Best Sociology Research Topics for College Students
Do you believe that sociology is a boring science that is based on piles of disconnected data, and your job is to figure out some laws where they can’t be figured out? Well, sometimes sociology may really get a little hard, but still it’s a fascinating study of human interactions and behaviors in a group. We bet that you will find out a lot of new, and sometimes unpleasant, things about human behavior in a crowd while studying sociology in college. But forewarned is forearmed, right? If you know that people will act this way, you can at least avoid danger or other less unpleasant consequences.
Where to Find Sociology Research Topics for College Students
In the age of the Internet and media you can google any question and get the answer immediately, especially if it’s something as easy as topics for your sociology projects. Google will shower you with links to various websites, and all you need to do is to spend a couple of minutes and pick a topic that appeals to you the most. However, we would like to suggest you a more personalized way and create your very own topic. Sociology projects for college often take a big part of your total score, so the better you do the higher GPA you will get. Here are a few suggestions on where to find ideas:
1) Look nearby.
Have you always wondered how the phenomenon of Instagram and other social media where people can boast how they are living their lives influences us? Or, maybe, you want to know whether there’s any difference in creating and maintaining a relationship now compared to 20 years earlier? Then now is your chance, and both these topics will make great sociology projects for college. Find social problems, phenomena and issues that have always bothered you and explore the unknown! This way you will kill two birds with one stone: dig deerper in the matter that interests you and find a great and, what is more important, unique topic for your project. You don’t want to be the 10th student in your class with “consumerism” or “gender inequality” topics, do you?
2) Find a different angle.
Trivial topics are not bad, they can actually be a good recourse for your thesis statement, all you need to do is to show your own take on the problem. Let’s regard the aforementioned example with gender inequality: the majority of people will write about misogynistic culture and suppression of women. We are not saying it’s a bad topic, but we bet your peers and your professor have heard about it a dozen times.
Of course, you can find a tiny aspect in the whole that has never been regarded before and investigate it further, but you can also try to turn the topic head over heels. For example, you can find out about matriarchal societies and rights of men in them. Are there still any of those societies? How do they operate? This will take more time and energy, but you will explore new horizons of human behavior – and that’s what college sociology is for.
3) Test your topic.
Remember that you are writing research for someone to read it, so it will be a good idea to test your topic “in the wild.” Ask your friends or family members what they know about the issue in your topic and whether they are interested to learn more about it. We don’t mean that your topic has to be popular, we’ve actually said just the opposite in the previous point, but you need to make it interesting and catchy. In the introduction to your essay, you have a hook sentence, but when it comes to sociology projects for college, you need to catch your reader’s interest from the very onset, and an intriguing topic is a good way to do so.
Ideas for Project Topics
We believe that you know how to put words into coherent sentences, so we are not going to spoon-feed you ready-made topics, we are instead going to give you a few suggestions:
1) Regard conspiracy theories from a social perspective.
What does the emergence and popularity of such theories show us about the society they are spreading in? What stage of development of a society is usually linked to the emergence of the first theories? Can such theories be regarded as similar to mythological concepts of less developed societies?
Take it from us, regardless of what topic you choose, your paper will ignite an intense discussion in the class. And doesn’t that count as success?
2) Analyze the mental health of a whole society.
Are there any ways of helping the whole community at the same time? Do we need to influence each individual to make the community healthier and happier, or is there a way to make everyone happy at once? Is it possible to eliminate the harmful social behaviors, such as mob panic and the bystander effect?
There are a lot to explore in psychology, and even more in the psychology of a society, so this field can be an eternal source of research topics for college.
3) Investigate the theories of social contract.
You have heard something about this, and know that Hobbes and Locke are significant figures in developing the idea of social (or political, as it’s sometimes called) contract. But who was the first to come up with the idea? Can the theories expressed by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau be regarded as the source of democracy? What are the views of the authors on society, its structure and the laws that rule it?
Studying sociology in college can be boring sometimes, but now you know how to spark the process up. Look for ideas around you, choose a suitable topic and create a project that will leave both your professor and your classmates frozen in awe. Otherwise you can hire a sociology expert to help you with your studies.