Great question! In pursuit of maintaining order in the chaos, I will answer this with the hope that this category will not be cluttered with matters unrelated to sociology. And yes, I know this is a pointless endeavor. But I gotta try. And let it be known that I am an armchair sociologist, not a professional. Anyone more knowledgable than myself in this area who finds errors in my answer is greatly encouraged to comment. Sociology is the scientific study of human behavior. It attempts to understand human beings by studying them in groups. It is not to be confused with the related field of psychology, which focuses on the individual. I normally think of sociology as psychology of society. Consequently, sociology helps us understand people, whereas psychology helps us understand the person. A person alone will think completely for himself. Add a person and now we have a dyad, or a two-person group. Now those two people are thinking, talking, and acting much differently than they were before they came together. Now add twenty more people, this time of different ages, races, creeds, and nationalities. Now the first person's actions hardly resemble what they were when he was alone. There are a few topics which sociologists concentrate on more than others. One is socialization, which is the process by which the individual learns how to act in a group, whether it be in the home, in the grocery store, or at a wedding. Another topic is social institutions, which are those things that people use as tools to acheive certain needs, such as religion, education, and media. And yet another is social inequality, which deals with why some people got it good and others don't, no matter which society you are looking at. There are three classes of thought in sociology: the functionalists, the conflict theorists, and the symbolic interactionists. The first basically sees society as straining to hold itself together, and focuses on how things essentially exist because they function well. Conflict theory says the opposite; it stresses that the ways of the world have enormous benefits for a small portion of a group, whereas the majority of the people in that group get the shorter end of the stick, even if they don't know it, and even if they accept it that way. I admit that I have a tenuous understanding of symbolic interactionism. I believe it is basically a bridge between psychology and sociology because it concentrates on a smaller scale. It focuses on how individuals create and deal with the ways of the group, instead of focusing on that group's strengths or weaknesses. The purpose of this answer is to show that sociology is in fact a very real study, using facts, science, and research, that concentrates on people, not the individual. It is not about how You or I think or act, it's about how We, Us, and Those People Over There think and act.

Sociology is a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action to arrive at a casual explanation of its course and effects. Sociology seeks to formulate type concepts and generalized uniformities of empirical processes. (History, on the other hand, is interested in the causal analysis of particular events, actions or personalities.) Action is human behavior to which the acting individual attaches subjective meaning. It can be overt or inward and subjective. Action is social when, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual(s), it takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby guided. Social action may be oriented to past, present, or predicted future behavior of others. Others may be concrete people or indefinite pluralities. Not all action is social: if it ain't oriented to the behavior of others, it ain't social. Also, it is not merely action participated in by a bunch of people (crowd action) or action influenced by or imitative of others. Action can be causally determined by the behavior of others, while still not necessarily being meaningfully determined by the action of others. If I do what you do because it's fashionable, or traditional, or leads to social distinction, its meaningful. Obviously the lines are blurred , but it's important to make a conceptional distinction.

Sociology means social science. What is social, you will ask me ? Social is used to qualified everything men and women made in a way they doesn't control as they would have thought at first and eventually get a mix of fine outputs and unexpected outcomes like violences, inequalities, poverty, unemployment,bad education,etc. Why is it on earth that so many things nobody wanted actually happen ? Sociology has to work hard to make understandable the underlining processes of everything that is social, i.e. not exactly under control. Nothing is more exciting excepted meteorology : you'll never get certainties but only probabilities. But peace, respect of life, general well being certainly are worthwhile to take the chance,aren't they ?

When I was studying Anthropology at University, Sociology was one of the three streams we addressed (the other two being Physical Anthropology and Linguistics). Whereas Physical anthropology has to do with the physical development of humans, sociology has to do with the society humans has built up. It studies both ancient and modern societies to see how they held together, what is important to them, and how they change due to both internal and external forces.

To put it in a nutshell - Sociology is the study of human behaviour and human society.

One semi-scientific perspective or lens, which together with psychology and anthropology shed light on the human condition.