Do people in United States have stereotypes of sociologists? What are they? Are they valid ?

Question

Do people in United States have stereotypes of sociologists? What are they? Are they valid ?

Answer 1

They mostly think they do academic research on an academic campus somewhere without contributing much to society.... so they study society but they aren't in the "real world".  I think that's partially true, but there are many sociologists who work on projects that have real beneficial effects.

Answer 2

The biggest stereotype I've seen is the "liberal bias". "Sociologists are all liberals." It is true that most sociologists are liberal, but the people who throw this statistic around for defamation do not understand the limits that are in place to prevent sociological research from being tainted by the views of the researcher. They also aren't considering that the more one knows about sociology, the less sense a conservative ideology makes. For example, sociology has again and again proven that "poor people choose to be poor" is not reality.

The other stereotype is that they are too bound by narrow methodologies to understand the real world, like another person said. That can be valid for some types of research, but "urban ethnography" (the 1st-person reserach method where sociologists go out and live in urban communities) has been popular since 1900. In fact, a sociologist named Sudhir Venkatesh was recently on the Colbert Report promoting his book "Gang Leader for a Day".

Sociology does not exist outside of academia, so in general, the same stereotypes that people have against academia are going to be shared by sociologists. The ones that believe them are not intelligent people, IMO.

Stereotypes of sociology *students* are very different. Sociology is usually a very, very easy major in undergraduate programs, so anyone working on their BA in Sociology is going to be assumed lazy, party animal, jock, etc. Most of the other students I studied with fit that stereotype, but it can be frustrating for those of us who are actually interested in the subject to combat.

Answer 3

i think so. i think people think that we study worthless topics and that it's a worthless field, without realizing just how in depth it is and how much of the things that they do are impacted by sociological research.