Nursing Students in Chennai Give Sociology a Surprisingly High Marks

Sociology rarely tops the list of courses that nursing students expect to love. Sandwiched between anatomy lectures, pharmacology exams and the relentless demands of clinical rotations, the study of social structures, institutions and human behavior can look, at first glance, like an academic detour. Yet new research from Chennai, India, suggests the opposite: undergraduate nursing students who completed a sociology course rated it as highly useful not only for their academic learning but also for the messy, human reality of clinical practice. The findings, published in BMC Nursing, offer a data-driven rebuttal to the long-standing assumption that the social sciences are a peripheral accessory to the biological core of nursing education.

The study, conducted by Pitchaimani Govindharaj of the Sri Ramachandra Faculty of Allied Health Sciences at Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research, set out with a deceptively simple question: how useful do nursing students actually perceive their sociology course to be? To answer it, the researcher turned to a cross-sectional design, surveying 61 fourth-year undergraduate nursing students at a medical college and hospital in Chennai. Data were collected between August and September 2025, at the end of the students’ fourth year, a timing that is methodologically significant. By that point, the students had not only finished their sociology coursework but had also accumulated substantial clinical exposure, allowing them to judge the course’s value against the backdrop of real patient encounters rather than abstract classroom expectations.

The measurement instrument at the heart of the study was the Perceived Usefulness of Sociology Course scale, abbreviated as the PUSC scale. This standardized tool produces scores ranging from 15 to 75, with higher values reflecting a stronger perception that sociology contributes meaningfully to a student’s education and professional development. Alongside the PUSC, participants were asked to rate their overall satisfaction with the course on a 10-point numerical rating scale, a simple but effective way of capturing a global impression that might not map neatly onto individual scale items. The combination of a multidimensional scale with a single-point satisfaction measure gave the study both depth and a headline metric.

The results were striking. The mean PUSC score across the 61 students was 67.36, with a standard deviation of 13.69, on a scale that tops out at 75. In practical terms, that means the average student clustered near the ceiling of the instrument, perceiving the sociology course as very useful indeed. The author reports that 91.8 percent of the students highly perceived the usefulness of the course. Satisfaction ratings told the same story: 57 of the 61 students, or 93.4 percent, rated a high level of satisfaction with the sociology course on the numerical scale. For a subject often treated as a curricular formality, those percentages represent an unusually emphatic endorsement from the students who actually sat through the lectures.

The demographics of the sample are worth noting for context. Of the 61 participants, 55.7 percent were female, a proportion consistent with the broader composition of nursing cohorts in India and globally. All participants were fourth-year students, meaning the findings reflect the judgments of students on the cusp of graduation who had completed the full arc of their pre-registration education. That maturity matters: a first-year student asked about sociology might evaluate it purely as a classroom experience, whereas a fourth-year student can weigh it against the clinical realities of patient care, teamwork, health disparities and the social determinants of illness that dominate modern nursing practice.

Why should sociology matter so much to nurses in the first place? The theoretical case is well established. Nursing is, at its core, a profession enacted at the intersection of biology and society. A patient’s recovery is shaped not only by pathophysiology and medication but by poverty, caste, gender, family structure, occupational hazards, migration, stigma and access to care. Sociological concepts such as social stratification, socialization, the role of institutions, and the social construction of health and illness give student nurses a vocabulary for these forces. When a nurse understands why a patient’s family makes particular care decisions, or how socioeconomic status shapes treatment adherence, that nurse can plan more realistic, more empathetic and ultimately more effective interventions. The Chennai findings suggest that students recognize this relevance once they have the clinical experience to see it in action.

The study’s conclusions point in a constructive direction for educators. The author concludes that undergraduate nursing students highly value the sociology course for its relevance to both academic learning and clinical practice, and encourages nursing educators to enrich the curriculum with sociological components through active learning, practical application and reflective practice. That recommendation is more radical than it may sound. Active learning in a sociology course for nurses might mean case-based discussions in which students trace how social forces produced a particular patient’s situation. Practical application could involve connecting sociological theory to clinical postings, so that a ward rotation becomes an impromptu field study in health sociology. Reflective practice invites students to interrogate their own assumptions, biases and social positioning, a skill with demonstrated importance in culturally competent care.

The methodological profile of the study also deserves attention from readers evaluating how far the findings can travel. A cross-sectional survey of 61 students at a single institution in Chennai provides a snapshot, not a longitudinal trajectory, and the sample size, while adequate for descriptive statistics, is modest. The PUSC scores and satisfaction ratings are self-reported perceptions, which is precisely what the study set out to measure, but perceptions of usefulness are not the same as measured learning outcomes or downstream clinical performance. The study was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee of Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research, and informed consent was obtained electronically from all participants through a secure form, with the research conducted under the principles of the Helsinki Declaration. Those procedural details matter because they signal that the data were gathered under a recognized ethical framework even in a small, single-site design.

Placed in a wider context, the study lands at a moment when health professions education worldwide is rethinking the balance between biomedical technicality and the social sciences. Curricular bodies in medicine and nursing have increasingly acknowledged that competencies such as communication, cultural humility, understanding of social determinants of health and interprofessional collaboration are not soft extras but determinants of patient outcomes. In India, where nurses routinely navigate extraordinary social diversity, from multilingual urban hospitals to rural communities with deeply entrenched hierarchies, the sociological literacy of the nursing workforce carries particular weight. A course that students themselves rate as highly useful, with a mean PUSC score approaching the scale maximum and satisfaction above 93 percent, strengthens the empirical case for protecting and deepening social science content in nursing curricula rather than trimming it to make room for more technical subjects.

There is also a symbolic dimension to the findings. Students in demanding professional programs are discerning consumers of their own education; they rarely extend enthusiasm to content they perceive as irrelevant. Their overwhelming endorsement of sociology in this cohort suggests that, properly taught, the discipline can hold its own against the hard sciences in the perceived-value contest. The author’s call to build on that foundation through active learning, practical application and reflective practice reads as an invitation to convert enthusiasm into even deeper engagement. For nursing schools weighing curriculum redesigns, and for educators anywhere who defend the social sciences against pressure to cut them, the Chennai data offer a concise and quotable message: the students are paying attention, and they think sociology matters. The study is published as an open-access research article in BMC Nursing, with funding and competing interest declarations indicating no external funding sources and no competing interests, and the full dataset of perceptions is available to any educator or researcher who wishes to replicate the approach in other institutions, regions or countries.

Subject of Research: Perceived usefulness of a sociology course among undergraduate nursing students in Chennai, India

Article Title: Perceived usefulness of sociology course among undergraduate nursing students in Chennai, India

Article References: Govindharaj, P. (2026). Perceived usefulness of sociology course among undergraduate nursing students in Chennai, India. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05309-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05309-0

Keywords: nursing education, sociology, undergraduate nursing students, PUSC scale, Chennai, India, cross-sectional study, curriculum, social determinants of health, BMC Nursing, student satisfaction, health professions education