Learning Goals

Students who major in sociology/anthropology can expect to achieve the following learning goals:

  • All Majors:
    • Understand how race, class, gender and its intersection influences peoples’ experiences within larger social institutions and across cultures.
    • Articulate empirical research questions and hypotheses and develop a logical plan of data collection and analyses to address such questions and hypotheses.
    • Create and deliver a professional presentation designed for a professional audience using oral, written, and visual formats.
    • Hone effective critical thinking skills.

 

  • Additional Goals for Human Services Concentration:
    • Attain first- hand experience by serving a minimum of 140 hours in a human service agency.
    • Develop basic human services helping skills.
    • Acquire an understanding of ethical and legal issues in human services.
    • Learn to recognize and address issues of worker self-care in the human service field.
    • Create a plan for entry into the human service profession.
    • Develop a repertoire of basic interpersonal skills which enable them to work effectively with individuals and groups.
    • Cultivate an understanding of purposes, formulation, design, context, issues, constraints, and uses of evaluation research with illustrations from business, education, and social service studies.
    • Expand a knowledge base about community organizations and services within a specific field of interest.
    • Analyze formal human service organizations with special emphasis upon their structure, processes, and services.
    • Develop skills in identifying, examining, and evaluating social problems, social policies, and service delivery systems.

 

  • Additional Goals for Anthropology Concentration:
    • Develop an understanding of the basic foundations and major concepts of American four-field anthropology.
    • Develop an understanding of local and global processes and social complexity through space and time.
    • Become familiar with important scholars and theories in the field of anthropology.
    • Develop the skills of global citizenship through an anthropologically-informed understanding of human diversity.
    • Apply the theory and methodologies developed within Anthropology and related disciplines to major social and cultural concerns in the multi-cultural global context.
    • Develop an awareness of career opportunities in Anthropology through advanced graduate training and in non-academic professional careers.
    • Gain practical experience in research methods with course-related independent research projects, opportunities for internships and/or other forms of supervised field research.

 

  • Additional Goals for Sociology Concentration:
    • Explain the sociological imagination by understanding people through the use of individual biography, history, and the relationship between the two within social structure.
    • Use the sociological imagination to identify the difference between personal troubles and public issues (social problems).
    • Distinguish between micro and macro levels of analysis.
    • Develop a working knowledge of key issues facing at least one social institution.
    • Understand the role of research in sociology and the various quantitative and qualitative methodologies used for empirical research.
    • Identify the central theories of sociology including functionalism, social conflict, symbolic interactionism, and feminist theory. In doing so, students should also be able to identify important figures in sociology— among them Max Weber, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Irving Goffman, and Dorothy Smith—and understand their contribution to sociology.
    • Understand social issues through examination of empirical evidence. In doing so, students should be able to synthesize and summarize existing literature.