The Second Sociology in Turkish Higher Education: A Quantitative Analysis of 30 Introductory Sociology Textbooks

There is a distinction between the literary forms of research-oriented scientific practice and those of scientific education, popularized in the early decades of the 20th century. This distinction emphasizes differences between “journal science”, whose audiences are mostly specialists, and “popular science” or “textbook science”, written for non-specialist public or students. In the early 2000’s, the term “two sociologies” was coined by Hamilton and Form to mark a similar differentiation in sociology. However, the disciplinary attention to this distinction and its problems can be traced back to the 1920s, and with the help of the existing research on sociology textbooks, some important solutions has been produced in Western academies. By stressing the difference between “two sociologies”, this research presents the findings of a quantitative content analysis on Turkish introductory sociology textbooks for higher education. The main objective of the study is to satisfy the need for such researches in Turkey and to describe the problems of the texts. The study results strengthen the argument that there is a link between standardization issues in the discipline and the textbook problems