Sociology or psychology a level for counselling??

Hello, I was wondering if anyone would share their opinion with me. I want to be a counsellor in the future. There's not any specific qualifications to do this and from what I have researched a psychology or sociology degree would be good. I'm going to start a levels soon and I'm going to do health and social care and either sociology or psychology. Which one would be better? I have been searching up all sorts of degrees including social psychology, psycholgy, sociology, counselling and psychology and I'm not sure whether to take psychology or sociology at a level. If anyone has done these could you say what each one covers? I've also heard psychology requires maths. How much of the course is numeracy based and to what difficulty? Thanks.

Reply 1

A. Khan

14

Hey,
I do both sociology and psychology as my A-levels (I'm in yr 13) and to answer your question it depends on whether your good at essay based questions.
Sociology is interesting cause when you're studying it, the things you learn makes you question a lot of things in your everyday life from teachers behavior to what is a family to how the media works etc. Sociology is really interesting and an easy subject to get an A in (depending on how your teacher delivers the knowledge to you). When I think about it links to counselling but in my opinion the link between sociology and counselling isn't as strong as psychology and counselling. This is because in A-level Psychology you learn about depression, ocd, phobias, addiction why people behave the way they do, how its learnt etc. Also maths in psychology is easy all you need to know is how to work out the mean, mode, median, percentage, range, standard deviation and your graphs - basic maths.
These types of topics in Psychology, in my opinion, would link better to your career choice and will make it easier when studying at degree level to understand some of the basic stuff.
But if you do get the chance, do both subjects so that you can understand different things from different perspectives.
Hope this helps and good luck :smile:

(edited 6 years ago)

Reply 2

Ruqayyah Aslam

OP

5

Original post by MrsSasuNaru

Hey,
I do both sociology and psychology as my A-levels (I'm in yr 13) and to answer your question it depends on whether your good at essay based questions.
Sociology is interesting cause when you're studying it, the things you learn makes you question a lot of things in your everyday life from teachers behavior to what is a family to how the media works etc. Sociology is really interesting and an easy subject to get an A in (depending on how your teacher delivers the knowledge to you). When I think about it links to counselling but in my opinion the link between sociology and counselling isn't as strong as psychology and counselling. This is because in A-level Psychology you learn about depression, ocd, phobias, addiction why people behave the way they do, how its learnt etc. Also maths in psychology is easy all you need to know is how to work out the mean, mode, median, percentage, range, standard deviation and your graphs - basic maths.
These types of topics in Psychology, in my opinion, would link better to your career choice and will make it easier when studying at degree level to understand some of the basic stuff.
But if you do get the chance, do both subjects so that you can understand different things from different perspectives.
Hope this helps and good luck :smile: