philosophy (1896), was