England · WJEC EduqasQ&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.
Crime and deviance
- The data on crime, including official statistics, victim surveys and self-report studies, the dark figure of crime, and the strengths and weaknesses of each source.0Q&A pairs
- Defining crime and deviance, the social construction of deviance, and how definitions vary by time, place and culture, including formal and informal deviance.0Q&A pairs
- Social control, including formal and informal control, the agencies of social control, and the role of the media in moral panics.0Q&A pairs
- The social distribution of crime, including the patterns by social class, age, gender and ethnicity, and sociological explanations of these patterns.0Q&A pairs
- Theories of crime and deviance, including Durkheim's functionalist view, Merton's strain theory, Albert Cohen's subcultural theory, the Marxist view, and Becker's labelling theory.0Q&A pairs
Education
- The factors affecting educational achievement, including the effects of social class, gender and ethnicity, and the difference between material and cultural explanations.0Q&A pairs
- The functions of education, including socialisation, skills for work, role allocation and social control, drawing on Durkheim, Parsons and Davis and Moore.1Q&A pairs
- Processes within schools, including labelling, the self-fulfilling prophecy, setting and streaming, and pupil subcultures, drawing on interactionists such as Becker.0Q&A pairs
- The hidden curriculum, the difference between the formal and hidden curriculum, and the Marxist view of Bowles and Gintis (the correspondence principle).0Q&A pairs
- The functionalist, Marxist, feminist and interactionist perspectives on education, and how they evaluate whether education is fair and meritocratic.0Q&A pairs
Families
- Changing family patterns, including falling marriage rates, rising cohabitation, the rise in divorce after the 1969 Divorce Reform Act, and the ageing population, with the reasons behind the trends.0Q&A pairs
- Conjugal roles (segregated and joint), the symmetrical family thesis of Willmott and Young, Oakley's critique and the dual burden, and power and decision-making in the family.0Q&A pairs
- The different family forms (nuclear, extended, reconstituted, lone-parent, same-sex and single-person households) and the reasons family diversity has increased.0Q&A pairs
- The functions of families, including Murdock's four functions and Parsons' two basic functions (primary socialisation and the stabilisation of adult personalities), and how perspectives evaluate them.1Q&A pairs
- The functionalist, Marxist, feminist and New Right perspectives on the family, and the criticisms of family life including its dark side.0Q&A pairs
Key concepts and socialisation
- The feminist perspective (patriarchy, gender inequality, liberal, Marxist and radical feminism) and the interactionist perspective (meanings, labelling and small-scale interaction).0Q&A pairs
- The functionalist (consensus) and Marxist (conflict) perspectives, including socialisation, social order, shared values, capitalism, class conflict and ideology.0Q&A pairs
- The key sociological concepts of culture, norms, values, roles, status, sanctions and subculture, and how they make up the shared way of life of a society.0Q&A pairs
- The nature versus nurture debate, the sociological emphasis on nurture, and the evidence from feral children and cross-cultural studies that behaviour is learned.0Q&A pairs
- Primary and secondary socialisation, the agencies of socialisation (family, education, peer group, media, religion and workplace), and how socialisation shapes identity.0Q&A pairs
Research methods
- Applied methods of sociological enquiry, including designing research for a topic, justifying the choice of method, and evaluating methods in context, as assessed on Component 2.0Q&A pairs
- Primary research methods, including questionnaires, structured and unstructured interviews, participant and non-participant observation, and experiments, with their strengths and weaknesses.0Q&A pairs
- The key evaluative concepts of reliability, validity, representativeness and objectivity, and the difference between quantitative and qualitative data.0Q&A pairs
- Sampling methods (random, systematic, stratified, quota, snowball) and the ethical issues in research (informed consent, confidentiality, avoiding harm, deception and privacy).0Q&A pairs
- Secondary sources, including official statistics, documents and the media, with their strengths and weaknesses, and the difference between quantitative and qualitative secondary data.0Q&A pairs
- The research process, including aims, hypotheses, the choice between positivist and interpretivist approaches, and the practical, ethical and theoretical factors that shape method choice.0Q&A pairs
Social differentiation and stratification
- The main forms of social differentiation, including social class, gender, ethnicity and age, and the inequalities of opportunity linked to each.0Q&A pairs
- Defining social differentiation and stratification, including the key concepts of social class, status, the strata of society, and ascribed and achieved status.0Q&A pairs
- Life chances and poverty, including the definition of life chances, absolute and relative poverty, the groups most at risk, and explanations of poverty.0Q&A pairs
- Power and inequality, including authority and coercion, power in the workplace and the home, social mobility, and how inequality is reproduced.0Q&A pairs
- Theories of stratification, including the functionalist view of Davis and Moore, the Marxist view, and the Weberian view of class, status and party.0Q&A pairs