Sociology
Sociologists study society, including social structures, culture, institutions, population dynamics, and patterns of behavior. The wide breadth of sociology as a field provides a range of approaches to study social interaction. Data-driven coursework in the sociology department covers a range of topics and tools, including traditional research methods, such as interviews, survey sampling, and ethnography, to computational methods, including network analysis, machine learning, and text data. Coursework in the sociology department will train you to collect, clean, analyze, and interpret data on social behaviors. Beyond collecting and analyzing data, sociology coursework will also push you to think critically about data collection and the conclusions that can be reached from statistical analyses.
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These courses have been identified as relevant to Data Science and will allow you to practice skills learned in the minor for your course of study. These courses cannot be used as electives for the Data Science minor.
Methods of data collection, with attention to problem selection, sources of information, choice of methods, and research design. Operationalization and measurement; sampling, construction of questionnaires, and interviewing; observation techniques; experimentation.
Methods of data analysis: descriptive statistics, elements of probability, and inferential statistics and multivariate analysis to permit causal inference.
Great ideas don't always result in entrepreneurial success -- you also have to know your audience or customer base. In this research methodology course, students will receive hands-on experience in conducting interviews and focus groups and engaging in participant observation in order to determine potential customer/client interest in a product, service, or nonprofit. Special attention will be paid to analyzing research findings in order to create actionable insights.
The surge of digital technology over the past three decades has reconfigured society - increasing political polarization, generating new types of discrimination in job searches, and expanding government surveillance. This course introduces the budding field of computational sociology. We will examine the ways that new kinds of data are being collected and analyzed and the impact these changes are having in society. You will learn how to collect and analyze novel sources of data, such as text data, social media data, and network data. By the end of the course, you should also be familiar with the sociological consequences of each method.
The primary objective of the course is to explain how and why particular social arrangements affect the types and distribution of diseases, as well as the types of health promotion and disease prevention practices that societies promote.