Sociology explores the intersection between our personal lives, history, and the social world around us. Students learn the basic foundations of sociology, including its development as a field of inquiry, sociological theory, and methodology. Students investigate how race, class, gender, and other social identities are constructed, performed, and affect our social lives and perpetuate existing structures of inequality, with an emphasis on institutional and structural racism. The course also explores how culture and social institutions shape individuals and their life trajectories. 

The course is designed to familiarize students with quantitative research methodology, methods of quantitative data collection, and analysis of quantitative data used in sociology, as well as the differences between quantitative and qualitative research methods. In addition, students will learn statistical software packages in the social sciences and conduct independent research using one of the most widely used sources of quantitative social data, the General Social Survey (GSS). One additional 80-minute lab session is required as a co-component to this course. 

Tweets, TikToks, and memes follow unique norms and conventions, but they all share one thing in common: They digitize text. One byproduct of digitization is that we can analyze these cultural constructs to dissect modern languages and cultures. In this course, you will: 1) Examine forms of digitization and how organizations create structures that constrain the production of meaning. 2) Conduct basic computational text analysis 3) Critically assess how computational methods are used to understand historically underrepresented cultural meanings and perspectives 

A comprehensive introduction to descriptive statistics and the essential ideas of probability. Students will study foundations of classical parametric inference: point estimation, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and common statistical techniques including simple regression and correlation. Examples will be drawn from a variety of social and natural sciences. Because many of the analysis techniques require extensive computations, for other than the simplest data sets, each student will become familiar with one or more of the software packages (e.g., Minitab, SPSS, Excel, etc.) or other tools, such as a graphing calculator, that are available. 

This course introduces the students to statistical ideas and concepts with an emphasis on the interpretation of data and the communication of statistical results. Topics include sampling, surveys, experimental designs, observational studies, data exploration, chance phenomena, and methods of statistical inference. Students who have already received credit for STA 215 cannot receive credit for this course. 

For advanced students undertaking an independent research project in sociology with the guidance of department faculty.  Formal proposal must be submitted to the sponsoring faculty for department approval.  The project should culminate in a paper to be presented on campus or a regional sociology conference. 

This is the culmination of a two-semester Senior Research project and paper that serves as one of the options for the Capstone experience for the Sociology major. It provides an opportunity for students interested in sociological research to pursue individual or collaborative research projects, with the guidance of the department faculty. Department Consent required.