BA (Hons) Social Science

Year 4 Core Modules

Choose one of two core modules

Brief description

Conduct and present a simple research investigation into a sociological topic of your choice. Write a 10,000 word dissertation and publicly present your research findings.

Module content:

• Research design: Selecting the appropriate method for a specified topic and conducting actual research - with guidance from project supervisor.
• Reviewing literature: Collecting evidence within relevant field of research and its application to the field of study.
• Analysing and interpreting data: Collecting, dealing with and understanding data; turning data into words and/or numbers - with guidance from project supervisor.
• Presenting findings: Making research findings ‘public’; writing-up your project - with guidance from project supervisor.

Brief description

A volunteer/work placement with an external organisation over two terms. Learn to apply academic learning to ‘real world’ situations.

Module content:

• Student defined content: The learning will be shaped by the organisation in which you are placed and the role you are assigned.
• Work experience: Gain valuable employability skills.
• Job-seeking skills: Guidance on job applications and CVs are built into the organisation of the module.
• Research and synthesis: Combine knowledge gained from your placement organisation with academic knowledge from your degree to produce a report.

Year 4 Option Modules

You must study and pass four option modules, two each from your chosen subject pathways, or from the Sociology options. For your two chosen subject pathways, choose one module from Group A and one from Group B. If you wish to graduate with a BA Social Science (with subject) then at least 60 credits must come from the same named subject pathway.

GROUP A

Brief description

The criminal justice system involves a variety of organisations and professionals, e.g. the police, the courts and offender services. How psychological theories and investigation can inform procedures followed in these organisations.

Module content:

• Introduction and context: An introduction to investigative psychology and the importance of recognising how other people can influence our behaviour and cognitive processes, including an overview of both theory and application of social influence research in this exciting and developing area of applied psychology.
• Investigative processes: An overview of the key stages and issues in relation to police and wider criminal justice system investigative processes including some of the key legal powers associated with these.
• Offender profiling: What is offender profiling and how is it undertaken? Evaluate difference approaches to offender profiling and consider the future for this topical approach to investigation. What is serial homicide and how can offender profiling be applied to this major crime?
• Investigating missing persons: What do missing people do and where do they go? What role is there for psychological theories in explaining missing person behaviour and helping the police investigate cases?
• Eyewitness testimony: The effects of social influence on memory: stress, suggestibility, alcohol, conformity. Applications of this research to real life (e.g., accuracy of memory in a forensic investigation).
• Identification: The role of human memory, face processing, and communicative styles on the construction of facial composites and identification of suspects. Discussion of the appropriateness of the use of CCTV footage as evidence in courts of law.
• False and recovered memories: How and why do people recall events which did not occur or recall events at a later date which they were previously unable to recall? What can the study of human memory tell us about this interesting debate? What implications does this have for the criminal justice system?
• Interviewing: How should we best interview witnesses to ensure reliable and complete statements are made? What differences might there be in interviewing suspects rather than witnesses? Critical evaluation of the tools and techniques psychologists developed to aid interviewing (e.g. the Cognitive Interview).
• Child witnesses: What can the study of child development tell us about the appropriateness of having children as witnesses in court? Critical evaluation of appropriate questioning techniques.
• Expert witnesses: What is/should be the role of the psychologist as an expert witness?

GROUP A

Brief description

Pursue a topic of interest, different from any other work either submitted or proposed, relevant to your work or voluntary experience. Reflect on it, identify an issue that can be informed with reference to published psychological literature, negotiate and agree a chosen area for review. Complete the review and report on it.

Module content:

• General: Content will be individually agreed dependent on the work or volunteer placement, topic and study plan.

GROUP B

Brief description

Child development in the first eight years covering language development, number and counting knowledge and reading from a cognitive and educational perspective. In addition, look at the influence of play and the media during these early years. 

Module content:

• Child cognition and brain growth: The development of the brain in early childhood and its links to language and numerical skills.
• Conceptual issues in learning: Domains (modules), critical periods, learning mechanisms (e.g. statistical learning, bootstrapping, innate constraints), nature-nurture.
• Speech and sounds: Auditory perception, acquisition of phonemes, and the effects of prosody on acquisition of other parts of the language system.
• Acquisition of words: Words, concepts and categories. Child-directed speech, literacy acquisition, language impairments.
• Rules of language: Acquisition of morphology and syntax.
• Learning to read: Theories of normal reading; dyslexia and hyperlexia.
• Early numerical skills: Theories of mathematical development; early number and counting skills.
• The role of play: Play inside and outside the classroom. How play influences cognitive and social development.
• Media: The role of television viewing and computer games on children’s development.

GROUP A

Brief description

The role of physical activity for special populations. and how participation has the potential to enhance physical, social and mental health and well-being.

Module content:

• Guidelines: Population physical activity guidelines.
• Benefits: Physical, social and mental health benefits associated with physical activity.
• Needs and challenges: Identification of Physical activity needs and challenges associated with engaging different groups in physical activity.
• Participation: Examine participation trends associated with different populations.
• Exploration of attitudes, beliefs and values: Exploration of attitudes, beliefs and values of different populations regarding physical activity.

GROUP A

Brief description

Gain knowledge and understanding related to duty of care in sport.

Module content:

• Safeguarding: What more could be done to strengthen sport’s position in relation to the protection of young people and adults at all levels of sport.
• Equality, diversity and inclusion: Specific aspects of duty of care with relevance to equality, diversity and inclusion.
• Injuries: How the likelihood of injury can be lessened and whether improvements can be made to how sporting injuries are treated in the short and long term.
• Career transitions: The support people receive as they transition through the sport system, including entering and leaving top-level sport.
• Mental health: Issues relating to the prevention, identification and management of mental health issues in sportspeople.
• Education: How sportspeople can be supported to help them balance education with their sporting activities.
• Representation of the participant’s voice: How the views of sportspeople are considered in decisions affecting them in sport.

GROUP B

Brief description

The way sport can be used to address social issues, some of the problems with this approach, and how these issues can be overcome. Gain a theoretical and practical toolkit for sport development work.

Module content:

• Community development: Introduce a community development approach to sport delivery.
• Ideologies of sport for development: Explore the political ideologies associated with sport development work.
• Community practice: Understand the community practice approach to sporting provision.
• Sport and urban regeneration: Explore the use of sport as a tool of urban development.
• Sport for development and peace: Explore the use of sport as a tool of international development.
• Sport, globalisation and development: Explore recent changes in societies and their implications for sport and development.
• Sport, capitalism and inequality: Explore the links between sport, capitalism and inequality.
• Liberating education and critical consciousness: Understand the notion of liberating education and how it can be applied to sport development work.
• The politics of development: Explore the political nature of development work and the utility of social movements for development.

GROUP B

Brief description

Enhance communication skills to support behaviour change intervention strategies to elicit lifestyle change and promote positive health and wellbeing.

Module content:

• Effective communication, Self-awareness, Listening skills.
• Management skills: Practicalities of management, administration and organisation of client.
• Behaviour change: Identify Influences on behaviour. Understanding and assessing behaviour, Individual behaviour and motivation, Determinants and factors that impact on behaviour and motivation.
• Time management: Aspects of time management. Changing time management. Effective planning.
• Goal setting: Identifying Goals. Developing Practical Realistic goals. Short long term goals. Achieving goals.
• Behaviour change models: Models of behaviour change. Social cognitive theory, relapse prevention model, ecological theories of behaviour, stages of readiness. Moderators mediators of change. Behaviour change process.
• Promoting adherence: Self-efficacy. Social Support. Behaviour change skills, Impact of habitual behaviour, Factors that affect adherence. Overcoming barriers.

GROUP A

Brief description

Undertake some practical research in response to a current business need of a real company and produce a suitable management report with recommendations.

Module content:

• Analysing a problem: Using different analysis techniques such as data flow diagrams, entity relationship modelling and process mapping, examine problems to better understand the current position of the business.
• Innovation and innovation techniques: Using different creativity and innovation tools to help find solutions to business problems.
• Innovation for global growth (IGG): During this event, students will work with multiple organisations - public, private and third sector, on a challenge they currently face. This will provide a scoping opportunity for the problem and a chance to test possible solutions. Prior to this event discussions on professional behaviour and communication will take place.
• Developing and presenting the solution: Students will take the solutions identified during IGG and further investigate their suitability. They will work to develop one or more solution to provide an implementation plan for the organisation.

GROUP A

Brief description

The challenges of managing in complex international business environments.

Module content:

• Introduction: The theoretical background: Globalization and international business; Analysis of international external business environment; political factors; economical factors; social factors; technological factors and implications for international managers; International trade theories and practices.
• International business strategies: Strategy and international business; Country evaluation and selection; Export and Import strategies; Direct investments and collaborative strategies.
• International and cross-cultural management: International Dimensions of Culture: Understanding various dimensions of culture; Hofstede’s (1980) National Culture Approach and Trompenaars (1993) Cultural Dimensions. Implications for International Managers.
• Managing in international contexts: Culture and Communications: Understanding of cultural characteristics and how they influence patterns of communications; communication process and important considerations; issues arising from cross-cultural and intercultural communication. Culture and Negotiations: Understanding the relationship between culture and negotiations; how to reconcile possible conflicts regarding differences in culture and negotiations.
• Contemporary issues in managing international business: Managing international human resources; Managing diversity in international business; Environmental issues and international business; the use of IT in international business and management.

GROUP B

Brief description

The resources and capabilities needed to gain and sustain advantage in competitive markets. Learn to identify tools of strategic analysis, strategic choice available to a firm, and elements and complexities involved in strategy formulation and implementation.

Module content:

• Introduction to strategic management: What is strategy; strategic analysis; classical and emergent schools; strategic thinking; levels of strategy.
• Strategy context. Competitive advantage of a firm: Defining the business environment. Industry analysis: turbulences and dynamics. Porter’s five forces; new dynamics in the 21st century.
• Business level strategy: Sources of competitive advantage: Competitive stance, business level strategy, corporate level strategy; generic strategies; hybrid strategy; value chains.
• Beyond competition: The nature of competition; co-operation; co-opetition; strategic alliances and joint ventures; mergers and acquisitions.
• Managing change through effective leadership: Leadership - values and ethics. Managing stakeholders, change and uncertainty. Change management approaches.
• Individual as a leader: Overview of trait, behavioural and situational theories. Moral aspects of leadership.
• Leading as a team: Leader’s role, coaching, conflict.
• Organisational leadership: Charismatic and transformational leadership, crisis leadership.
• Global and cross-cultural leadership: Leadership in multinational business environment and in the cross-cultural context.
• Leadership and value creation: The role of leadership in creating value for a competitive advantage, strategy formulation and implementation.

GROUP B

Brief description

How transformational change can be delivered for the purposes of long-term organisational improvements in complex operating contexts.

Module content:

• Analysing change contexts and drivers: The change context: globalisation, technology, and changing market dynamics; change management and sustainability.
• Theories of change and approaches to change management: Models of change and change management; trans-formational change and organisations; Critical discourse in change management.
• Human resources issues in transformative change: Participative change; managing psychological contracts, social identity, stakeholder positioning and dynamics in times of radical change ; voice, dialogue and rethinking resistances in radical change; Culture, habits and unlearning.
• Transformative change in context: (this will change each year and will form the basis of the guest lectures): Transforming public sector services in times of resources uncertainty (as an example).
• Leading and managing transformational change: Transactional and transformational leadership; a competency framework for transformational leadership; values and value-based systems in transformational change.

GROUP A

Brief description

Contemporary theoretical approaches in criminology and their application to key issues that characterise contemporary criminal justice policy and practice.

Module content:

• Contemporary issues in criminal justice policy and practice: Victimology and the ‘victim’; hate crime; semiology; restorative justice – 1.
• Contemporary issues in criminal justice policy and practice: Community safety; anti-social behaviour; restorative justice – 2.
• Insecure state: The insecure nature of `policing’ and law making.
• Antisocial behaviour: Key issues, debates and challenges regarding the regulation of antisocial behaviour.

GROUP A

Brief description

Analysis of the socio-ideological discourses contained in popular cultural narratives that deal with crime, justice, punishment and morality.

Module content:

• Morbid fascination: The social world, crime and culture.
• Popular culture and ideologies of crime: The criminal body to the social body in accounts of crime.
• The emergence of the detective: Modernity and the rise of the detective, from the science of deduction to the hard-boiled tradition and beyond.
• Crime and the city: The construction of the city as criminogenic; surveillance and danger.
• Punishment, order and justice: Law versus order, retribution and justice.
• Moral orders: The criminal as an ambivalent figure, serial killers and modernity.

GROUP B

Brief description

Key issues and debates in policing and criminal justice matters for the 21st century.

Module content:

• Gang research: What is the issues regarding contemporary research into gangs and violence both in US and UK?
• Policing gangs: What are the key and emerging tactics that have been developed to deal with gangs and violence over time?
• Eco crime: Provide an overview of emerging trends in criminology, including eco-crime or environmental crime.
• Policing borders: How do we deal with cross border issues in policing in a modern and cultural world?
• Policing immigration: How do we deal with immigration? Is it a crime or a humanitarian problem?
• State crime: How do we tackle state and corporate crime?

GROUP B

Brief description

Changing attitudes to death, dying and killing. The connections between power and the right to take or preserve life, how death and killing are represented and legitimated in various contexts.

Module content:

• The death-denial thesis: Changing ideas of death and dying from pre-modernity to postmodernity Death denial and ambivalence the sequestration of death The ‘revival’ of death.
• Social, political and legal constructions of death: State crime and deviance, militarism.
• Death and representation: Conflict, commemoration and public memorialising; Death and popular culture, representations of war and death in news.
• Death and power: The social mechanisms of oppression, consent and legitimation that determine when, how and why people kill and die; Terror Genocide.
• Bioethics and politics: The sanctity of life versus the quality of life; The politics of ‘ethical’ decisions about life and death; Capital punishment.

GROUP B

Brief description

The principles, practices, applications and critiques of conversation and discourse analysis with respect to the language of crime. Consider philosophical issues, contemporary studies, debates and critiques in relation to crime and other issues.

Module content:

• Conversation analysis: This aspect of the module considers the roots of conversation analysis in ethnomethodology and the study of social order at the local level. The nature of the conversation analytic approach is examined alongside in terms of classic and contemporary studies. Studies examined include topics such as police interrogations, counsel and witness courtroom interaction, sexual consent and refusals.
• Discourse analysis: This aspect of the module considers the different approaches to discourse analysis: from conversation analytic to critical approaches. The nature of these are explored through contemporary studies including topics such as: criminal speech acts such as conspiracy, threats, solicitation, swearing and offensive language; police talk about trauma; youth crime in the media; constructing the legitimacy of whistleblowers; phishing emails; the reporting of intimate partner violence.
• Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language Philosophy: This aspect of the module considers the resurgence of interest in Wittgenstein's approach to language use. The focus here is on the reference to language games and includes consideration of topics such as the law and vagueness; the problem of abusive language, the conceptual instability of consent.

GROUP A

Brief description

Key economic and social processes from a critical sociological perspective.

Module content:

• Work: Work in classical and contemporary social theory, work or labour, the ontology of labour, abstract and concrete labour, intellectual and manual labour, the accumulation of labour and the degradation of women, unemployment and the refusal of work.
• Class: The sociological approaches to class from Adam Smith to Max Weber; class and the stratification of British society; class as a critical concept; class, social constitution and the logic of separation.
• Global economy: Globalisation and critical political economy, Fordism and Post-Fordism, the rise and fall of Keynesianism, Neo-liberalism, the politics of money and the expansion of credit, global capital and crisis.

GROUP B

Brief description

The significance of human rights in the world today. Gain a grounding from a social theoretical perspective, including current debates and trends in human rights. 

Module content:

• History and theory of human rights: Classical Origins in Greece and Rome, Classical Liberal Thought, The French and American Revolutions, Marx, Critical Social Theory, Postcolonialism.
• Human rights in transition: Human Rights in Armed Conflict, Responsibility to Protect, Refugees and Asylum Seekers, Genocide and Torture, The International Criminal Court.

GROUP B

Brief description

Culture has become the watchword of our age. Build on earlier level study of the sociology of culture to inform a critique of the relationship between culture, crisis and civilisation.

Module content:

• Civilisation and crisis: The relationship between the concepts of crisis and civilisation.
• Civilisation, civil society and the Enlightenment: The role of the concepts of civilisation and civil society in political change and the emergence of the public sphere in Europe and America.
• Culture and the critique of civilisation: The role of the aesthetic as a special lens for the critique of modernity and morality.
• Sociology of culture: The role of classical sociology in the crisis of and disenchantment with European civilisation and nationalism.
• Relational sociology and culture: A sociology of cultural relations turns attention to issues of power, process, symbolic and physical violence, and the roles of nationalism, economy and the state.