Clinical sociology is experiencing a research drought, as virtually no research is being conducted in the field. There are no specific academic journals that can be said to be designed for serious research on sociotherapy, and there are only a few handbooks on the subject. Research in sociology related to mental health is conducted in other fields, such as medical and health sociology (Pilgrim, 2015; Bradby, 2012), mad studies, psychosocial theory, critical social work (Webb, 2019), and social psychiatry (Rose, 2019).
Because there is no active research program focused on sociotherapy and clinical sociology, practicing clinical sociologists must adopt a much more improvisational approach compared to their clinical colleagues in psychotherapy. Clinical sociology is more firmly established at certain universities, particularly in the United States and France; otherwise it is essentially not practiced at all with a few exceptions. The closest equivalent is social workers who have been taught sociological macrotheories, certain interactionist and social constructivist theories, which may foster a certain degree of enhanced sociological imagination. Clinical sociologists can do the following:
“Clinical sociologists work in the following capacities: as self, help/mutual, help enablers, supporting social networking for well, being, community facilitators/organizers, sociotherapists, mediators, focus group facilitators, social policy implementers, action researchers, and administrators” (Reback & Brun, 1991, 10).
The degree of professionalization is low for clinical sociology as a field, with very few practitioners. Through the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology, one can obtain recognition as a clinical sociologist and specify one’s area of focus after submitting a portfolio. Accreditation and certification as attempts at professionalization should be considered unsuccessful thus far. It cannot yet be called a profession because the scientific foundation is too weak. Furthermore, accreditation is granted only after one has worked a certain number of hours in a clinical setting. It is not possible to train directly to become a clinical sociologist in the same way as one does for psychology programs. The low degree of professionalization is further evident in quotes on the organization’s website, which read more like a high school textbook: “Imagine if you could use the secrets of how society works to make things better for everyone.” or “It’s like being a detective who finds out why things happen in society and then uses that information to improve communities, organizations, and people’s lives.” It also states, in the same informal tone, that: “Clinical sociologists create interventions designed to produce better outcomes. It’s like therapy for society, using knowledge to make real changes in people’s lives.” Is it therapy, or is it like therapy for society? This also makes it unclear whether sociotherapy can be practiced at the individual level, while at the same time it humanizes society. It is not society that can undergo therapy, but rather the people within society.
The lack of professionalization is also evident in the fact that the meanings of “clinical sociologist” and “sociotherapy” are ambiguous and vary from country to country (Balogová et al., 2018; Fritz, 2021). Meanwhile, the current president of the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology is a teacher at a community college in the United States.
There are few handbooks and hardly any studies specifically on sociotherapy in client encounters, where few theories have been applied and the potential of sociological imagination in the therapeutic context has not been fully realized. Important handbooks include:
Handbook of Clinical Sociology (Rebach & Bruhn, 1991), which provides an overview of clinical sociology.
Clinical Sociology: An Agenda for Action (Bruhn & Rebach, 1996) is an anthology that addresses sociological interventions at the micro, meso, and macro levels. In some chapters, the analysis takes a surprisingly purely behaviorist approach (Bruhn & Rebach, 1996, 80).
International Clinical Sociology (Fritz, 2021) is a study of how clinical sociology is practiced in different countries.
Community Interventions (Fritz & Rheaume, 2014) is a book about various aspects of interventions at the community level.
Clinical Sociology: Moving from Theory to Practice (Wan and Wan, 2020) addresses the fact that sociology is still absent from clinical practice. The theoretical aspect dominates, while the clinical aspect has been left to other academic disciplines: psychology, medicine, and social work. The book concludes with a discussion of how clinical sociology could grow; the authors argue that this growth lies primarily in a change to the sociology curriculum at universities, which would improve teaching overall and shift the relationship with society toward a more practice, oriented approach (Wan and Wan, 2020).
There were two small journals that were discontinued: Clinical Sociology Review and Sociological Practice. Compared to psychotherapeutic research, hardly any research has been conducted systematically, as the few existing studies were of low scientific quality: small groups, no control group, autoethnography as a method, no clear follow, up on the effects, etc. What remains is the Journal of Applied Social Science, which covers very little on clinical sociology and virtually nothing on sociotherapy, with the exception of a few articles that do not present new research but reiterate the need for sociotherapy (e.g., Cavanagh, 2021). An overview of the minimal research that has been conducted makes it clear that there is a lack of a comprehensive research program where discussions about priorities, opportunities, methods, etc., take place.
A study from 2024 illustrates these aforementioned shortcomings: of all the more important and relevant studies that need to be conducted in sociotherapy, some researchers have chosen to focus on “laughter therapy,” using autoethnography and case studies as their methods (Gonot, Schoupinsky et al., 2024). Certainly, humor can have a place in sociotherapy, but conducting this study against the backdrop of everything else that needs to be done to create a comprehensive research program is problematic. Thus, there is no direction in clinical sociology and sociotherapy as a field, resulting in the production of only studies with low relevance, overly niche focuses, and weak methodologies.
This overview is based on a review of all articles in three journals and the books on clinical sociology that I have been able to read. Several of these articles and book chapters lack a theoretical framework; some articles focus more on diagnoses and categorizations (Meacham, 2015), but few diagnoses are proposed without a systematic approach, and some focus on actual practice in encounters with individuals and groups. Nor have they kept pace with the ongoing developments in sociology, which constantly introduce new theories. The theories that have been used could be applied more comprehensively than they have been to date. The theories employed cover a certain portion of the theoretical perspectives available within sociology, but fall far short of their full potential. Here are the main theories used in clinical sociology (often only once): functionalism, socialization theory (sociotherapy as a form of resocialization), psychoanalytic sociology, critical theory (Cavanagh, 2021), grounded theory (Swan, 1985), social determinants of health (Lamonica & Boeri, 2015), Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory (Grape et al., 2015), sociological concepts generally related to “community, based learning” (Merenstein, 2015), Bourdieu’s habitus and capital, particularly the form of “recovery capital” (Zschua, 2016), empowerment (Fielding, 2014), symbolic interactionism (Church, 1985), emotion regulation (Cutchbertson, Johnson & Gagan, 1993), Scheff’s theory of shame, and Berger & Luckmann’s social constructivism (Coyle, 1997, Fein, 1988), “emotional and intellectual learning” as conceptualized by Habermas and Scheff to create an ideal speech situation (Bentz, 1992; Malhotra, 1987), affective role theory (Fein, 1990), dramaturgical theory (Sobal, 1991).The most common theoretical framework is symbolic interactionism, with Mead, Colley, Goffman, and Hochschild as the most frequent references a (e.g., Coyle, 1997; Sobal, 1991).
There is thus much more to be drawn from sociology’s diverse range of theories. Hardly any of sociology’s insights have been utilized. It is surprising that not even Randall Collins’s theories on interaction rituals and the energy of emotions, which would seem obvious, have been employed. Further developments of Collins’s theory, such as Summer, Effler’s theory, would also be very useful (Summer, Effler, 2004). Furthermore, other sociological approaches that may be more Marxist, influenced have not been utilized. Examples of theories that could be applied include resonance (Rosa, 2020), interaction rituals and emotional energy (Collins, 2004, Summer, Effler, 2004), positive risk orientation (Furedi, 2019; Taleb, 2012), a sense of coherence (Antonovsky, 1979), Kafkaesque qualities (Clegg et al., 2016), the habitus gap, habitus, and capital (Friedman, 2016), anomie, a blasé attitude, and indifference (Trenter, 2000), over, psychologized (Cabanoz & Illouz, 2019), “just right” (Hiltunen, 2017), governmentality (Foucault, 1991), dual consciousness (Dubois, 1903), false consciousness (Marx), enlightened false consciousness (Sloterdijk, 1987), despair, and oscillation between different forms of obedience (Paulsen, 2017), or instrumentalization/McDonaldization (Ritzer, 2004).
These are some of the diagnoses that have been explored in clinical sociology. Some are psychiatric diagnoses, and at times sociological diagnoses such as anomie, disenchantment, and alienation have been incorporated. However, there is a significant gap in that no one has attempted to compile a comprehensive catalog of various sociological diagnoses.
There are several methods, techniques, and exercises that have been proposed in sociotherapy and clinical sociology: sociologically informed self, help groups aimed at a “restructuring of the self” (Coyle, 1996), socio, education, workshops, sociodrama and role, playing, video feedback, and self, confrontation (Rouse, 1998), assignments and homework, journaling, redefining the situation, and working in different ways: directly, indirectly, and collaboratively (Straus, 1984), “socio, emotional reconstruction” by identifying “social themes,” improving the individual’s “emotional repertoire,” and supporting them in taking “emotional responsibility” (Cuthbertson Johnson, 1996), “identity empowerment” (Hall, 1996), family therapy, and community therapies (Jiménez et al., 2019).
In the vast majority of articles I have read, clinical sociology focuses on reducing the negative: alleviating grief, overcoming drug addiction, or making the family functional. Sociologists such as Rosa argue that sociology needs to incorporate more into its analysis what the good life might look like from a sociological perspective (Rosa, 2019). I believe this should also inform sociotherapy and clinical sociology. The good life, part of which involves being a citizen who engages in meaningful activities beyond one’s own self, is absolutely central. There are exceptions, as some studies have drawn on Habermas’s theory of communicative reason, which aims at emancipation. Clinical sociology has not yet succeeded in harnessing the critical potential inherent in sociology.