ABSTRACT
Chapter overview Science starts with curiosity, with raising questions about what’s happening and why. Questions are at the very beginning of any research, and the kind of questions scientists ask more or less defines their discipline. There are many different scientific disciplines, however, such as physics, biology, psychology, anthropology and sociology. So what sort of questions, then, do sociologists ask? This chapter is about sociological questions: what they are, what makes good questions and how they differ from questions in other disciplines. As we will see, underlying sociological questions is a certain perspective, which is called the “sociological perspective” and the “sociological imagination”. I explain how the sociological view differs from an individual perspective on human behavior (1.1). Then I discuss how sociological questions are related to social problems, which are often the main starting point for sociological research (1.2). After this, I introduce the three aims of sociology, namely to accurately describe social phenomena, to understand underlying processes and to apply sociological insights (1.3), and we will see that these three aims concur with three types of sociological questions—descriptive, theoretical and application questions (1.4). I then review the art of asking good sociological questions (1.5). Subsequently, I bring in the idea that all human beings are “private sociologists” themselves, as they participate in social life continuously and wonder every day about what’s happening and why. At the same time, however, this does not mean that sociological questions and insights are common sense. I discuss why people sometimes mistakenly think so and what this means for “academic sociology,” i.e., the scientific study of social life (1.6). I end with a discussion of sociology as a cumulative science, i.e., theories and observations of earlier studies are incorporated in the work of successive sociological studies (1.7).
