Hi guys!

I'm 19F, NY resident, attending a community College and I plan on switching my major to BA in Sociology!

I'm a bit curious on insight from anyone that knows or has experience possibly in the job field with ba in sociology?

I don't have any plans on graduate school or further programs or any license or registration for advanced jobs, kinda settling with just a bachelor's for now because I'm not sure if my mind will change in the future.

Is the job market for sociology majors really bad at the moment? I know in general jobs are demanding higher education (masters/phd/etc), I plan on going to career counseling next week at my campus to possibly learn more but was hoping to hear more from realistic viewpoints here instead of potentially biased and glazed responses from campus workers that are being paid by our tuition 😭 (my college has a bad reputation for unhelpful advisors).

Thanks so much in advance!

P.S. does it matter if my degree is a BS or BA in the job market? My college only does BA for sociology (and many other science majors (ex: psychology, biology) for some reason)

Does anyone have clips of Sociological questions/answers on Jeopardy? I have searched but am not finding what I am looking for. I would especially like anything about Mills, Weber, Marx, structural functionalism, conflict theory, and moral panic.

I have a bachelor's thesis this year. I wanted to get the thesis done early on no, and I don't know what to pick thing is, I know that I want to the subject to be between isolation, social isolation, to be to be exact. And the religion or music thing is, I don't know what to pick anyways for music, I wanted to do something like how some sub genres are like the escape from the social isolation, how they give identity, for example, the rock subgenre, but I don't know if it's academic enough. Especially since that topic is not talked about enough here in Algeria. and other topic is about religion. This is talked about, and e also sensitive here in Algeria thing is it's a very broad topic. I don't know what to pick like how religion is like used as a social pressure mechanism or is an escape. The thing is, I'm not sure whether to pick the music one or religion . and I want them to I don't know, have a taste of loneliness and isolation to it. Also I don't know what question to ask, how do I get the question?

I’m finally getting curious about the world again post-graduation from my MSW and am starting through my book pile, beginning with Kenneth Gergen’s Relational Being. I would love any discussion!

One thing I’m really enjoying is the fruitfulness of measuring Gergen and my ideas against one another. Here at the beginning, Gergen and I are having some hefty ontological disagreements. He rightfully advocates for a model of self that serves as an alternative to traditional Western conceptualizations of an individualistic, bounded self. I join him in this project, and propose the Greek middle voice as the structure of an "agent-in-the-world." I'll spare the lengthy explanation to summarize this as: I produce the action in the social world that returns to produce me.

Where I first diverge with Gergen is his notion that the bounded self is the problem - he calls it a prison - and relational being is the solution. We are both lovers of Buddhist thought and many of these ideas infuse our scholarship. But taking dense religious concepts like nonduality and emptiness, which he expresses by locating the self as a wave that recedes back into the water and then putting them to sociological and psychological work doesn’t hold for me.

Firstly, I don’t see bounded self as pathology to which relational being is the cure. I admit, he may have a more nuanced position behind relational being, but it looks a lot like a less structured version of how Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong (From the Soil, 1947) talks about differential modes of association. For Fei, Chinese identity is construed relationally, though a self is still present. Instead of Gergen’s dance or duet metaphor that entirely disappears the self, Fei posits a social structure like concentric ripples formed by throwing a stone into a lake with a self at the center.

If this is not a picture of relational being, then I may have misread Gergen. But with Fei’s model, the pathology diagnosis cuts both ways. Let’s take the idea of narcissism, something that Gergen specifically pointed to as evidence of pathology of a bounded self. Chinese culture has this, too, from what I observed when I was over there. They call it zilian, or self love. But when I pressed the idea in my conversations, as opposed to a bounded self’s hyperinflation of it’s own ego, zilian looked more like a relational self’s hyperinflation of others’ estimation of the relational self’s ego. Relational constructions of being seem to suffer pathology as much as bounded self constructions of being do. The diagnostic tool is capturing the wrong thing as far as I can see here at the onset.

My counter is that this is a both-and situation. The self is just as ontologically significant as the thing to which the self is relating. While Gergen only talks about relations among selves as of chapter 2, I would extend relata to not just include other bodies but also matter and environment, and samskara (a Buddhist term for mental constructs).

Nonduality and emptiness are still relevant to me because even though there is actual hardware with bodies and matter, our interpretation of that hardware is effectively the only thing we have access to. So in that sense, yes, subject-object relations is empty. And, as Thich Nhat Hanh once said, I fully agree that with this ultimate view in mind that “if the wave is capable of touching himself and the other waves very deeply, he will realize that he is made of water. Being aware that he is water, he transcends all discrimination, sorrows, and fears.” It’s a powerful image.

But my picture of self-within-reality, at least while we are all out here relating to one another, would not be the wave and the ocean. It would be the jewel net of Indra. Here, a 3D positioned net has a jewel on each knot. And each jewel is cut in such a way that it reflects every other jewel on the net. It preserves the interdependence that Gergen is gesturing to as well as the self represented at each knot. Whether or not this all recedes into an ocean at the end is not in my purview. But I am a social worker who wants to do transformative social work, and I think we need a both-and picture of subject-object relations.

- The Social Construction Worker

Why do academics / professors get a weird amount of excitement when I tell them I have a degree in sociology?

Mostly just the title. I’ve been in higher ed for nearly a decade now. I started my journey by getting a degree in sociology. When I was going to school for it—and afterwards—I knew there was a stigma around the degree of it being nearly-worthless. I had always planned to go back for another—more traditionally worthwhile—degree, and the sociology degree was always just for me. I’m passionate about the topic; I love writing and studying sociology.

I’m studying Museum Studies now, and since enrolling in a new program / school, it occasionally comes up that I have a relatively strong background in sociology. Every lifelong academic or professor that discovers this fact gets weirdly excited and interested. They all seem disappointed to know I’m pursuing a different degree. I noticed this trend when I was pursuing my degree in sociology, but I just assumed that was sociology department people excited about fresh meat. Why is this? Did I always just have a bad interpretation of sociology as an academic field? Is there another stigma or stereotype I’m unfamiliar with?

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I’m not saying conspiracies or hidden motives are always wrong. Sometimes the goverment lies or a group with power has an interest. What I’m wondering is why believing you see the hidden story seems to feel intelligent by itself.Under almost any major thing or event, someone is trying to explaining what’s really happening or who’s actually behind it or saying “you really trust the x” like distrust alone proves you understand something.

Do we just prefer believing somebody is behind events? Is it hard for us to accept that huge things can emerge from millions of people incentives and circumstances without anyone really being in control? A hidden actor gives you someone to blame and makes the world feel understandable I guess? and if you remove the bad actor, maybe everything gets better. Why has “I see through it” become such a mark of being informed or intelligent?

I am starting my thesis and I am using the Dramaturgical approach to literary analysis. I would like recommendations on the theory beyond Hoffman, thank you!

Hi Reddit!

I am starting a research study into the causes and effects of the declining birthrates being seen around the world. As of now, I am primarily interested in looking into and challenging (or possibly confirming) the hypothesis that population decline is directly related to financial hardships. To put that in another way, I want to understand the validity or truthfulness of the oft-believed idea that the decline in birthrates across the globe is primarily (or largely) caused by the lack of economic resources. Through my (very brief) research, I have not been able to find many substantial articles and resources which will help me better understand this subject. I wanted to come to reddit to see if anyone has any relevant resources that may help. Any general thoughts on my research topic would be very appreciated as well!

I know that this stereotype comes from instagram and tiktok, but I also read a book called suicidal empathy and there is some truth about the claim reported above... I repeat "some" truth

What's on your plate this week, what are you working on, what cool things have you encountered? Open discussion thread for casual chatter about Sociology & your school, academic, or professional work within it; share your project's progress, talk about a book you read, muse on a topic. If you have something to share or some cool fact to talk about, this is the place.

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In the upcoming semester I'll be taking the research method - applied social statistics combo. And, I may be underprepared as previous courses involved rushing through pages understanding bare minimum amount to produce multiple okay papers that satisfy professors who have low expectations from students of current times. I can display further evidences that justify why I'm overwhelmed and prove I am indeed underprepared. Instead, I urge you to just believe me. Trust me. I can use some help. I'm scraping desperately for any help I can get. For social statistics, I got to study ahead of time. I don't know how I should prepare for research method. What should I do?

AAAS: "Slavery linked to mortality gap between Black and white Americans today," by Laura Martín Agudelo.

'In 1953, civil rights activist James Baldwin wrote that “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

"Black people in the U.S. are already well-known to have a lower life expectancy at birth than white people, but the new analysis finds that [from] 2010 to 2020, they had significantly increased mortality rates in U.S. counties [notice, counties, not states] that relied the most on slavery just before the Civil War." In fact, 'mortality rates during that decade was 20 times greater in those counties compared with ones with no slavery recorded in the 1860 U.S. census.'

"According to a 2025 Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, a Black person born in the U.S. in 2023 could expect to live to the age of 74 on average, about 4 years less than their white counterpart." Black mothers are 3 times as likely as white mothers to die within 1 year of giving birth. Their babies have higher rates of prematurity + low birth weight. "Black people also have higher death rates related to conditions such as cancer, diabetes, or heart disease."

Manuel Galvan, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley is the lead author on this Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study just published. In counties where 92% of the population had been enslaved, there were more than 200 additional deaths per 100,000 people among Black people in the 2010s, compared with white people—a gap about 20 times greater than the one observed in counties with no slavery. "Slavery’s reach into the present…operates through how slavery shaped poverty or educational [or health care access] disparities.”

The current administration cannot white-wash slavery out of American history, but it's surely making the attempt. "During President Donald Trump’s second administration, officials at the National Institutes of Health have repeatedly sought to terminate grants funding research on health disparities, including a fresh round of cuts that Science reported last month."

Hi! I've recently found myself interested in the sociology of nostalgia in transnational families, particularly how they maintain ties through these nostalgic recollections. Similarly, they use these to form and/or connect with the diaspora. Beyond the emotional connection that bridges the gap of physical separation, I also see how nostalgia shapes identity and a sense of belonging. It also creates expectations for returning migrants.

I've read Jacobsen's (2022) Intimations of Nostalgia, which features a chapter on the sociology of nostalgia, and I'll be reading Fred Davis's "Yearning for Yesterday" next. Any other suggestions for materials to read or scholarly articles on the topic? Thank you!

This is our local recurring future-planning thread. Got questions about jobs or careers, want to know what programs or schools you should apply to, or unsure what you'll be able to use your degree for? This is the place.

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I get we have public education, founding myths, etc. but even before the nation state, it seems like empires were the norm and they seemed as if they were the same size. Why, for example, are cities not the normal level of governance even though they are very centralized? Or why don’t we naturally seem to form more anarchist societies that have much less hierarchy? Is the nation (or at least some version of it) a kind of timeless constant?

Any academic books on psychology or sociology of people during wars?

Are there any academic book summarizing the research and different theories of sociology of civilians people right before and during prolonged wars?

Given that we live in the times of large scale wars (Russia - Ukraine war and US - Israel - Iran war), I'd like to understand better the psychology of people around me during these times. Some examples questions:

* What are the factors making people support the leader of the aggressive nation?
* What would make people switch the side from supporting to non-supporting to protesting?
* How people link mentally the effects of the aggression to daily things around them? For example, does Russian population see the link between the war and that Ukraine bombs their refineries and that there is a lack of gas at the gas stations?
* What powers the will to fight in people in the defending countries? For example, why people in Venezuela surrendered when their president was captured, while people in Iran are willing to fight?
* How does the psychology measure the "morale"?
* and many other questions.

Any good books summarizing the research? If not, good books on wars from sociology point of view?

Are there any works on how some rich people like to act like poor people because they think it's cool? does this type of phenomenon have a name and has it been discussed a lot in sociology?