Sociology is the social science that seeks to understand the complexities of human society. You can use two of its subdisciplines, macro sociology and micro sociology, to gain a deeper understanding of social institutions, rituals and cultural differences between social groups. Macro sociology looks at society from
a large-scale perspective while micro sociology goes into great detail to examine society at the individual, behavioural level. While you may think the two disciplines are very different, they actually have many elements in common. Macro and micro sociology focus exclusively on human societies and understanding them at various levels and through their participation in different social constructs. The social world of animals, for example, isn't a part of macro or micro
sociology.
In macro sociology, the focus of your studies may include topics of war, poverty or even the effects of pollution. By studying these broad social events, you will be able to apply them later to the smaller individual elements of society that is the focus of micro sociology, such as the role of women in war, or how poverty affects the elderly.
- Sociology is the social science that seeks to understand the complexities of human society.
- By studying these broad social events, you will be able to apply them later to the smaller individual elements of society that is the focus of micro sociology, such as the role of women in war, or how poverty affects the elderly.
Macro and micro sociology are similar in their study of individuals, families and other similar social groups. With micro sociology, you'll take a more detailed look at the behaviours of the people in those groups, while in macro sociology you will observe how these collective groups relate to society as a whole.
Although in macro sociology you'll use a broad approach to study societies, you can apply all of what you learn to understand facets of micro sociology. The two disciplines work together, informing and pushing the study of human society. Micro sociologists can later disseminate a topic for deeper examination that macro sociology covers.
Video transcript
Voiceover: Macrosociology and microsociology are two different levels of analysis in sociology to study societies. You need a place to start when you're looking at a society, otherwise it can feel rather overwhelming. Because not only do you have the individual people making up the population you're studying, you also have the different groups that also make up your population and the communities and the cultures and the subcultures. And you have your population as a whole that you can look at. So if you can at least figure out what perspective you want to start with, it'll help you find a good foot hold to proceed. Okay, macrosociology is the large scale perspective. You're looking at big phenomena that affect your whole population, or a least a big portion of it. You're looking at social structures and institutions. You're looking at whole civilizations or societies or populations. And what are you looking for? Well, you're looking for patterns. You're trying to find the effects that the whole big picture have on the life of small groups and individuals. You're analyzing large collectives like cities for broad social trends. And you can get a lot of statistical data from these big populations. But be careful how you analyze it. Don't ask a question when you already have an answer in mind, because you might interpret the data to prove your point. But, that won't actually tell you anything about the population you're studying. Don't find the one statistical test that makes the data fit your story, let the data tell the story. Macrosociology deals with matters like war, or poverty, or the health care institution, or international stuff like the world economy. Functionalism is a social theory that comes from the macro perspective. Basically, functionalism looks at a society as a whole, and how the institutions that make up a society adapt to keep the society stable and functioning. Conflict theory is also a macroperspective. Real quick, conflict theory is the idea that societies are made up of institutions that benefit the powerful and create inequalities, and large groups of people are at odds with each other until the conflict is resolved and a new social order is created with equally distributed power. Okay, so that's the big picture perspective. Let's go to the other extreme and check out microsociology. Kind of sounds like microscope, right? With a microscope you can look at individual cells or really tiny things. Well, in microsociology you're looking at the small scale every day, face to face social interactions between individuals or maybe small groups. You're looking at families and schools and other small social interactions. Unlike macrosociology, in microsociology you don't have the same large test group. So microsociology is more of an interpretive analysis of the society. You look at a sample of your society and interpret how those individual interactions would affect the larger patterns of the society, like institutions and social structures. You can look at how the expectations of a teacher will affect a student's grades, or you can look at doctor-patient interactions, or how family dynamics affect the expression of prejudiced attitudes. So you can get an idea of microsociology in practice, you can look at symbolic interactionism, which is a social theory that is a microperspective. Symbolic interactionism focuses on the individual and the significance or meaning they give to objects, events, symbols and other things in their life. Cool, so you have macrosociology starting from the big picture and seeing how it affects the individual. And you have microsociology going the other way, looking at the individual interactions and seeing how they affect the big picture.