Why does sociology have such a bad reputation?

Question

I find it facinating but why does it have such a bad reputation? All I hear is if I do it I'll end up flipping burgers. So if you did a degree in sociology, what are you doing now? And if you don't mind, how much are you earning? I am thinking about doing it out of pure interest. If I go ahead with it, I'll later apply to work in the civil services where it doesn't really matter what degree you have.

Answer 1

sociology is a hard subject...i took it for a term at uni...so if anyone out there has a major in it...respect to you :)

Answer 2

There are of course a lot of reasons, but one large reason is that sociology majors are given few ready-to-deploy on the job skills in school unless they are applying for the relatively scarce social work jobs. This is especially relevant when compared to engineering students, finance and accounting students and many biological science students. Thanks to that, they aren't as competitive even for general jobs. Higher wage entry level positions often tend to favor candidates who have had mathematics heavy course work, the hiring managers believing that social sciences are a haven for inumerates.

  I also think that popular media tends to sensationalize a lot of the empyheaded fringe social science personalities and leave the real thinkers alone given that their research streams are too deep to cover within the 45 second segment that TV attention spans require. I really didn't respect sociology until I was doing research in economics and discovered a lot of the criticisms I had with economic assumptions were well developed in sociology. The research journals in Sociology are some of the most stringently reviewed in the social sciences, preventing a lot of the data-mining article churn that leads to worthless theory building and substantiating.  An example of this is in Psychology where fundamental attributional error, which has been in every Psyc 101 text book as a fact for 30 years, was significantly blasted by meta-analysis for being only somewhat true an only under a few circumstances in the Psychological Bulletin last year.

  If you can get yourself into a graduate degree, or a solid sociology undergraduate program, you would be well positioned for a law degree if you are worried about low pay.  Otherwise, if you are really interested, look for a graduate program at another university and aim for a PhD. Sociology is a welcome background in management research, especially in strategic management and organizational theory, which is the field I'm working through right now. As unfair as it might be, the pay is a lot better in management than in sociology academia and you can still do much of the same research.

Peace and good luck to all of you..

Answer 3

Maybe minor in sociology.

Isn't sociology a lot like psychology? If it is, why not major in psychology?