Sociology
lastmod 2014-07-09created 2014-07-091 edits
Sociology (社會學) is the academic discipline that studies society. Sociology uses various social research methods to conduct empirical investigations and analyzes the results. In this sense, sociology is treated as a branch of the social sciences. The goal of sociology is to study human society and understand social structure from the micro level to the macro level. Sociology is a very broad discipline in terms of both methodology and subjects of inquiry. Traditionally, sociology has used quantitative research methods to study, in a quantitative way, social stratification such as class, social mobility, religion, secularization, law, culture, deviance, modernity, and more. In recent years, the research areas of sociology have expanded to various social institutions such as medicine, the military, and punishment, to new social relations such as the Internet, and to knowledge systems such as scientific knowledge. As broad as its research areas are, its research methods are equally diverse: linguistic methods, cultural methods, interpretive sociology, philosophical methods, and others are used in sociological research. More recently, mathematical methods and computational techniques have been used for agent-based models and social network analysis.