Westminster City School
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Sociology

You will require an open mind to study sociology as it's essentially a perspective for viewing the world, analysing how society shapes our beliefs, behaviour and identity, and how this process has changed over time. Subjects like the family, education, the media, crime, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, and globalisation could all be explored.

Probably the most important thing about sociology is that it enables us to make sense of the rapidly changing world that we live in. Some of the main changes that we have recently seen in Britain have been:

  • an economic transformation, as old industries have declined and service occupations have rapidly expanded.
  • changes in family life as more people have begun to live on their own, more women have found employment in paid work and divorce rates have continued to rise
  • changing educational thinking as new solutions are brought to bear to tackle underachievement.
  • the transformation of the media by information technology and the spread of more flexible and less secure forms of interacting with the wider world.
  • changing patterns of crime and new ways of tackling it based on new thinking as to what causes it.
  • increasing inequalities as more people have experienced poverty and exclusion, and the gap has widened between rich and poor

Perhaps most fundamentally of all, sociology enables us to understand ourselves. The way that we think, behave and feel, indeed our very sense of identity, is socially produced. People often speak of human nature as though deep within us there lies some reservoir of natural impulses that determine the way that we behave. There is, however, no such thing as human nature, for the way that we think, behave, and feel is shaped by what sociologists call the process of socialisation. This provides us with language, gives us our values and beliefs, establishes our identity and so turns us into members of society.

Students who have studied Sociology apply for a wide variety of jobs, but popular options include social work, as well as education, the criminal justice system, local government and community development. Instead of seeing the way they live as natural or inevitable, Sociologists learn that it is socially constructed. By discovering the workings of society, they gain an understanding of how this process takes place ... Sociology can then enable you to understand and explain the world you live in and your situation in it.