Criminology with Psychology

Criminology with psychology combines two disciplines that illuminate crime and offending behaviour from complementary directions. Criminology examines the social, structural, and institutional dimensions of crime: how it is defined, who commits it and under what circumstances, how criminal justice systems respond, and whether those responses are effective and just. Psychology brings the individual dimension, exploring the cognitive, developmental, emotional, and interpersonal factors that shape human behaviour, including behaviour that leads to criminal acts.

At Northampton this degree invites you to integrate the insights of both disciplines, understanding human behaviour, thought, and emotion alongside the study of crime, social order, and social control. You will engage with criminological theory from classical to critical and contemporary perspectives, as well as with psychological science covering cognition, development, social influence, and abnormal psychology. The combination allows you to bring psychological depth to questions about offending and victimisation, and to place individual psychology in the broader social context that criminology provides.

The three-year full-time programme develops both your theoretical understanding and your research skills, equipping you to think rigorously about the questions that criminology and psychology share.

Graduates go on to careers in the police, probation and prison services, social work, victim support, youth justice, mental health services, research, and the voluntary sector. The psychology component also opens pathways to further training in applied psychological roles, and many graduates continue to postgraduate study in criminology, criminal justice, forensic psychology, or social work.