Sociology is the study of human social life. Because human social life is so expansive, sociology has many sub-sections of study, ranging from the analysis of conversations to the development of theories to try to understand how the entire world works. Introduction to Sociology is one of the very few Wikibooks to gain the coveted "Featured Books" rating by the admistrators of Wikibooks, attesting to its highly developed and comprehensive nature. This book can be used as an excellent High School or College level textbook, reference work, and/or a volume for general reading and learning. Wikibooks is a collaborative book authoring website, where users from all over the world work together to write textbooks and other types of instructional books on many topics. It is a Wikimedia project, operated by the same group of people who run Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikibooks went online on 10 July 2003. Wikibooks is a collection of open-content textbooks. Wikipedia attracts 683 million visitors annually reading over 10 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.74 billion words for all Wikipedias. The English Wikipedia edition passed the 2,000,000- article mark on September 9, 2007, and as of May 31, 2008 it had over 2,396,000 articles consisting of over 1,034,000,000 words. This volume is published by Seven Treasures Publications, an independent book publisher unaffiliated with the Wikipedia Foundation, under the terms of the GNU license.