What is The Sociological Perspective?

When you are first beginning to study sociology, this is something you will here time after time, again. So therefore, what exactly is the sociological perspective? Put simply, the sociological perspective is essentially how one would function cognitively as a sociologist would. However, it is not simply a single perspective one could learn and use properly, but multiple different perspectives intended to create a toolbox of cognitive methods used to think with this main, ‘sociological perspective’. That being said, there are many different sociological perspectives but for the sake of prioritizing, we will only be discussing the four major perspectives used by sociologists. The first major, theoretical perspective we will discuss is called the structural-functional perspective. The structural-functional perspective is defined as follows; using this perspective effectively means to view society as a complex, interconnected system where every aspect of it works together to function as a whole. This perspective is introduced to us by durkheim, father of the functional perspective. Another sociological method of thought is called the social conflict perspective, what this essentially means is that society is viewed as a system of unequal groups, because of this inequality society is inevitably doomed to consistently generate social conflict and change, (coined by famed sociological thinker, Karl Marx). The feminist sociological perspective defines itself as viewing society traditionally unequal between men and women, with its primary goal being to strive for equality between both. Finally, the last major sociological perspective is called the symbolic interactionism, this theory involves the relationship between society and self, suggesting society is full of actors with different roles, this role playing theory was first introduced by sociologist George H. Meade. Together, these four perspectives work to create a dominant, primary perspective in which we can effectively use the functions of all these theories.