Sociology is concerned with people and with the rules of behavior that structure the ways in which people interact. As one of the social sciences, sociology has much in common with psychology and anthropology.
The subject matter of social science inquiry is patterned social regularities.
4 A search for these regularities shows that most human behavior, from big and momentous acts to small and insignificant ones, is patterned.
All of the social sciences are interested in patterned regularities in human social behavior. The distinction among the social sciences is chiefly in the kinds of regularities of interest. Psychology occupies itself principally with patterns of learning, motivations and mental disorders. Because mental behavior also has a biological base, psychology is related to the natural science as well as the social. Anthropology has traditionally limited its inquiry to small, preliterate societies and has turned to focus on culture and cultured systems. The focus on such societies provides anthropologists with field laboratories in which they study many of the concerns of the other social sciences.
5 To the extent that anthropologists turn their attention to modern societies, there is little difference in the subject matter of anthropology and sociology; in many colleges and universities, they are in the same department.
The chief differences continue to be in methodology and level of analysis.
Whatever their particular area of concern, all social sciences rely on the scientific method of inquiry.
6 This means they rely on critical and systematic examination of the evidence before reaching any conclusions and that they approached each research question from a position of moral neutrality.
This scientific approach is what distinguishes the social sciences from journalism and other fields that comment on the condition.