Department of Sociology | Masters by Research (MPhil) Sociology

Masters by Research (MPhil) Sociology at Durham University

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The Department of Sociology encompass a breadth of activities, with our main focus on the application of social science methods and concepts to social and policy issues.

Cutting across the Department and the wider Faculty and institution, colleagues in the Department are actively involved in Interdisciplinary Research Centres, notably Violence & Abuse, Social Justice & Community Action, and in Institutes including the Institute of Hazard, Risk & Resilience and the Institute of Advanced Study and the Wolfson Research Institute for Health & Wellbeing.

Our Postgraduate Researchers are an integral part of the Department and participate in, and often organise, our research seminars, away days, training sessions and social events. Our research training is delivered as part of the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) recognised NINE Doctoral Training Partnership.

Sociology at Durham is grounded in the Department's five core research themes. We welcome candidates for our research degrees who are interested in developing their own thesis in an area that intersects with these and where we have staff available to supervise.

The following research degrees are offered:

• MA by Research
• MPhil by Research
• PhD

The Department’s research activity focuses on five main research themes, around which we organise research groups of staff and postgraduate researchers to share and develop research ideas and practices. These groups are currently:

• Communities & Social Justice
• Higher Education & Social Inequality
• Violence & Abuse
• Health & Social Theory
• Criminal Justice, Social Harm and Inequalities

Department Expertise

The Department also has expertise in the following disciplinary areas:

• Criminology - Criminology and deviance, hate crime, crime reduction and prevention, forensic investigation, criminal justice systems, prisons;
• Sociology - Globalisation, science and technology, identity, culture, social capital, entrepreneurialism, social inequality, health and illness, complexity theory, methodologies;
• Social Policy - Health inequality, social exclusion, regeneration, housing, education, local and regional government, professional ethics, cultural strategies;
• Social Work - Child well-being, children’s rights and child mistreatment; adoption, fostering, and residential child care; disability, mental health and older age; green social work, post-disaster social work, professional ethics, service user involvement, community development and social change, globalisation and international social work;
• Community & Youth Work - Community development, community-based research, participatory action research, faith-based community and youth work, cross-community interaction, community-based responses to debt, ethics and politics of community development.

Since 2019 the Department has annually held a Sociology in Action week. Linked to our research and our taught curriculum, the aim of this week is to take our work out of the classroom and explore Sociology and Criminology from a different perspective.

Sociology graduates work in a wide range of settings all over the world, including health and welfare, local and central government and the Civil Service, education, the police, social research, the media and non-profit organisations. Many recent graduates from the Department have progressed to careers with high-profile employers including M&S, Mencap, Accenture and Unilever. Others have moved on to postgraduate study and academic research.

In Criminology, as well as building detailed subject-specific knowledge of criminological issues, our courses are designed to develop transferable skills that are valuable for both personal and professional development including, how to assemble and evaluate evidence, how to turn evidence into an effective argument, how to design a research project and analyse data.

Our graduates work in a wide range of employment settings worldwide, including the criminal justice system, the Civil Service, local and national government, banking, academic research and law (through graduate conversion programmes).

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