Abstract
What do university students majoring in sociology learn from the subject?
What kind of interest do they have in it? What kind of usefulness do they find in the subject? This paper attempts to explore these questions based on the results of a questionnaire survey conducted by the Sociological Education Committee of the Japan Sociological Society in 2003. First, I examine the students' interest in society and knowledge about sociology before entering university, and then summarize the results about their satisfaction with lectures, seminars, and so on, Next, I classify the vocabularies used by the students to answer the questions pertaining to how useful and interesting they find sociology. This shows that they refer to its "scope" (sociology enlarges their views), "nonobviousness" (sociology transcends their common sense), and "closeness" (sociology relates to their own positions) more frequently than usefulness in their jobs or knowledge about society. In the last part, I attempt to examine these results and tentatively consider the future directions for sociological education.
