Common Ideas
Although it's a fairly gross over-simplification to talk about the sociological perspective in any but the most general of terms (to distinguish the subject from other social sciences, for example), it is evident that most, if not all, sociologists share some fundamental beliefs about the social world and the people who create it. We could, for example, note the following examples:
a. Human beings are social animals:
That is, we have to co-operate with others in some way to produce the social world in which we live.
b. Human social behaviour is learned, not instinctive.
In this respect, the argument is that we have to learn, from the moment we are born, how to be not just a human being but also a recognisable member of the society and culture into which we happen to have been born.
c. To understand human social behaviour we have to focus our attention on the groups to which people belong.
These groups are many and varied, as we will see in a moment, but the largest group to which people belong is a society.
d. Sociology is the study of all the relationships in an individual’s life.
In this respect, sociologists do not restrict their studies to a single dimension of an individual’s life (work, political behaviour, family / life history, geography, individual psychology and so forth).
Although each of these is significant and interesting, to varying degrees, it is only by looking at how these relationships develop, combine and influence each other that we can arrive at a complete picture of human social behaviour.
In this respect, Sociology represents a subject that aims to understand the totality of human social relationships, rather than the various aspects of these relationships that is the focus of other social sciences.