Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Choosing a topic can be the most challenging step in writing a research paper. You may change your topic, subtopics, scopes, and approaches frequently until you find the right combination of your interest, the available literature, and the assignment's requirements.  Here are some resources to help:

• The library's step-by-step guide to choosing topics;

• An-easy-to-navigate video tutorial on choosing your topic;

• The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology: Browse this seminal work to generate ideas; you may cite this source in your bibliography;

• Wikipedia: Browse this source to generate ideas, but in general, instructors do not consider Wikipedia a substantiated source. We recommend you browse it for subtopics, then locate substantiated sources in the library's holdings.

• Sociology journals and websites: These sources contain some of the most current topics within the field. Use the sites listed on the Journals and Websites section of this guide. 

• Visit the Sociology section of King library: There are few more inspiring ways to choose a topic than to browse books on the shelves. Stop by King and visit these sections by call numbers:

  • HM covers general and theoretical sociology

  • HN, social history and conditions and social problems and reform

  • HQ, marriage and the family, sexual life, age groups, and women’s studies

  • HS, secret and other societies and clubs

  • HT, urban and rural sociology, social classes (including slavery), and race and race relations in general

  • HV, social work and public welfare, social pathologies (including drug abuse, crime and criminology, and terrorism), and criminal justice administration

  • HX, socialism and communism (general), utopias, and anarchism.

  • As much sociological research and methodology are interdisciplinary, a significant part of subclass H, which covers social sciences in general, is sociological in nature. Large numbers of sociology titles are found in the subject bibliography section of Class Z: in Z 7161-7165 (political and social sciences) and in Z 5703 (criminology).  [LoC]

This list, originally compiled by university librarian Kathryn Blackmer Reyes, includes common topics within Sociology.  These make useful keywords when searching our databases.  One way to help create your topic or research inquiry is to choose an approach from the first column and link it to one or two topics in the remaining columns.