Sociology
University of Portsmouth
UCAS Code: L300 | Bachelor of Science (with Honours) - BSc (Hons)
University of Portsmouth
UCAS Code: L300 | Bachelor of Science (with Honours) - BSc (Hons)
Entry requirements
A level
104-112 points, to include a minimum of 2 A levels.
106-112 Tariff points from the Access to HE Diploma.
Cambridge Pre-U score of 44-46.
GCSE/National 4/National 5
2 GCSEs at grade C/4 or above to include English.
International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme
25 points from the IB Diploma, to include 3 Higher Level subjects.
Leaving Certificate - Higher Level (Ireland) (first awarded in 2017)
H3,H3,H3,H4,H4-H3,H3,H3,H3,H4
Acceptable when combined with other qualifications.
Acceptable when combined with other qualifications.
Pearson BTEC Level 3 National Extended Diploma (first teaching from September 2016)
104-112 Tariff points to include a minimum of 2 Advanced Highers.
Acceptable when combined with other qualifications.
T Level
UCAS Tariff
104-112 points, to include a minimum of 2 A levels, or equivalent.
104-112 points from the Advanced Welsh Baccalaureate including 1 A level, plus the Advanced Skills Challenge Certificate.
About this course
This course has alternative study modes. Contact the university to find out how the information below might vary.
**This is a Connected Degree**
Portsmouth is the only University in the UK with the flexibility to choose when to do an optional paid placement or self-employed year. Either take a placement in your third year, or finish your studies first and complete a placement in your fourth year. You can decide if and when to take a placement after you've started your course.
**Overview**
Understand how and why society is changing on this BSc (Hons) Sociology degree course.
Step into critical debates on social issues and inequalities as they vary around the world, including gender and sexuality, race and racism, nationalism and human emotions. Make sense of what’s going on, why it’s happening, and what we can do about it.
On this BSc (Hons) Sociology degree, you’ll learn classical sociological theories and how to apply them to the topics that most inspire you. You'll be taught and supported by the same expert staff and active researchers who introduce you to ideas and concepts in lectures, and encouraged to discuss these with them in more depth alongside other students.
As you work towards your choice of final research project, you'll pick subjects you want to explore further from a wide range of specialist subjects, such as social justice, wellbeing and happiness, and the sociology of education.
You'll graduate with transferable skills sought after by employers across many sectors, as well as the confidence, knowledge and methods to enact positive change within a broad range of careers.
**Course highlights**
- Tailor your studies to topics that matter most to you – from gender, sexuality, race, and social class, to happiness, the body, and social power and dissent - and be taught by experts in those fields
- Discover ways to apply classical sociological theories, such as developing policies and actions to produce social change and solutions to issues affecting the world right now
- Learn from leading sociologists about their impactful research on key social issues, such as the Researching Migrant Homelessness project
- Hear from industry specialists on topics such as racism, asylum and gender-based violence – recent guest speakers have come from Friends Without Borders and Portsmouth Abuse and Rape Counselling Services (PARCS)
- Build skills that support you to carry out your own research and analysis of issues you're passionate about – previous student dissertations were on the Black Lives Matter movement, online dating, musical taste and K-Pop, happiness and social media, becoming vegan and racism in sport
- Follow an optional media studies pathway, where you could explore topics such as digital cultures and media fandom
- Have the opportunity to do a work placement year after your second or third year on this Connected Degree - we're the only UK university to offer flexible sandwich placements for undergraduates
- Choose to learn a foreign language for free as part of your degree, from a selection of Arabic, British Sign Language, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin or Spanish
**Careers and opportunities**
What sectors can you work in with a sociology degree?
Many of our sociology graduates go into people-focused roles, or in roles that allow them to do research, shape social policies or bring about social change.
Areas you could go into include:
- teaching and lecturing (with additional training or further study)
- research and policy
- health and social care
- advertising, marketing and media
- local government
- careers advice, human resources and recruitment
- charity work and community development
What jobs can you do with a sociology degree?
Roles you could go onto include:
- fundraising and project manager
- hr adviser
- housing strategy and policy officer
- social worker
- evidence and evaluation manager
- peer support and young person's service manager
- recruitment consultant
- senior research executive
- marketing manager
- data analyst
Modules
Year 1
Core modules in this year include:
- Developing your Sociological Imagination (40 credits)
- Observing Society (20 credits)
- Research Design and Analysis (20 credits)
- Social Inequalities (20 credits)
- Theorising Social Life (20 credits)
There are no optional modules in this year.
Year 2
Core modules in this year include:
- Doing Sociological Research (20 credits)
- Modernity and Globalisation (20 credits)
- Risk and Society (20 credits)
- Work, Employment and Society (20 credits)
Optional modules in this year currently include:
- Consumer Society: Critical Themes and Issues (L5) (20 credits)
- Digital Cultures: Exploring the Digital in the Humanities and Social Sciences (20 credits)
- Emotions and Social Life (20 credits)
- Empire and Its Afterlives in Britain, Europe, and Africa (20 credits)
- Engaged Citizenship in Humanities and Social Sciences (20 credits)
- Equality Or Liberation? Theorising Social Justice (20 credits)
- Family, Career and Generation (L5) (20 credits)
- Gender and Sexuality (20 credits)
- Global Security (20 credits)
- Health, Wellbeing, and Happiness (L5) (20 credits)
- Intercultural Perspectives On Communication (20 credits)
- Marketing & Communication (20 credits)
- Media Networks: Exploring Digital Culture (20 credits)
- Media, Culture and National Identity (20 credits)
- Nationalism and Migration: Chaos, Crisis and the Everyday (L5) (20 credits)
- News, Discourse, and Media (20 credits)
- Principles of Economic Crime Investigation (20 credits)
- Professional Experience L5 (20 credits)
- Puritans to Postmodernists: American Literature (20 credits)
- Race and Racism (L5) (20 credits)
- Screen Media (20 credits)
- Social Power, Elites and Dissent (L5) (20 credits)
- Sociology of Culture: Taste, Value and Celebrity (L5) (20 credits)
- The Sociology of Education (20 credits)
- Transitional Justice & Human Rights (20 credits)
- Understanding Personal Life (L5) (20 credits)
- Wildlife Crime: Threats and Response (20 credits)
Placement year (optional)
Have the opportunity to do a work placement year after your second or third year on this Connected Degree - we're the only UK university to offer flexible sandwich placements for undergraduates.
Year 3
Optional modules in this year currently include:
- Celebrity and Society (20 credits)
- Consumer Society:Critical Themes and Issues (L6) (20 credits)
- Dissertation (Sociology) (40 credits)
- Emotions and Social Life (L6) (20 credits)
- Equality Or Liberation? Theorising Social Justice (20 credits)
- Family, Career and Generation (L6) (20 credits)
- Gender and Sexuality (20 credits)
- Health, Wellbeing and Happiness (20 credits)
- Introduction to Teaching (20 credits)
- Major Project (40 credits)
- Media Fan Cultures (20 credits)
- Nationalism and Migration: Chaos, Crisis and the Everyday (20 credits)
- News, War and Peace (20 credits)
- Professional Development: Recruiters and Candidates (20 credits)
- Professional Development: Recruiters and Candidates (20 credits)
- Professional Experience L6 (20 credits)
- Race and Racism (L6) (20 credits)
- Social Power, Elites and Dissent (L6) (20 credits)
- Sociology of Culture: Taste, Value and Celebrity (L6) (20 credits)
- The Sociology of Education (L6) (20 credits)
- Understanding Personal Life (L6) (20 credits)
We use the best and most current research and professional practice alongside feedback from our students to make sure course content is relevant to your future career or further studies.
Therefore, some course content may change over time to reflect changes in the discipline or industry and some optional modules may not run every year. If a module doesn’t run, we’ll let you know as soon as possible and help you choose an alternative module.
Assessment methods
You will be assessed throughout this course via a wide range of assessment methods including:
- written essays and tests
- both group and individual projects
- seminar participation
- examinations
- a 10,000-word dissertation in year 3
Examinations typically only make up around 10–20% of your final mark.
You’ll be able to test your skills and knowledge informally before you do assessments that count towards your final mark.
You can get feedback on all practice and formal assessments so you can improve in the future.
The way you’re assessed may depend on the modules you select. As a guide, students on this course last year were typically assessed as follows:
Year 1 students: 18% by written exams and 82% by coursework
Year 2 students: 17% by written exams, 17% by practical exams and 66% by coursework
Year 3 students: 12% by written exams and 88% by coursework
Tuition fees
Select where you currently live to see what you'll pay:
The Uni
University of Portsmouth
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
What students say
We've crunched the numbers to see if overall student satisfaction here is high, medium or low compared to students studying this subject(s) at other universities.
How do students rate their degree experience?
The stats below relate to the general subject area/s at this university, not this specific course. We show this where there isn’t enough data about the course, or where this is the most detailed info available to us.
Sociology
Teaching and learning
Assessment and feedback
Resources and organisation
Student voice
Who studies this subject and how do they get on?
Most popular A-Levels studied (and grade achieved)
After graduation
The stats in this section relate to the general subject area/s at this university – not this specific course. We show this where there isn't enough data about the course, or where this is the most detailed info available to us.
Sociology
What are graduates doing after six months?
This is what graduates told us they were doing (and earning), shortly after completing their course. We've crunched the numbers to show you if these immediate prospects are high, medium or low, compared to those studying this subject/s at other universities.
Top job areas of graduates
We have quite a lot of sociology graduates, although numbers fell last year. But graduates still do pretty well. Most sociology graduates go straight into work when they complete their degrees, and a lot of graduates go into jobs in social professions such as recruitment, education, community and youth work, and housing. An important option for a sociology graduate is social work - and we're short of people willing to take this challenging but rewarding career. Sociology is a flexible degree and you can find graduates from the subject in pretty much every reasonable job — obviously, you don't find many doctors or engineers, but you do find them in finance, the media, healthcare, marketing and even IT. Sociology graduates taking further study often branch out into other qualifications, like teaching, law, psychology, HR and even maths, so don’t think a sociology degree restricts you to just one set of options.
What about your long term prospects?
Looking further ahead, below is a rough guide for what graduates went on to earn.
Sociology
The graph shows median earnings of graduates who achieved a degree in this subject area one, three and five years after graduating from here.
£25k
£25k
£29k
Note: this data only looks at employees (and not those who are self-employed or also studying) and covers a broad sample of graduates and the various paths they've taken, which might not always be a direct result of their degree.
Explore these similar courses...
Higher entry requirements
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Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF):
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This information comes from the National Student Survey, an annual student survey of final-year students. You can use this to see how satisfied students studying this subject area at this university, are (not the individual course).
This is the percentage of final-year students at this university who were "definitely" or "mostly" satisfied with their course. We've analysed this figure against other universities so you can see whether this is high, medium or low.
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This information is from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), for undergraduate students only.
You can use this to get an idea of who you might share a lecture with and how they progressed in this subject, here. It's also worth comparing typical A-level subjects and grades students achieved with the current course entry requirements; similarities or differences here could indicate how flexible (or not) a university might be.
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Post-six month graduation stats:
This is from the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education Survey, based on responses from graduates who studied the same subject area here.
It offers a snapshot of what grads went on to do six months later, what they were earning on average, and whether they felt their degree helped them obtain a 'graduate role'. We calculate a mean rating to indicate if this is high, medium or low compared to other universities.
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Graduate field commentary:
The Higher Education Careers Services Unit have provided some further context for all graduates in this subject area, including details that numbers alone might not show
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The Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset combines HRMC earnings data with student records from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
While there are lots of factors at play when it comes to your future earnings, use this as a rough timeline of what graduates in this subject area were earning on average one, three and five years later. Can you see a steady increase in salary, or did grads need some experience under their belt before seeing a nice bump up in their pay packet?
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