Social Sciences with Data Science

The social sciences study human society in all its complexity, examining how people behave collectively, how institutions function, how inequality is structured and reproduced, and how social change happens. Data science provides the computational and statistical tools to analyse the large and complex datasets that increasingly make the social world visible, from administrative records and social media to surveys and sensor data. Combining the two equips you to ask genuinely social scientific questions and to bring rigorous quantitative methods to bear in answering them, a combination that is increasingly powerful and in demand.

At University College London this three-year full-time programme sits at the intersection of these two domains. You will study the core disciplines of the social sciences, engaging with sociology, economics, political science and related fields and developing the theoretical frameworks for understanding social phenomena. Alongside this you will develop substantial data science skills, including programming, statistical modelling, machine learning and data visualisation, applied to social data.

UCL's exceptional research environment and its location in London, with its extraordinary concentration of policy, research and technology organisations, provide a stimulating context for a degree that is explicitly designed to produce graduates who can work rigorously across disciplinary boundaries.

Graduates from social sciences with data science programmes are sought after across a wide range of sectors. Social research, government analytics, policy evaluation, behavioural science, academic research, journalism, technology companies and international organisations all value people who can combine social scientific understanding with quantitative analytical capability. The ability to work with large datasets while maintaining the critical perspective that social science training develops is a genuinely distinctive skill set.

Many graduates continue to postgraduate study in social data science, computational social science, public policy or related fields. This degree is designed for people who want to understand society through data without losing the social scientific perspective that gives that data meaning.