Sociology of Sleep

Research Paper # 46302

Anthropology > Cultural
Anthropology > Scientific / Medical
Psychology > Dreams

Sociology of Sleep

This paper is about sleep as a sociological discipline to be studied and investigated by researchers, as well as students and professors of sociology.

3,150 words () | 13 sources | MLA | 2003 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper investigates sleep as a sociological process. The writer explains the methodology used, including an introduction, a literature review, and results of the findings. It looks at a history of the study of sleep and further examines modern-day literature on the topic. It finds that the sociology of sleep has its roots deeply planted in rational choice theory, in the sense that the human being must make a rational, coherent choice in weighing out the costs and benefits before deciding how much sleep to engage in on a particular occasion.

From the Paper:

"When I first decided to investigate sleep as a sociological process for the 2003 Sociological symposium, I had no idea where my research would take me or what I was getting into. I basically conducted my project as a research paper, finding an abundance of information regarding sleep within cultures, but finding an enormous lack of research regarding sleep in the field of sociology. Even studying sleep cross-culturally was a field left mostly up to anthropologists. As I continued to research various cultures and their methods of sleeping, I found there are very deep sociological implications for sleep. Thus my original research question was becoming more of a mystery than a solution: why is sleep not being researched within the field of sociology?"