Tayana Robinson, M.A., a researcher in the Department of Surgery who is part of the Transplant Epidemiology and Analytics in Medicine group, says the Online M.A. in Sociology program "has helped me to better understand and identify social issues, both within our studies of kidney transplant donors and within our society here in Birmingham."
Sociologists study human behavior and the nearly infinite complexities of social relationships. Close study of sociologists will show you that they themselves tend to fall into the profession through chance encounters.
“You rarely meet a child who tells you, ‘I want to be a sociologist when I grow up,’” said Cullen Clark, Ph.D., director of UAB’s Online M.A. in Sociology graduate program, which has been ranked as one of the top online programs in America by BestColleges.com.
Indeed, the road to sociology can be indirect. It was a book about social activist Jane Addams that caught the attention of a 12-year-old Verna Keith, who became intrigued with the idea of being a social worker. But when she got to college, the school did not have a program in social work. It did, however, offer a major in sociology, and Keith now serves as chair of the sociology department at UAB. Retired Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Chair Emeritus William Cockerham, Ph.D., always said he was introduced to the field while serving in the Army in Vietnam, when he came across an article on the topic in Time magazine.
Sociology explained “a lot of what I was seeing”
Clark, who worked as a journalist and communicator for an entire career in Cincinnati and Birmingham, came to UAB to earn a master’s degree in health administration while he was working in communications at Birmingham’s Carraway Methodist Health System. He lamented to a professor that there was no medical anthropology program in Birmingham. That faculty member pointed him to Jeffrey Clair, Ph.D., then director of the medical sociology doctoral program. After talking with Clair, Clark decided to apply. Sociology “explained a lot of what I was seeing working in hospitals, some of the underlying social causes of illnesses and injuries seen in the hospital as well as professional dynamics within the organization,” Clark said. “My graduate work was an experience that changed my life.”
Program director Cullen Clark, Ph.D., says many of the students are balancing careers and graduate study — teachers, nurses, bankers, doctors and technologists who want to apply sociological theory and practice to their jobs, enhance their careers with a graduate degree, or get formal training in statistics, survey techniques and the R programming language.UAB’s sociology department was an early pioneer in online education, diving into the medium under Clair more than 20 years ago. “I was lucky enough to be a grad student TA in some of those classes, and our experience showed us that we could deliver the same quality of instruction online as we did on campus,” Clark said.
The department launched its online M.A. program in the fall of 2013. Many of the students in the online M.A. in Sociology program today are balancing careers and graduate study, Clark says. They are teachers, nurses, bankers, doctors and technologists who want to apply sociological theory and practice to their jobs, enhance their careers with a graduate degree, or get formal training in statistics, survey techniques and the R programming language. Sometimes they want to do all of the above.
Helps “me to better understand and identify social issues”
Tayana Robinson, M.A., a researcher in the Department of Surgery who is part of the Transplant Epidemiology and Analytics in Medicine group, majored in psychology with a minor in medical sociology as an undergraduate. “When I discovered there was an online master’s program in sociology at UAB, I was ecstatic,” she said. And despite the fact that her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer during her first semester, which meant that she was working on assignments while at the hospital or accompanying her mother to chemo, Robinson stuck with it. “Having my training and knowledge from the program has helped me to better understand and identify social issues, both within our studies of kidney transplant donors and within our society here in Birmingham,” she said. It also has improved her “ability to think critically and analytically” in her many roles, including as a member of the University Hearing Board, Robinson said.
Scott Westenberger, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the sociology department who focuses on computational social science, teaches a series of courses in the online sociology master’s program on social data analytics. Westenberger first learned sociology-adjacent techniques such as social network analysis while working as a military analyst on counter-insurgency operations. Now he specializes in teaching related techniques — and helping students with technical backgrounds to see what they can do with formal training in sociology principles.
Applying data “to make sense of the human aspect”
Scott Westenberger, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the sociology department who focuses on computational social science, teaches a series of courses in the online sociology master’s program on social data analytics. “Sociologists have contributed some really interesting and practical algorithms” to computer science, Westenberger said. The program attracts students with and without technical backgrounds; they work together on team projects from the very beginning of the program. “Sociologists have contributed some really interesting and practical algorithms” to computer science, Westenberger said. One example is a 2011 paper by Amir Goldberg, Ph.D., then at Princeton University, in the American Journal of Sociology, which introduced a new method known as relational class analysis. “What he found was a new way of thinking about recommendation algorithms,” Westenberger said. Instead of simple patterns of likes and dislikes, Goldberg’s algorithm was able to encode magnitude. In politics, for example, abortion can be such a strong issue for some voters, whether for or against, that it outweighs all other factors in choosing a candidate.
“We have students who know machine learning and statistics but now want to apply those skills to make sense of the human aspect,” Westenberger said. His Foundations of Social Data Analytics course teaches R and basic statistics, but Westenberger also spends time explaining that every act of data analysis requires a set of decisions. “And those decisions are made for you unless you take charge,” he said. “There are ramifications of theory — how these algorithms are clustering and sorting people.”
Class project inspires a book — and more
Students with and without technical backgrounds work together on team projects from the very beginning of the online M.A. program. Both the students on the conventional track and those specializing in social data analytics “take the same core courses and learn to apply sociology in day-to-day applications,” Clark said.
All students in the survey research methods course learn how to carry out the mechanics of online surveys, for example. “At the end of the semester, every student will have done their own survey from start to finish,” Westenberger said. “I was in my fifth year of graduate school before I did that.”
In lieu of a thesis, every student in the online M.A. program completes a capstone project based on their interests; often, for those already in the workforce, the project relates to their jobs. A nurse developed an in-service education program for paramedics and emergency room personnel to identify trafficking victims. A group of students did an urban sociology project related to finding new uses for the former Brookwood Mall property. During the pandemic, another group conducted a series of Zoom focus groups with volunteers from Birmingham neighborhood associations to collect information for Birmingham Fire and Rescue to use in their long-range strategic plan.
David Rogers, M.D., UAB's chief wellness officer, turned his capstone project in the online sociology master’s program into a book, Frontline Healthcare Leadership.David Rogers, M.D., a surgeon and chief wellness officer for UAB Medicine, turned his capstone project in the online sociology master’s program into a book, Frontline Healthcare Leadership, with Clark as co-author. Although Rogers had been at UAB since 2012, it was only after talking to a colleague about UAB’s Educational Assistance benefit in 2022 that he discovered Clark’s program. “I have always been interested in groups and teams, so that when I saw that the program had a good reputation and was fully online, I signed up,” Rogers said.
“Each course involved writing a paper where you apply the concepts you are learning to your work,” Rogers said. Rogers’ main work mission, especially post-pandemic, was to find ways to engage the health care workforce at UAB in light of continual change, from COVID to AI. “The founding sociologists were writing during the Industrial Revolution; they were interested, among other things, in how changes in the organization of work occurring during this period were affecting the workforce and society in general,” Rogers said. “It is shocking how relevant their work is to what we are dealing with now.”
Putting learning to the test
Even before the capstone, students in the workforce are able to put their learning into practice. “In the survey course, we had a group who were all middle school teachers in different parts of the country — one from the state of Washington, one from Michigan, one from outside Washington, D.C., and one from Birmingham, who did a survey of cellphone use in the classroom,” Westenberger said.
One of the attributes of UAB’s online M.A. in Sociology program that sets it apart is the emphasis on learning communities. “The last thing we want is for students to sit down, read something and then take a test,” Clark said. “We want them to feel like they have interacted with a community and can support one another and teach one another. We try to create opportunities for that to happen. We have people from different occupations, cultures and countries, and they bring insights that are amazing.”
“Multiple times, I have had students mention that they have had a phone call from Cullen,” Westenberger added. “I get a lot of comments about that. They appreciate having a person behind the emails.”
