Look inside the OCR A-Level Sociology guide (H580)

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Look inside the OCR A-Level Sociology guide

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OCR · A-Level · H580
Sociology
Active Recall Guide
859 questions
SociologyContents
Contents
10 topics, 81 subtopics
  1. Introducing Socialisation, Culture and Identity102
  2. Families and Relationships103
  3. Youth Subcultures78
  4. Media52
  5. Research Methods and Researching Social Inequalities103
  6. Understanding Social Inequalities56
  7. Globalisation and the Digital Social World52
  8. Crime and Deviance108
  9. Education101
  10. Religion, Belief and Faith104
ii
Families and RelationshipsQuestions
Families and Relationships
Family types and trends in marriage, divorce and cohabitation
  1. What is the difference between a family and a household?
  2. Define the nuclear family.
  3. What is an extended family, and what is the difference between its vertical and horizontal forms?
  4. Define a lone parent family.
  5. What is a reconstituted family?
  6. What is meant by a same-sex family?
  7. Give two examples of a non-family household.
  8. Describe the broad trend in marriage in the UK over roughly the last thirty years.
  9. Give three reasons sociologists offer for the decline in marriage.
12
Families and RelationshipsAnswers
Answers
Family types and trends in marriage, divorce and cohabitation
  1. A family is a group connected by blood, marriage or civil partnership, or adoption, whereas a household is simply one person or a group of people living at the same address and sharing facilities.
  2. A nuclear family is two generations living together in one household: a couple and their dependent children.
  3. An extended family is a nuclear family plus other relatives; the vertical form adds extra generations such as grandparents, while the horizontal form adds relatives of the same generation such as aunts, uncles and cousins.
  4. A lone parent family is one parent living with their dependent children, and the great majority of such families in the UK are headed by the mother.
  5. A reconstituted or step family is formed when partners bring children from a previous relationship into a new household, so at least one adult is a step parent.
  6. It is a family in which the couple are of the same sex, raising children through adoption, fostering, assisted conception or a previous heterosexual relationship.
  7. A person living alone and a group of unrelated students or friends sharing a flat are both non-family households.
  8. Fewer people are marrying, those who do marry are doing so later in life, a larger share of marriages are remarriages, and civil partnership and same-sex marriage have added new legal forms.
  9. Secularisation has weakened religious pressure to marry, the stigma attached to cohabitation and to remaining single has faded, and women's greater financial independence means marriage is no longer an economic necessity.
13
Research Methods and Researching Social InequalitiesQuestions
Research Methods and Researching Social Inequalities
Verstehen, qualitative data and validity
  1. Explain the term verstehen.
  2. Why do interpretivist researchers work at building rapport?
  3. Why do interpretivists treat subjectivity as acceptable rather than as a flaw?
  4. What is researcher imposition?
  5. What does reflexivity require a researcher to do?
  6. What is qualitative data?
  7. Name three methods interpretivists tend to prefer.
  8. Define validity.
34
Research Methods and Researching Social InequalitiesAnswers
Answers
Verstehen, qualitative data and validity
  1. Verstehen means empathetic understanding: the researcher tries to see the situation from the participant's point of view in order to grasp why they act as they do.
  2. A trusting relationship encourages participants to speak openly and honestly, which produces richer and more valid data.
  3. Because the social world is made up of people's subjective meanings, so research that excludes them cannot capture what is really going on.
  4. Researcher imposition is when the researcher's own assumptions and categories are forced onto participants, for example through fixed-choice answers, so the data reflect the researcher's framework rather than the participant's reality.
  5. It requires the researcher to reflect critically on how their own identity, values and presence have shaped the research, and to make that influence explicit.
  6. Qualitative data is information expressed in words or images, such as interview transcripts and field notes, which conveys meaning and depth rather than quantity.
  7. Unstructured interviews, participant observation and ethnography.
  8. Validity is the extent to which the data give a true and authentic picture of what the researcher set out to study.
35
Crime and DevianceQuestions
Crime and Deviance
Defining crime and deviance, social control and relativity
  1. Define the term crime.
  2. Define the term deviance.
  3. Give one act that is deviant but not criminal, and one that is criminal but rarely treated as deviant.
  4. What do sociologists mean by social order?
  5. Define the term social control.
  6. Distinguish between formal and informal social control, with an example of each.
  7. What is meant by the relativity of crime and deviance?
  8. How does the relativity of deviance show itself over time?
  9. How do definitions of crime vary between one society and another?
56
Crime and DevianceAnswers
Answers
Defining crime and deviance, social control and relativity
  1. A crime is an act that breaks the criminal law of a society and is punishable by the state through the criminal justice system.
  2. Deviance is behaviour that departs from the norms of a social group and attracts disapproval, negative sanctions or attempts to correct it.
  3. Talking loudly to yourself in a quiet carriage is deviant but lawful, while driving a few miles per hour over the speed limit is criminal yet widely tolerated.
  4. Social order is the stable, predictable patterning of everyday social life that results from people largely sharing and following the same norms and expectations.
  5. Social control refers to the processes by which members of a society are persuaded or compelled to conform to its norms and laws.
  6. Formal social control is exercised by official agencies with written rules and legal sanctions, such as the police and courts, while informal social control operates through everyday approval and disapproval from family, peers and colleagues.
  7. It means that no act is inherently criminal or deviant: whether an act counts as either depends on the historical period, the society and the social context in which it occurs.
  8. Acts move in and out of the criminal category as attitudes shift, so sexual acts between men were decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967 while smoking in enclosed public places became an offence in 2007.
  9. Drinking alcohol is lawful in the United Kingdom but a criminal offence in Saudi Arabia, and cannabis possession is prosecuted in some countries while regulated and sold legally in others.
57
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859 questions
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  3. Step 3 · Closed book again

    Same questions, same order, from memory. The gap between pass one and pass three is the session result.

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