Glossary
Sociologist Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential sociologist terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key sociologist vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in sociologist training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Coding
- Tagging qualitative data.
- Demography
- Study of populations.
- Inequality
- Unequal distribution.
- Institution
- Established social structure.
- IRB
- Research ethics board.
- Literature review
- Summary of past research.
- Mixed methods
- Combining approaches.
- Policy brief
- Short policy report.
- Qualitative research
- Non-numeric study.
- Quantitative research
- Numeric study.
- Regression
- Statistical relationship.
- Sample
- Group studied.
- Learning social norms.
- Stratification
- Social ranking.
- Survey
- Structured questions.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Sociologist practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Sociologist training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.