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Sociology flashcards

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AS Topic 1: Unit 1 – Introducing Sociology

Vertically vs horizontally extended families: Vertically extended: several generations, such as grandparents, parents and children. Horizontally extended: relatives of the same generation, such as brothers and their wives, living or working together.
Name three alternatives to families in the specification: Communes, living alone, and foster care or children's homes.
What are Therborn's types of family system?: Therborn grouped the world's families into a few major family systems linked to region and religion (e.g. European, West Asian/North African, South Asian, East Asian, Sub-Saharan African), which differ in patriarchy, marriage and sexuality.
Matriarchal vs patriarchal families: In a matriarchal family, women (often the mother) hold authority and descent may pass through the female line. In a patriarchal family, men hold authority.
Arranged vs love marriage: In an arranged marriage, families play the main part in choosing the partner. In a love marriage, the couple choose each other on the basis of romantic attraction. Monogamy is marriage to one partner at a time.
How does functionalism see the family's relationship to society?: The family performs essential functions, and the nuclear family "fits" modern industrial society: Parsons argued it is geographically mobile and specialises in primary socialisation and stabilising adult personalities.
What did Engels argue about the family?: A Marxist view: the monogamous nuclear family developed with private property, so men could pass wealth to their legitimate heirs; the family serves capitalism as an agent of social control.
How do Marxists see families as agents of social control?: Families pass on ruling-class ideology, teach obedience to authority and act as units of consumption, so they help keep capitalism stable.
What did Oakley argue about the family?: A feminist view: gender roles are socially constructed, and the conventional family socialises women into a housewife role that keeps them unequal to men.
Liberal vs radical vs Marxist feminist views of the family: Liberal: gradual progress towards equality is possible. Radical: the family is a key site of patriarchy and male power. Marxist: women's unpaid labour in the family benefits capitalism.
Name the demographic changes in the specification: Family size, birth and death rates, infant and child mortality, internal and international migration, and ageing populations.
What is the pivot (sandwich) generation?: People, often in middle age, who care for both their own children and their ageing parents.
Living apart together vs beanpole family: Living apart together: a committed couple who keep separate homes. Beanpole family: several generations alive at once with few members in each.
What is personal life (Smart)?: An approach that studies the relationships people themselves find meaningful, such as friends as family or pets as family members, rather than starting from a fixed definition of the family.
What did Stacey argue about family diversity?: Women have been the main agents of change in family life, creating new, more diverse "postmodern" family forms such as families stretched across divorce and remarriage.
What are transnational families?: Families whose members live in different countries but keep close ties, often linked to diasporas and migration.
Instrumental vs expressive roles: The instrumental (male "breadwinner") role is earning income. The expressive (female) role is caring and giving emotional support. Parsons saw them as natural; feminists see them as socially constructed and unequal.
What is the triple shift?: Women doing paid work, domestic work and emotional work.
How might power and decision-making be unequal in families?: Men may control money and major decisions, and violence against women and children is an extreme form of male power in families.
What is child-centredness?: Family life organised around children's needs and interests, with more time and money spent on fewer children.
What are boomerang families?: Families in which adult children return to live with their parents, e.g. because of housing costs or after study.
How do the status and roles of older people vary?: In some societies older people have high status as sources of wisdom and authority; in others they are marginalised. Grandparents often provide childcare and support.
Positivist vs interpretivist approaches: Positivist: objective, quantitative, reliable data to find causal patterns, modelled on natural science. Interpretivist: verstehen, understanding meanings through qualitative, valid data.
Primary vs secondary data: Primary data are collected by the researcher. Secondary data already exist: qualitative (diaries, letters, personal documents) or quantitative (official statistics).
Formal (structured) vs informal (unstructured) interviews: Structured: set questions in a set order, comparable and reliable but subject to interviewer effect. Unstructured: a flexible conversation, valid and detailed but slow and hard to repeat.
Participant observation: strength and weakness: Strength: very valid, as behaviour is seen in its natural setting. Weakness: cannot be replicated, uses small samples, and the researcher may "go native"; covert work raises consent issues.
Multistage vs stratified random vs quota sampling: Multistage: sampling in stages, e.g. regions, then schools, then pupils. Stratified random: random selection within groups in proportion to the population. Quota: the researcher fills set numbers in each category.
What is the Hawthorne effect?: People change their behaviour because they know they are being studied, reducing validity.
Causation vs correlation: Correlation: two variables change together. Causation: one variable causes the other. A correlation alone does not prove cause.
What does PET stand for when evaluating a method?: Practical, Ethical and Theoretical issues; the theoretical ones include reliability, validity and representativeness.
Name the ethical issues in the specification: Informed consent, confidentiality, anonymity and participant wellbeing.

AS Topic 2: Unit 2 – Exploring Sociology

Norms vs values vs roles: Norms: specific rules of behaviour. Values: general beliefs about what is important. Roles: behaviour expected of someone in a social position.
What is the sociological imagination (Mills)?: The ability to connect personal troubles (e.g. one person losing a job) with public issues (e.g. mass unemployment caused by economic change).
What is a stereotype?: A fixed, oversimplified image of a group, applied to all its members.
What are subcultures in multicultural societies?: Groups within a society, including ethnic groups, with some norms and values of their own alongside those of the wider culture.
Primary vs secondary socialisation: Primary socialisation: early learning of culture, mainly in the family. Secondary socialisation: later learning through schools, peers, media, religions and the workplace.
What is re-socialisation?: Learning new norms and values to replace old ones, e.g. in a total institution such as a prison or the army, where Goffman described the stripping of a person's previous identity.
What is inadequate socialisation?: When an individual has not properly learned society's norms and values, which some functionalist and New Right writers link to deviance.
What did Mead argue about the self?: The self develops through interaction: children learn to take the role of others and eventually of the "generalised other", the attitudes of society as a whole.
Functionalist vs Marxist vs feminist views of socialisation: Functionalist: creates value consensus and social order. Marxist: passes on ruling-class ideology. Feminist: socialises people into unequal gender roles.
Individual vs collective identity: Individual identity: how a person sees themselves as unique. Collective identity: belonging to a group with shared characteristics, such as a nation, religion or ethnic group.
Name the bases of social identity in the specification: Age and generation/cohort, sex and gender, race and ethnicity, social class, religion, ability/disability and nationality.
What is a hybrid ethnic identity?: An identity mixing elements of more than one culture, often among members of diasporas.
What did Fanon argue about identity?: Colonialism shaped the identities of colonised peoples, leading some to internalise the coloniser's view of them as inferior.
How can consumption and globalisation influence identity?: People can build identities through what they buy and through global media and brands, and online identities in social media and virtual communities.
Formal vs informal social control: Formal: government and laws, police and other enforcement agencies, and the criminal justice system. Informal: families, schools, peers, media, religion and the workplace, through disapproval, gossip and ridicule.
Repressive vs ideological state apparatuses: Repressive state apparatuses (police, army, courts) control people by force. Ideological state apparatuses (education, media, religion) control them through ideas (Althusser).
What is hegemony?: Rule by consent: the ideas of the dominant class are accepted as common sense, so people consent to the existing order (Gramsci).
What is othering?: Defining a group as different from and inferior to "us", which can stigmatise them. Goffman described stigma as a spoiled identity.
Name four aims of punishment: Deterrence, retribution, rehabilitation and incapacitation (protecting the public). Others include reparation to victims.
What does the social construction of crime and deviance mean?: What counts as crime or deviance differs between societies and changes over time, depending on who defines and reacts to the behaviour.
White collar vs corporate vs state crime: White collar: crime by individuals in their jobs, e.g. fraud. Corporate: crime by companies, e.g. breaking safety laws. State: crime by governments or their agencies, e.g. torture.
What are victimless crimes and social harms?: Victimless crimes have no direct victim who complains, e.g. some drug offences. Social harms are actions that cause harm but are not defined as crimes, e.g. legal pollution.
Official statistics vs self-report studies vs victim surveys: Official statistics record crimes known to the police. Self-report studies ask people about offences they committed. Victim surveys ask about crimes they suffered, revealing unreported crime.
What did Stanley Cohen show about moral panics?: Exaggerated media coverage of a group, such as the mods and rockers, turns them into "folk devils" and leads to public alarm and stronger control.
What is public sociology (Burawoy)?: Sociology that engages with audiences beyond universities, taking part in public debate about social issues.
What is value freedom, and how does activism challenge it?: Value freedom is the idea that research should be free of the researcher's values. Some sociologists argue sociology should openly take sides and support activism for social change.
Structure vs agency: Structure: social institutions and patterns that shape behaviour. Agency: individuals' ability to act and make choices. Structural theories stress the first; social action theories the second.
Functionalism vs neo-functionalism: Functionalism sees society as a system of parts working together through value consensus. Neo-functionalism keeps this idea but allows more for conflict, change and agency.
Marxism vs neo-Marxism: Marxism: society is shaped by class conflict over the economy. Neo-Marxism gives more weight to culture, ideas and hegemony.
What is symbolic interactionism?: A social action theory: society is built through the meanings people give to symbols and interactions; labels and self-concepts shape behaviour.
Postmodernism vs postmodernity: Postmodernity is the type of society: fragmented, media-saturated and global. Postmodernism is the theory that grand narratives no longer explain it and identities are fluid and chosen.
Why does theoretical position affect choice of method?: Positivists favour structured questionnaires, official statistics and structured observation for quantifiable data. Interpretivists favour unstructured interviews, participant observation and personal documents for meaning.

A Level Topic 3: Unit 3 – People and Development

Great Divergence: The widening gap in wealth and industry between western Europe (and later North America) and most of the world from the nineteenth century.
Colonialism vs neocolonialism: Colonialism: direct political control of a territory and extraction of its resources and labour. Neocolonialism: continued control of formally independent states through debt, trade terms and investment.
How does Weber (1905) help explain why Europe industrialised?: The Protestant ethic: Calvinist values encouraged saving, hard work and reinvestment. Critics note capitalism also grew in non-Protestant settings.
What did Rodney (1972) argue?: In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, that enslavement and colonial rule moved Africa's wealth and labour to Europe. Critics say it underplays African agency.
What did Pomeranz (2000) argue about the Great Divergence?: That coal and colonial land, not unique values, explain Britain's lead, challenging both Weber and pure exploitation accounts.
Growth vs development: Growth is rising GDP. Development is better lives across life expectancy, living standards, education, health, rights and democracy.
Cultural vs political vs economic globalisation: Cultural: spread of languages, beliefs, popular culture and the internet. Political: spread of democracy, human rights and gender equality. Economic: spread of capitalism, global trade and TNCs.
Global village: McLuhan's image of electronic media shrinking the world into one community.
Positive globalist vs negative globalist vs transformationalist: Positive (neo-liberal, e.g. Ohmae, 1990): a borderless world where markets spread wealth. Negative (e.g. Bello): harmful for most, so "deglobalise". Transformationalist (Held et al., 1999): real but with mixed outcomes.
Cultural imperialism vs glocalisation: Cultural imperialism: one-way domination of local cultures by Western, especially American, media and brands. Glocalisation (Robertson): global and local combine, adapting global products to local cultures.
What did Polanyi (1944) argue?: In The Great Transformation, that markets become "disembedded" from society, and society pushes back to protect itself (the double movement).
TNC vs NGO: A transnational corporation is a profit-making firm operating in several countries. An NGO is a non-profit charity or campaign group independent of states.
Grassroots movement: Collective action organised from below by local people.
Structural adjustment: Loan conditions from the IMF and World Bank requiring cuts in state spending and market reforms.
Arguments for and against development aid: For: Sachs (2005) argues targeted aid gives a "big push" out of the poverty trap. Against: Moyo and Easterly argue aid breeds dependency.
Bilateral vs multilateral aid: Bilateral aid goes from one state to another. Multilateral aid goes through agencies such as the World Bank.
What is Lee's (1966) push-pull model?: Migration follows push factors at the origin, pull factors at the destination and intervening obstacles. Critics say it treats migrants as isolated rational individuals.
Refugee vs economic migrant: A refugee (1951 Convention) is outside their country with a well-founded fear of persecution on set grounds. An economic migrant moves for work. Forced migration is wider than the legal refugee category.
Diaspora: A dispersed population keeping ties with a homeland.
Remittances: Money migrants send to family in their country of origin.
What types of diaspora did Cohen (1997) identify?: In Global Diasporas: victim, labour, trade and imperial diasporas, among others. Real communities often overlap categories.
Digital nomad: A remote worker who moves between countries while working online.
Modernisation vs dependency explanations of obstacles to progress: Modernisation (e.g. Rostow, 1960): internal obstacles such as traditional values. Dependency (e.g. Frank): external obstacles, as the metropolis drains surplus from satellites.
What is Wallerstein's (1974) world-systems theory?: The world economy is divided into core, semi-periphery and periphery. Critics say it is too economic and underplays culture.
What did Mies (1986) mean by housewifisation?: A feminist idea: women's work is treated as cheap or unpaid, which globalisation exploits. Factory jobs may still give women income.
What is Collier's (2007) conflict trap?: War destroys investment and makes more war likely, holding back development.
Sustainable development: Meeting present needs without compromising future generations' ability to meet theirs (Brundtland, 1987).

A Level Topic 4: Unit 4 – People and the Environment

Sedentarisation: The process of nomadic groups settling permanently, often under state pressure.
Rural depopulation: Decline in rural population as people, mostly young, leave for towns.
What did Mike Davis argue in Planet of Slums (2006)?: That slum growth is linked to debt and structural adjustment; in City of Quartz (1990) he described "fortress" cities with gated, segregated spaces.
What are non-places (Augé)?: Spaces of transit or consumption, such as airports, motorways and malls, where people remain anonymous.
Megacity: An urban area of over 10 million people.
What is demographic transition theory?: A model (Thompson and Notestein) of change through stages from high to low birth and death rates. Based on European history, it may ignore state policy.
Romanticism vs conservation: Romanticism values nature as pure, spiritual and restorative. Conservation manages nature to protect it for present and future use. They often combine.
The long now: Thinking about responsibility across very long timescales and future generations.
How does Hannigan (1995) explain environmental problems becoming public issues?: A soft constructionist view: problems are real but must be claimed; six factors turn a real problem into a recognised public issue.
Scepticism vs denialism: Scepticism questions evidence. Denialism rejects strong evidence, such as human-caused climate change, often for interests or identity (Oreskes and Conway, 2010, on organised doubt).
Ecological modernisation vs green Marxism: Ecological modernisation (Mol and Spaargaren): capitalism can become green through technology and regulation. Green Marxism (e.g. Foster's metabolic rift): capitalism's growth drive is the cause of the damage.
What did Bullard find about environmental justice?: In a Houston study (1979) and Dumping in Dixie (1990), waste sites were placed disproportionately in Black neighbourhoods.
What is the zoological connection (Bryant, 1979)?: Bryant's argument that sociology had ignored animal-related human behaviour; more a call for research than a theory.
Animal welfare vs animal rights: Animal welfare reduces suffering within human use of animals (Singer, 1975, Animal Liberation). Animal rights rejects such use (Regan, 1983, The Case for Animal Rights).
Zoonotic disease: A disease that passes from animals to humans.
Columbian Exchange: Crosby: transfer of plants, animals and diseases between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after 1492.
Rewilding vs de-extinction: Rewilding: restoring land to natural processes, sometimes with reintroduced species. De-extinction: attempts to recreate extinct species using genetic technology.

A Level Topic 5: Unit 5 – People and Technology

Technological determinism vs social construction of technology: Technological determinism: technology is the main driver of social change. Social construction: social groups shape which technologies succeed (e.g. Pinch and Bijker, 1984, on the safety bicycle).
Automobility: The car as a self-reinforcing system of roads, fuel, housing and habits that locks in car use (Urry).
Conspicuous consumption: Buying visible goods to display wealth and status (Veblen, 1899).
Deskilling: Breaking skilled work into simple machine-paced tasks, reducing worker control (Braverman).
What is Latour's actor-network theory?: Humans and non-humans (such as machines) are all "actants" in networks that shape social life. Critics say it describes but does not explain power.
What did McLuhan (1964) mean by "the medium is the message"?: The form of a medium shapes society more than its content; electronic media create a "global village". The idea is hard to test.
Marxist vs pluralist views of traditional media: Marxist: media serve the ruling class (e.g. Herman and Chomsky's 1988 propaganda model). Pluralist: media reflect market choice and many voices.
Misinformation vs disinformation vs propaganda: Misinformation: false information shared without intent to deceive. Disinformation: false information spread deliberately to mislead. Propaganda: organised persuasion, often by states, to shape opinion.
Hypodermic syringe vs two step flow vs uses and gratifications: Hypodermic syringe: a passive audience directly affected. Two step flow (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955): influence passes through opinion leaders. Uses and gratifications: active audiences use media to meet their needs.
What did Cohen (1972) show about moral panics?: Press exaggeration of mods and rockers created "folk devils" and public alarm. Such panics may be harder in a fragmented media world.
Citizen journalist: Member of the public who reports news events, often by phone and social media.
Influencer: Social media user with a large following who shapes tastes and promotes brands.
What did Uscinski and Parent (2014) find about conspiracy theories?: Conspiracy theories are used by those out of power, and there was no long-term rise between 1890 and 2010, based on US letters to one newspaper.
What is the debate about social media and mental health?: Orben and Przybylski (2019) found only a very small association between technology use and adolescent wellbeing; Haidt (2024) argues for strong harm.
How has social media changed audiences?: Audiences are more involved, creating content as well as consuming it, through citizen journalism and influencers, though ownership of platforms is concentrated in a few corporations.
Quantified self vs gamification: Quantified self: tracking the body and daily life as data (steps, sleep, calories). Gamification: adding game features (points, badges, leaderboards) to non-game activities.
Panopticon vs synopticon: Panopticon: the few watch the many (surveillance). Synopticon: the many watch the few, e.g. audiences watching celebrities (Mathiesen).
What are Wall's (2007) categories of cybercrime?: Crimes against computers (e.g. hacking), crimes using computers (e.g. fraud) and crimes in content (e.g. illegal images). The categories overlap in practice.
What did Norris (2001) identify about the digital divide?: Global, social and democratic divides in access to and use of digital technology. Access gaps narrow but skills gaps remain.
Narrow AI vs general AI: Narrow AI is designed for one task, such as image recognition. General AI would have human-level ability across tasks; it has not been achieved.
What did Buolamwini and Gebru (2018) find in Gender Shades?: Facial analysis systems had error rates up to 34.7% for darker-skinned women but under 1% for lighter-skinned men, showing algorithms can reproduce inequality.
Robot vs cyborg: A robot is a machine acting on its own. A cyborg is a human or other organism combined with technology that extends or replaces a body function.
What did Haraway (1985) argue in "A Cyborg Manifesto"?: That boundaries between human and animal, organism and machine, and physical and non-physical are breaking down. Critics question how far the abstract idea helps.

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Written for OxfordAQA International AS and A-level Sociology (9690), syllabus 9690 (Version 1.1).

Cards by Marlbridge Academic Team; 17 restate definitions from the 9690 revision notes. This deck has not yet been reviewed as a whole by a subject teacher. Report an error.

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