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"As its founder, I was delighted to find [the Department] in such good shape and brimming with confidence"
Professor Emeritus Raymond Illsley, first Head of Department
Welcome to the Department of Sociology.
The Department is amongst the very best teaching and research units in the United Kingdom and recognised internationally for the quality of its work.
The Times newspaper's Good University Guide considers Aberdeen as one of the top places to study sociology in the UK, and we have risen up the league table steadily over the last few years to occupy second place in the most recent rankings in June 2008. With just over ninety universities offering undergraduate degrees in the discipline, this confirms that we deliver one of the country’s most highly respected sociology programmes. The Department has consistently achieved extremely high satisfaction ratings in the National Student Survey (NSS). In 2009, the NSS ranked the Department of Sociology at Aberdeen fifth in the UK, with a student satisfaction rating of 94%.
In a national exercise to assess teaching quality at undergraduate level, we were judged as ‘Excellent’, the highest level attainable. With respect to postgraduate studies, the Department was identified in 2001 as a recognised outlet for research training and supervision of postgraduate students (MRes and PhD) by the Economic and Social Research Council.
The Department sees a strong link between high quality teaching and research. Publication of the results of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) has confirmed the status of Sociology as one of the leading research departments in the field. With more than half the research work done in the Department judged by a panel of experts to be world-leading (4*) or internationally excellent (3*) and all of its work meeting national standards of excellence, the Department was ranked joint sixth in the UK and one of the two top departments for Sociology in Scotland. We take pride in these hallmarks of external recognition, which together reflect our national and international prominence.
We are a medium-sized department, at fifteen permanent members of staff. This gives us the benefits of scale – in terms of the range of teaching and research interests – while still making us small enough to sustain an intimate and friendly atmosphere.
We invite you to explore the rest of our web site to learn more about our teaching programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, our research strengths, some of our regular activities, such as seminars, and be introduced to staff.
This page was last updated on 27-Feb-2012 11:07:52 GMT
