The Effect of Sociological Studies on Personal and Social Life

What is Sociology

Sociology literally means the study of the human society. It studies the development, the structure and how the society functions. Studying sociology and applying it into your everyday lives is advantageous for your own personal life in various ways.

How Sociology Helps us to Become a Better Person

The sociological studies actually contribute a lot to our personal growth because you are actually shaped based on the society. However, with the understanding of sociology, we know how the society shapes us and it makes us deal with situations better. It’s like without sociology, you’re playing a game without knowing the rules, but with sociology, you’re playing the game while understanding the rules, in this case, it’s a game of your own life.

First of all, it makes you much more confident of how you do in your life. For example, if you study in a very prestigious school where everyone gets straight A’s, almost everyone will think highly of you, so if you achieved a B in one of the subjects, people will start to look down on you, making you lose self-confidence and you will also feel that you are less intelligent than the average person. However, by opening our mind up with the help of sociology, we can discover that the average grades are actually lower for that particular subject, thus making us feel more secured with the grade. Studying there, you are made to think that the average grade is an A, but in reality, it is not. This is all because society makes us think that we should accomplish this kind of grade, living there and studying there, you have only heard about getting A’s, so it fixes our thinking of getting an A only. With sociology, you don’t judge yourself based on what the society thinks of you, but you judge yourself based on yourself.

Secondly, it teaches us to respect each individual person along with their religions, cultures and their attitudes. Besides changing our mindset, our daily lives also deeply influenced by the surrounding society. The decisions you make every day are all guided by the society, you’re just a person doing multiple choice question which has answers given to you, but not written by you. However, the answers differ across different countries. The reasons are because they have different religions, cultures, and you may also find that in their religions, rules may crash. For instance, one religion may be able to eat beef but the other cannot, making people from both sides feel offended by the opposing religion and because of that, people don’t usually get along too well, so they feel disrespected. However in reality, society is the one who controls the people, not the people themselves. They are merely just puppets that are being played by the religion. Some people don’t even to follow their own religion but they are forced to because of the society, especially your parents as they are the most influential. In a nutshell, it teaches us to be respectful.

Lastly, it makes us live in a very diverse world while also learning from them. Without sociology, we’re being confined in a tiny box where our society lives in, we’re not exposed to the outside world in terms of their way of life. In order to become better and more efficient, we must look at different point of views, find more solutions to the problem. All of this doesn’t always have to come from within yourself, you may look at a societies around the world. Researching how different people thrive in different places is invaluable to your own personal growth. We can look at different ways of life and then figure which methods are better and more efficient which we can then incorporate it into our daily lives. Adaptation is one of the examples, immigrating or even just studying at a new country will always have difficulties, one of which is adapting to the climate. In a country near the equator, you will have been used to the warm climates, but if you are moving up to a northern region, you may need to do some research based on how they live there, what we are going to expect. Sociology prepares us for that as it exposes us to the various people and their lifestyles around the world.

How Sociology Helps us to Become Better Citizens

Not only the study of sociology helps our own personal growth, it also aids us in becoming better citizens, to curb the problems in society. As we find out how society is affecting us as time goes by, we may support the society or stand up with others to change it.

The society that we mingle amongst is huge with hundreds of thousands of people, you are just a tiny little grain of sand on a beach. Because of this reason, many people think they cannot bring about change to the society because they think that their numbers are insignificant compared to the population. However, we should think on the contrary, we will always start at the bottom, working your way up from the bottom to the top is very normal. Gathering a small group of people helps to convey the message that you’re trying to spread. At the beginning, the people around you will notice your message first and this technically increases the number of your group because there will be more people that will share the message. Over time, This message can spread like viruses through social media, newspapers and so on. One good example for this is how the slogan “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” came about. It is estimated that the slogan was born in the 1970s. After the economic booms in the 1950s, The Americans began to realize how they are damaging the environment which brought the first national earth day to us, held on April 22, 1970 by Gaylord Nelson and a Wisconsin Senator.

Besides from that, there are people that, for example, had thought that committing a crime won’t decrease a country’s reputation a lot because you’re just one person. If everyone thinks that way and then proceed to commit a crime, wouldn’t that make the country’s reputation bad by statistics? The Islam and Muslims living in the United States are being discriminated because of the Islamic terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks, It is so bad that a phobia was created – Islamophobia. After the attacks, the people are still disrespected and discriminated even though they didn’t do anything wrong. The terrorist attacks brought discrimination to the people, but it is not them that we should disrespect, it’s the people who had done the attacks. We should consider this so we will not harm our country or race because of our own bad deeds.

Conclusion

As we can see from this essay, sociological studies help a person to become a better person and a better citizen. The significance of the role we play in our society is tremendous. By studying sociology and understanding it, we can become better citizens in our community by bringing positivity and eliminating negativity, benefitting both the country and the community.

References

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