Why I am proud to have an Ology!

Heather Griffiths, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Sociology at Warwick University, on how she is proud to be a Sociologist. “An Ology?!” chorused my family, when I told them I was giving up work to study Sociology. No, I didn’t know what they were talking about either, but it turns out that the credibility of my chosen discipline had been irreparably tarnished by an advert from the 1980s for BT. In a vain attempt to rectify this I have spent the last four years trying to explain to my family and friends what Sociology actually is. No, it is different to psychology and I am not going to be a psychiatrist or social worker. What I am doing is looking at your world and trying to make it just a little bit better. Not your entire world, that would be madness, but that piece of your world where you feel something is not quite fair.