Sociology and Anthropology: What Do You Really Study?
Societies, cultures and identities - to understand how groups, institutions and norms shape our lives.
What Do You Study in Sociology and Anthropology? Core Subjects, Year by Year
What do the degree courses cover?
Open a course to learn about its main topics and see what the work looks like in practice.
What do you learn in the course?Introduction to Sociology?
Learn to see how institutions, norms and groups shape choices that seem personal. The course introduces concepts such as status, role, power, deviance and social change and practices moving from a private case to a social explanation.
Main topics
- structure and action
- institutions and norms
- Class, gender and power
- Groups and social change
What does it look like in practice?
For example, choosing a profession is analyzed not only as a personal preference but also through family, education system, gender and the labor market.
What do you learn in the course?Introduction to Anthropology?
The course examines how people create meaning and live within different cultural worlds. You learn about kinship, ritual, religion, economics and identity and fieldwork that tries to understand practices from the perspective of the participants.
Main topics
- Culture and meaning
- Kinship, family and exchange
- Ritual, religion and identity
- Ethnography and cultural relativism
What does it look like in practice?
For example, one studies a daily custom and asks what knowledge, values and relationships it expresses instead of judging it from the outside.
What do you learn in the course?Statistics for the social sciences?
Learn to describe social patterns and draw conclusions from a population sample. Dealing with distributions, sampling, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and correlation, while criticizing measurement and interpreting numbers.
Main topics
- Data description and visualization
- Sampling and probability
- Estimation and testing of hypotheses
- relationships between variables
What does it look like in practice?
For example, we check whether a difference in attitudes between groups is consistent enough that it is unlikely to have been created by chance in the sample.
What do you learn in the course?Academic writing in the social sciences?
You learn to read an article, identify a claim and a method and write a clear work that is based on sources. Literature search, synthesis, structure, citation and editing are practiced while distinguishing between description, interpretation and evidence.
Main topics
- Search and evaluation of sources
- critical reading
- Argument and paragraph construction
- Synthesis, citation and editing
What does it look like in practice?
For example, combine several studies into a paragraph that presents a controversy rather than summarizing each article separately.
What do you learn in the course?Sociological theories?
Readers read classical and contemporary thinkers who offer different explanations for order, power, conflict, and meaning. You learn to use the theory as a tool that highlights mechanisms and not as a list of names to memorize.
Main topics
- Marx, Weber and Durkheim
- action and interaction
- Power, fields and capital
- Critical and contemporary theories
What does it look like in practice?
For example, a workplace is analyzed once through class division and once through organizational culture and compare what each approach explains.
Frequently Asked Questions About Sociology and Anthropology
Is a degree in Sociology and Anthropology difficult?
There is no single answer — difficulty depends on your background, the institution, and your chosen study pace. According to this site's estimate, The degree has a relatively small quantitative component, so mathematics is usually not the main obstacle, and a large share of the reading material is in English. A good way to assess fit is to review the course map on this page: if most of the subjects interest you, the effort will usually feel worthwhile.
How long does a degree in Sociology and Anthropology take?
Usually 3 years (Single-major, double-major, or combined program). Exact duration varies by institution and depends on course load and the track you choose.
Sociology and Anthropology or Criminology — which is right for me?
The degrees most closely related to Sociology and Anthropology are Criminology, Psychology, and History. Their differences are usually in emphasis rather than the overall subject, so the fastest way to decide is to compare their course maps — what you actually study in each program, year by year. You can also open the degree comparison tool to view the differences side by side.