England · AQAQ&A
SociologyQ&A by dot point
A short Q&A bank for every England Sociology syllabus dot point. Each question and answer is drawn directly from our worked dot-point page, so you can scan key concepts before opening the long-form answer.
Beliefs in Society
- The relationship between religious beliefs, organisations and social change, including religion as a conservative force and as a force for change (Weber, liberation theology, fundamentalism).0Q&A pairs
- The relationship between different social groups and religious or spiritual organisations and movements, beliefs and practices, including by gender, ethnicity, social class and age.0Q&A pairs
- Religious organisations, including churches, sects, denominations and cults, and the relationship to religious and spiritual movements, including the growth and appeal of new religious and New Age movements.0Q&A pairs
- The secularisation debate, including evidence and explanations for the decline of religion, the secularisation thesis and its critics, and debates about religion in the contemporary UK, Europe and the USA.0Q&A pairs
- Different theories of religion, including functionalist, Marxist and feminist theories, and their explanations of the role and functions of religious beliefs, practices and institutions.0Q&A pairs
Crime and Deviance
- Crime control, surveillance, prevention and punishment, victims and the role of the criminal justice system and other agencies, including situational and environmental prevention and theories of punishment.0Q&A pairs
- The relationship between crime and the media, including media representations of crime, fear of crime, the media as a cause of crime, moral panics, and cyber-crime.0Q&A pairs
- Ethnic patterns in crime and victimisation, including the over-representation of some groups in statistics, explanations of offending, the role of the criminal justice system, and racism and discrimination.0Q&A pairs
- Functionalist, strain and subcultural theories of crime and deviance, including Durkheim on the functions of crime, Merton's strain theory, and subcultural theories (Cohen, Cloward and Ohlin).0Q&A pairs
- Gender patterns in crime, including why women appear to commit less crime, the chivalry thesis, explanations of female and male offending, and gendered patterns of victimisation.0Q&A pairs
- Globalisation and crime in contemporary society, the global criminal economy, green crime, human rights and state crimes, including genocide and crimes by states against their own citizens.0Q&A pairs
- Labelling theory and the social construction of crime, including the social construction of crime statistics, the deviant career, master status, deviancy amplification and primary and secondary deviance.0Q&A pairs
- Marxist, neo-Marxist and realist theories of crime, including traditional Marxism, critical criminology, left realism and right realism, and their explanations of crime and policy responses.0Q&A pairs
Education
- External factors (material deprivation, cultural deprivation, cultural capital) and internal factors (labelling, streaming, pupil subcultures) explaining social-class differences in educational achievement.0Q&A pairs
- Gender differences in achievement and subject choice, and ethnic differences in achievement, explained through external factors and internal school processes including teacher labelling and ethnocentric curricula.0Q&A pairs
- The significance of educational policies, including selection, comprehensivisation, marketisation and privatisation, and policies to achieve greater equality of opportunity or outcome by class, gender and ethnicity.0Q&A pairs
- Relationships and processes within schools, including teacher labelling, the self-fulfilling prophecy, streaming and setting, pupil identities and subcultures, and the hidden curriculum.0Q&A pairs
- Functionalist, Marxist, New Right and other perspectives on the role and purpose of the education system, including socialisation, role allocation, the correspondence principle and human capital.0Q&A pairs
Families and Households
- The nature of childhood and changes in the status of children, the social construction of childhood, the march of progress versus conflict view, and debates about whether childhood is disappearing.0Q&A pairs
- The domestic division of labour, including the symmetrical family debate, the dual burden and triple shift, decision-making and control of money, and domestic violence within couple relationships.0Q&A pairs
- Demographic trends in the UK since 1900, including changes in birth rates, death rates, family size, life expectancy, the ageing population and migration, and their effects on family and household structure.0Q&A pairs
- The relationship of the family to the social structure and social change, including functionalist, Marxist, feminist, New Right and personal-life perspectives on the family and industrialisation.0Q&A pairs
- Changing patterns of marriage, cohabitation, separation, divorce, childbearing and the life course, family diversity, and the increasing variety of household and family structures.0Q&A pairs
- The nature and extent of changes within the family, and the impact of social policy and laws on family structure, gender roles and the balance of power within families.0Q&A pairs
Theory and Methods
- Consensus, conflict, structural and social action theories, including functionalism, Marxism and feminism, and their explanations of order, conflict and social structure.0Q&A pairs
- The nature of science and the extent to which sociology can be regarded as scientific, including positivism, Popper's falsificationism, Kuhn's paradigms and the realist view of science.0Q&A pairs
- Observation (participant and non-participant, overt and covert) and the use of secondary sources, including official statistics, documents and other existing data, and their strengths and limitations.2Q&A pairs
- The distinction between primary and secondary data and quantitative and qualitative data, and the theoretical positions of positivism and interpretivism on how society should be studied.0Q&A pairs
- Quantitative and qualitative methods of research, including experiments, social surveys, questionnaires and interviews, and the practical, ethical and theoretical factors influencing the choice of method and topic.0Q&A pairs
- Social action and interactionist theories and postmodernism, including symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, ethnomethodology, Weber's social action theory and the structure-action debate.0Q&A pairs
- The relationship between theory and methods, and debates about objectivity, values and value freedom in sociological research, including the views of Weber, the positivists and committed sociology.0Q&A pairs