The traditional focuses of sociology include social stratification, social class, culture, raceand ethnicity, gender and sexuality, social mobility, religion, secularization, law, and deviance. As all spheres of human activity are affected by the interplay between social structure and individual agency, sociology has gradually expanded its focus to further subjects, such as health, medical, military andpenal institutions, the Internet, environmental sociology, political economy and the role of social activity in the development of scientific knowledge.
The range of social scientific methods has also expanded. Social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitativetechniques. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-twentieth century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophicapproaches to the analysis of society. Conversely, recent decades have seen the rise of new analytically, mathematically andcomputationally rigorous techniques, such as agent-based modelling and social network analysis. Sociology should not be confused with various general social studies courses which bear little relation to sociological theory or social science research methodology.
Sociological reasoning predates the foundation of the discipline. Social analysis has origins in the common stock of Western