PhD Program
Curriculum and Requirements
The PhD degree is offered in four programmatic areas:
Doctoral students are required to complete 60 semester hours of graduate course credit beyond the master’s degree. Students admitted to the doctoral program without a master's degree will complete one during their course of study. A minimum of 16 post-MA credits must be Dissertation Research (SOC 7990); however, no more than 30 credits of SOC 7990 may be applied to the 60-hour requirement. Hour requirements, however, are secondary in importance to breadth and depth of knowledge as evidenced by performance on the major area preliminary examination and demonstrated research competence. The dissertation, a mature piece of scholarship embodying the results of original research, is central to the student’s plan of study. Students are expected to develop a dissertation proposal early in their program.
PhD students are given considerable flexibility in developing their programs of study, although all students are expected to achieve a level of basic competence in theory, research methods, and statistics. Most PhD students also will choose a minor area of concentration from among the above four areas or Quantitative Methods.
All doctoral students are required to take six core courses in theory and quantitative methods:
- Classical Sociological Theory (SOC 6010)
- Statistical Packages (SOC 6090)
- Statistical Techniques and Applications in Sociology (SOC 6100)
- Intermediate Methodology (SOC 6110)
- Intermediate Statistics (SOC 6120)
- Research Design (SOC 7130)
Doctoral students also must take Teaching Introductory Sociology (SOC 6600).
Updated: 09/15/2023 02:58PM