It is sometimes easy to forget that everything we do, including our private thoughts and fantasies, grows out of or is shaped through our interactions with others, especially others close to us. Whether we like it or not we are born into groups and spend most of our social lives in those same groups. All of us assimilate, at least in part, the perspectives of these groups and thereby acquire our language, values, attitudes, beliefs and sense of identity. As a discipline, Sociology involves the description and explanation of social structures, processes, and relations. These range from two-person interactions to relations between large social institutions, such as politics and the economy, to relations between nations.
Sociology also ranges across time and serves as a useful complement to history.
Changes in the social arrangements that people create are of special interest to the sociologist for a number of reasons. First, Sociology increases our understanding of ourselves and our society by providing us with concepts that describe and explain our social creations and how they influence us. We learn who we are and why, and how we are similar to and different from people with different social arrangements. Third, it is important to be aware that the organization and institutions of our society evolved through social processes operating in a social environment. We need to learn how to collect and analyze representative information about society and its members rather than to rely on information we encounter haphazardly.