ARTICLE IN PRESS Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Physica A ( ) – www.elsevier.com/locate/physa The use of models in sociology Barbara Pabjan * Institute of Sociology, Wrocaw University, Ul. Koszarowa 3b, 51-149 Wroclaw, Poland Received 16 December 2003; received in revised form 17 December 2003 Abstract The question whether and how to use models in sociology is not a new one but it is still worth to discuss concerning the state of sociological research and current development of research on agent models in sociology and other disciplines. The aim of this paper is to discuss the most eective way of using models in sociology by taking into account essential features of social phenomena and the speciÿc subject of sociological research. In order to do this I present main problems of research subject and methods in sociology. The article is written for a speciÿc purpose, namely, to develop the cooperation between sociology and physics. It is an attempt to present the sociological approach to models for physicists who are not very much familiar with sociological perspective. c  2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. The interest in models is not widespread in sociology as it is in the physical sci- ences, economics and even political sciences, however, more and more research work has been carried on for some time and it appears to be growing [1]. When one compares models used by physicists to models used by sociologists it is clear that sociological models provide a more realistic basis for understanding social reality by embodying important aspect of social environment as structure, culture and this is an important feature of social models. Models in sociology can be useful for two reasons the ÿrst one is the subject of social studies, and the second one is the method. One of the subject of sociological research is social behaviour, or collective action, in fact, it is considered to be the very sociological phenomena. The main interest of modelling is collective behaviour and models are extremely useful to examine collective behaviour. Social reality is the result of actions, decisions, or thinking of individual social actors (agents). Social actors take account of the actions of other social actors (agents). The mutual interactions produce more complex social phenomena. The process of social * Fax: +48-71-326-10-08. E-mail address: bpabjan@uni.wroc.pl (B. Pabjan). 0378-4371/$ - see front matter c  2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.physa.2004.01.019