The graduate program provides rigorous training in methods, statistics, and theory as well as in the substantive areas of class stratification, criminology, demography, deviance, family, gender, international/macro-comparative, and race/ethnicity.  The program also offers numerous research opportunities through collaborative work with faculty and through our affiliation with Oklahoma Population Institute (OPI).  Our students also receive training and experience in teaching.  Our training program includes an orientation workshop for new teaching assistants, a teaching seminar for PhD students, and an opportunity for PhD students to design and teach their own courses.  Over the years, the department has placed its graduates in tenure-track jobs in universities and colleges and in research-based positions in a wide variety of public and private agencies.

The department provides access to a host of resources for research.  The department is a member of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) program, a membership that gives students access to numerous data sets on domestic and international issues related to the economy, education, family, gender, and health.  We also house many data sets collected by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), the Bureau of the Census, and by the faculty themselves.  These data sets are available to students for theses, dissertations, course papers, and independent projects.  In addition, the department provides graduate students with access to a large computer lab furnished with computers that are equipped with recent statistical software packages, including Stata 12.  The department and university also give graduate students travel grants to defray the cost of travel to national and international conferences.  Students who are presenting their own research at a conference can receive support for at least one conference per year.