Sociology

Course summary

Students investigate the deeper reasons behind our everyday behaviour. They explore why people inhabit different social worlds in society, how people learn to be the sorts of people that they are, and why they conform or rebel or even become criminals. Students use their own experiences to examine how the society they live in works. They then test those ideas against the arguments and evidence put forward by thinkers and researchers – sociology is full of debates and disagreements! Students study how sociology tries to find ways to make society better, and they judge how far it has succeeded. Students also learn how to gather good-quality data and how to make sense of it. They focus on a range of topics that allow different sorts of insight into society, described below.