Graduate Program

Our program prepares students to become researchers, scholars, and teachers through a well-balanced curriculum comprising theory and methods that enable students to conduct sociological research at the forefront of the field. Need more information about our program, click here. Click here if you are ready to apply to our graduate program. 

Interested in partnering with a faculty member on a research project, click here.

In addition to our cutting edge methodological training and broad sociological teaching, our program offers instruction in seven specialization areas: Family; Health, Aging, and the Life Course; Law and Society; Social Inequality: Class, Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and Sexuality; Social Movements and Political Sociology; Sociology of Religion; Work and Organizations; Computational Social Genetics; and Methodology

Purdue Sociology graduate students have access to the Joe and Maggie Kernan Experimental Social Science Lab (JMK Lab), a dedicated facility for collecting original data. Run jointly by the Departments of Sociology and Political Science, the lab gives faculty, postdocs, and graduate students the space and equipment to run experiments and to conduct and record interviews and focus groups.

The lab maintains a steady pool of undergraduate participants, so researchers don't have to recruit subjects from scratch. Beyond computers and recording equipment, it offers tools for collecting physiological measures, virtual reality headsets, and even 3D printers, which make a wide range of experimental manipulations possible.

 Few sociology graduate programs offer a facility like this. At Purdue, graduate students can design and carry out their own primary research. This is further facilitated by the JMK Lab being an affiliate of the Methodology Center at Purdue (MCAP) which offers small grants to graduate students to aid in original data collection.