Sociology Websites

Sociology Central is designed for use by a A-level Sociology teachers and their students. To this end it offers a range of materials and information for use both inside and outside the classroom. These include notes on various AS/A2 modules (Deviance, Family Life, Media and so forth); student worksheets; lesson plans; overhead transparencies; revision materials (such as keyword files and revision cards) and study skills links. The website also provides short reviews of useful Sociology-related books across a range of modules.

A level Sociology: Andy Walker’s A level Sociology site is designed as a free distance learning resource for A1 and A2 students. The site uses powerpoint lectures and interactive games and quizzes to facilitate distance learning of course content. A dedicated Invision power board is also linked from the site to encourage home school links and peer group sociological discussion. Students and teachers of sociology are invited to join. The site is becoming increasingly popular amongst students and teachers alike and is a work in progress. Teachers who would like to submit content or ideas for the site are warmly invited to do so via e-mail”

BUBL Sociology: BUBL Information Service, based at Strathclyde University Library, is a searchable database of Internet resources of academic relevance. The websites are organized by Dewey Decimal Classification and can be searched by subject or class number. The sociology section includes General Resources, Anthropology, Social Interaction, Social Processes, Social Change, Population, Young People, Women, Social Classes, Racial & Ethnic Groups and Culture & Institutions.

Sociology Online is a website that carries essays, interactive quizzes/crosswords and slideshows on subjects within the domains of criminology, politics and sociology. It also carries a regularly updated SocioNews page from which students and teachers can link to other relevant materials on the Internet. The website is intended primarily for A Level and undergraduate students and their teachers/lecturers.

School Sociology: Janis Griffiths, Head of Sociology at Bryn Hafren Comprehensive School and the Barry Sixth Form, is responsible for the School Sociology website. It offers materials, study skills guidance and resources for students of sociology at GCSE and A Level. There are powerpoint presentations, pdf files and quiz shows.

Stuff is the sociology site produced by a lecturer at City of Bristol College. It is intended primarily as a resource for his students, a cyberspace filing cabinet. Consequently, the site is rather uneven, it reflects the specifications for the courses taught, and those aspects of the specifications that are selected by the college. The site consists of course notes that cover various substantive areas of the AS, A2 and Access Sociology specifications. There is a links section that includes most of the best AS/A2 British School and College Sociology sites, some University links and some sites of general sociological interest. The skills page offers the chance to take some basic online tests and crosswords and has some suggestions for improving exam performance. The password protected area of the site contains information specifically for City of Bristol Students, for example, online work-schemes and homework timetables.

Sociology Learning Support: Sociology Learning Support offers self-assessment material for AS and A Level Sociology students. The tests are self-contained and run directly from the site without plug ins. All tests can be used with either AQA or OCR specifications. Students can do multiple-choice quizzes, short answer tests, match items, gap-fill exercises and crosswords. Topics for which tests are available include the Individual and Society (Introduction to Sociology), Research Methods, Family, and Education. New tests for these and other topics are in preparation.

DTC Sociology Online: Sociology A1 is a self contained distance learning resource for 6th form students at Dartford Technology College and formed the bulk of a recent LSDA Action Research Project. Health and Social Care provides support for AVCE students studying Unit One and will soon be extended to cover other units PE A Level resources support some units of the A1 in Physical Education Knowledge Management provides and links to forums for educationalists and practitioners to share ideas, methods and approaches The ICT pages are a collaborative project between DTC and Thamesview School to encourage online interactive learning in ICT at Key Stage 3.

History of Education: Henk van Setten, associate professor at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, is responsible for this very impressive website. The site lists and provides links with resources on the Internet that contains information on education and childhood. Categories include: Educators, Parenthood & Family, Childhood & Play, Children's Books, Childhood Perceptions, Child Abuse, Women in Education, Higher Education, Special Education and Vocational Education. A well-designed website, this is an extremely valuable resource for any student of education.

Sociologists - Dead and Very Much Alive: This website is based at the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. The group is involved in several projects but the excellent Sociologist - Dead and Very Much Alive website is an attempt to provide a comprehensive listing of all sociology resources on the Internet. Fifty-six sociologists are listed including several who are still very much alive. The material includes interviews, articles, text of out of print books and discussion groups. It is also possible to search for material by subject area.

World Catalogue: Sociology: Set of links to selected, evaluated and annotated resources for sociology, maintained by the Exeter University Library. Material is listed under Sociologists, Schools and Theories, Teaching and Methodology, Popular Culture, Social Change, Sociology of Children, Sociology of Economics, Education, Gender and Sexuality, Law and Crime, Sociology of Medicine, Politics, Race and Ethnicity, Religion, Sport, Work and the Family. The website also includes links to a large number of online journals and discussion groups.

Sociological Tour Through Cyberspace: Michael Kearl, Professor of Sociology at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, has produced what he calls a Sociological Tour Through Cyberspace. Kearl is interested in exploring the potential of the Internet to "generate discourse" and to help it become a "theatre of ideas". The website features commentary, data analyses, essays, and links to other websites. Subjects covered include 'Death and Dying' and 'Social Inequality'. The website also includes a useful guide for writing research papers.

The Marx/Engels Archive: This website provides a comprehensive collection of the writings of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels. The material available is constantly expanding and eventually it will contain everything the two men published. It also includes material from writers influenced by Marx and Engels. The website is produced by a group of volunteers from Colorado's Progressive Sociology Network and is completely free to use. The authors tell us that "the real profit will hopefully manifest in the form of individual enlightenment through easy access to these classic works".

Multicultural Pavilion: Paul Gorski from Virginia is responsible for this very impressive website. In his mission statement Gorski explains that he is attempting "to provide resources for educators to explore and discuss multicultural education; to facilitate opportunities for educators to work toward self-awareness and development; and to provide forums for educators to interact and collaborate". Features of the site include Teacher's Corners (multicultural resources for teachers online); International Project (information on what is going on in multicultural education around the world); Online Discussion Board (forum for online exchanges about multicultural issues) and Multicultural Activity Archives (experimental activities for exploring multicultural issues).

Research in Education: The Scottish Council for Research in Education (SCRE) have now made their excellent journal Research in Education available on the Internet. The website also includes an excellent database of research reports that can be found on the Internet and a list of the research projects that the Scottish Office Education and Industry Department (SOEID) intends to commission over the coming months.

Education-Line: Education-Line is funded by the Higher Education Funding Councils as part of the Electronic Libraries Programme. Maintained by Sam Saunders at the University of Leeds, Education-Line is developing what it calls "a live collection of documents" on the Internet. The website enables researchers to present their work at an early stage in its development where it can be reviewed by the world-wide academic community. Education-Line is also involved in providing access to specialized or small-scale texts that would otherwise have difficulty finding a publisher.

The Philosophy of Education: The Philosophy of Education Society produce a Yearbook that includes eighty or so essays on the subject. The current edition is available from the University of Illinois. However, recently the Philosophy of Education Society has put previous Yearbooks (1992-1999) online. The website has an efficient search facility that enables the visitor to search for authors and key words in the database of articles.

Early Childhood Research & Practice: ECRP is a electronic journal sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and organized by the University of Illinois. Published biannually, the journal includes articles that cover topics related to the development, care, and education of children from birth to approximately age eight. ECRP concentrates on reporting on practice-related research and development and issues relating to parent participation. The current edition includes online articles such as Children's Social Behaviour in Relation to Participation in Mixed-Age or Same-Age Classrooms and Early Childhood Special Education and Distance Learning.

EdResearch Online: EdResearch is a freely searchable web database. It includes 11,000 records from the Australian Education Index, covering all educational sectors. 8500 of the documents are available on the web for free with the remainder available for a copyright fee.

Social Science Information Gateway is a freely available Internet service which aims to provide a trusted source of selected, high quality Internet information for students, academics, researchers and practitioners in the social sciences, business and law. It offers users the chance to read descriptions of resources available over the Internet and to access those resources directly. The Catalogue points to thousands of resources, and each one has been selected and described by a librarian or academic. The catalogue is browsable or searchable by subject area.

Mead Project: Compiled and created by Lloyd Gordon Ward and Robert Throop at the Brock University Department of Sociology in Canada, the Mead Project contains an array of primary documents by George Herbert Mead and his contemporaries. Along with a collection of seminal papers and articles written by Mead from 1881 to 1938, the site also contains a variety of supplementary scholarship produced by William James and John Dewey.

Multiple Intelligences: It has been claimed by some researchers that our intelligence or ability to understand the world around us is complex. Some people are better at understanding some things than others. For some of us it is relatively easy to understand how a flower grows but it is immensely difficult for us to understand and use a musical instrument. For others music might be easy but playing football is difficult. Instead of having one intelligence it is claimed that we have several different intelligences. Kinesthetic, Linguistic, Logical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Musical, Visual/Spatial and Naturalistic. This website enables you to find out what special intelligences you have.

NationMaster is a massive central data source and a handy way to graphically compare nations. Using the form provided you can generate maps and graphs with ease on all kinds of statistics. The graphs cover topics such as crime, currency. democracy, economy, education, energy, environment, geography, government, health, identification, labour, language, media, military, people, religion, sports and transportation. It also lets you look back in history with the popular GDP per capita statistics for the years 1820, 1900, 1950 and 1973. You can also look ahead to 2050 with these projected population growth rates.

Myth Busters: The Refugee Council is the largest organisation in the UK working with asylum seekers and refugees. It has recently launched a campaign to "demonstrate the valuable contribution that refugees make to the UK economy and society". The issue of asylum is rarely out of the British press. But can you believe everything you read? The website's Myth Buster provides the facts behind the headlines.

Crime Statistics: This website uses data from 'Crime in England and Wales 2002/2003' Published on 17 July 2003, it brings together police recorded crime figures with data collected by the British Crime Survey (BCS) to provide a comprehensive account of the latest patterns and trends in the main high-volume crimes. The recorded crime data is provided by the 43 police forces throughout England & Wales, who are required to supply the Home Office with monthly figures for all of the Crime & Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs) in their police force area. You can also access long-term data from the British Crime Survey - the most reliable indicator of long-term crime trends.

GlobLog: Johan Norberg is head of political ideas at the free-market think tank Timbro in Stockholm. He is the author of the award-winning book In Defence of Global Capitalism (2001). On his website he explains: "I believe that we should have individual rights and liberties because man needs to live by his individual reason and strive for self-realisation. I am passionate about the Enlightenment ideals of reason, secularisation, education and liberty, and the adulation of science, technology and progress." On his website Norberg shares his latest thoughts and explains what he is doing to promote global capitalism.