 Welcome. My name is Roger Landers. I am a coordinator for the Social Sciences Minor in the Research Master Program. The Social Sciences Minor actually consists of two tracks, Sociology and Organization Studies, and I'll be discussing both of them in this video. Our Social Sciences Minor focuses on groups and networks, ethnic groups, families, social networks, organizations, networks of organizations. The main thing that we address in this this minor is that people constantly interact with others. You probably live with your family in a neighborhood. You're a member of a sports club, maybe you have a reading group that you go to, you go to school, you visit all kinds of organizations like a grocery store that you do your shopping, a hospital that you may visit people in, the school where you where you study, all organizations, all settings where people work and act together. A major difference with the Social Psychology Minor is that we put much focus on how people act together. People work in teams and these teams are in organizations. People live together in neighborhoods. People together develop products online. How this happens, what makes these groups successful or not, those are the main questions that we address in our Social Sciences Minor. The topics that we address are all firmly rooted both in sociology and organization studies. Examples of questions that can be studied are how does cohesion in a neighborhood affect crime and other deviant behavior? Why are certain organizations better able at motivating their employees than other organizations? Why do students in multicultural schools perform worse than students in homogenous schools? And how do people act together when they cooperate in an inter-organizational network? In our theories and our methods, much emphasis is on multi-level aspects. People work in teams. These teams are in organizations. Organizations reside in countries that are parts of continents, that are again parts of the world where there's much interaction. And what happens at one level of analysis and one level of observation affects what happens at the levels below and the levels above that. This makes our field both complex but also really exciting. An especially great way to learn how to do research in the Social Sciences is to participate in research projects in our departments, so-called internships. A few examples of internships are the creativity and innovativeness of teams. In this project we study how social networks of and outside of teams affect the creativity of those teams and the extent to which these teams can be innovative. We collect network data, we perform network analysis, but we also conduct lab experience, for example, where we manipulate the social network structure and other conditions and look at how that affects the creativity of the team as a whole. This is pretty typical because in most of our research we combine multiple methods or multiple approaches to the same topic. If you have a special interest in organizations, other typical research topics include the special nature of temporary projects, the study of how norms and values and routines inside organizations and teams develop over time, the study of what makes some team take more risk than other teams, how networks of people and organizations affect the performance of employees in the organization, topics like that. From a sociology point of view, a typical internship is a European value study. The sociology department is very strong in collecting both primary data internationally and nationally, and the European value study is a prime example of that. The study started originally in 1981 and continues to this day. Questions that are asked include questions about values of family, work, politics, trust, well-being, social capital. Research master's students are involved both in the collection of the data and the analysis, and also will be involved in the preparation of the next survey. It's really a challenge to collect data that is comparable across countries and over time, and this study will be able to shed some more light on how cultural differences between European countries have increased or maybe decreased over the recent years. The specific courses that we offer in this minor can be found on the website. I won't go into detail on that in this video. Most importantly, I hope you realize that we study very exciting topics that are very relevant. Our courses and our research are conducted by members of two internationally renowned departments, sociology and organization studies, so you can be sure to get the first class learning experience. We hope that you share our enthusiasm for this program and we hope to see you soon.