Our BA Sociology (including Foundation Year) could be suitable for you if your academic qualifications do not yet meet our entry requirements for a three-year version of our social sciences courses and you want a programme that improves your skills to support your academic performance.

Open to UK and EU applicants, this four-year course includes a Foundation Year (known as Year Zero) which is delivered by our Essex Pathways Department followed by a further three years of study in our Department of Sociology and Criminology.

During Year Zero you will study on our Social Sciences Pathway which will cover topics such as Analysing the Social and Political World, and People and Society. At the end of Year Zero all students who pass the Social Sciences Pathway will have a choice of which course to progress with. As well as BA Sociology students on the Social Sciences Pathway could also study BA Politics or BA Childhood Studies, amongst other courses.

From Year One of BA Sociology you will investigate what connects people with each other, as well as what divides them. You can study topics such as digital media and society, psychiatry and mental illness, sexualities, crime, childhood, and the art, film and personal testimony of war.

We are a large and friendly department, offering a range of diversity of specialisms including:

Social divisions, inequality, the nature of work and commercial culture

Culture, identity and subjectivity

Public policy regarding health, the environment, crime and aging

Citizenship, multiculturalism and human rights

Receive training in sociological methods – how to design a survey, conduct an interview, and use quantitative analysis from basic statistic to big data – in order to ask the difficult questions

We are 2nd in UK for research power in sociology (Times Higher Education research power measure, Research Excellence Framework 2021) and were ranked 73rd globally and top 15 in the UK for sociology in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2024.