A Level Sociology: Socialisation, Identity and Research Methods — Practice Questions

These are original questions written for Marlbridge, for revision and practice on this content. They are not reproduced past-paper questions, and they do not replicate the exam’s exact structure, question count or mark tariffs — examination boards hold copyright in their own papers. Use these alongside the official past papers available free from your board. Section shape and command words below follow Paper 1’s real pattern: Section A (three compulsory questions) and Section B (one essay chosen from two, 26 marks), using only the command words the syllabus defines — Describe, Evaluate, Explain and Give.

Related: Socialisation, Identity and Methods revision notes

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Section A

1. Explain the difference between primary and secondary socialisation, giving an agency of each. [6]

2.

(a) Describe the difference between ascribed and achieved status, giving one example of each. [4]

(b) Evaluate the evidence from feral children used to support the view that identity and behaviour are learned rather than innate. [8]

3.

(a) Explain the difference between reliability and validity as ways of evaluating a research method. [6]

(b) Evaluate the use of triangulation in sociological research, giving an example of how two methods might be combined. [10]

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Section B

Answer one question from this section.

4. Evaluate the view that structuralist perspectives provide a better explanation of human behaviour and society than social action perspectives. [26]

5. Evaluate the practical and ethical problems a researcher would face in using participant observation to study bullying in a secondary school, and explain why an interpretivist would prefer this method to a questionnaire for this topic. [26]

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Answers

1. Primary socialisation occurs in early childhood, teaching language and basic norms and values through the family [2]. Secondary socialisation occurs later, teaching the wider norms of society, through agencies such as school, the peer group or the media [2]. The two are linked: secondary socialisation builds on the foundation primary socialisation lays down, rather than replacing it [2].

2. (a) Ascribed status is fixed at birth and cannot be changed, e.g. sex or caste [2]; achieved status is earned through a person’s own effort, e.g. an occupation or qualification [2].

(b) Cases of children raised with little or no human contact suggest that behaviour long assumed to be natural — language, social interaction, even walking upright — is in fact learnt through socialisation, since these children fail to develop it without human contact [3]. However, such cases are extremely rare and methodologically weak as evidence: the children involved are usually few in number, unrepresentative, and often had pre-existing conditions or suffered severe abuse and neglect, so it is difficult to attribute their lack of development to social isolation alone rather than to these other factors [3]. A stronger version of the same argument draws on cross-cultural variation — norms, gender roles and behaviours assumed to be universal differ markedly between societies, which a purely biological explanation cannot account for [2].

3. (a) Reliability means that repeating the research using the same method would produce the same results [3]. Validity means the method gives a true and accurate picture of what it claims to measure [3].

(b) Triangulation combines two or more research methods so that the strengths of one method can offset the weaknesses of another, increasing overall confidence in the findings [4]. For example, a researcher might combine a large-scale questionnaire, which is reliable and can be repeated but may lack depth, with a small number of unstructured interviews, which are high in validity but harder to replicate — the questionnaire’s breadth and the interviews’ depth compensate for each other’s limitations [4]. Triangulation is particularly valued by researchers who reject a rigid positivist/interpretivist divide, since it treats quantitative and qualitative data as complementary rather than as rival, incompatible approaches [2].

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Model answer guidance for Section B

Essay 4 should open by defining both traditions — structuralist perspectives (functionalism, Marxism, feminism) see individual behaviour as shaped by the structure of society, while the social action perspective (interactionism) sees society as built up from individuals’ own meanings and interactions. The essay should then set out the structuralist case in detail: functionalism’s account of value consensus and social order, and Marxism’s account of how class structure shapes behaviour and consciousness, each with a named theorist or concept. It should set out the social action case with equal weight: interactionism’s focus on labelling, the negotiated nature of everyday interaction, and its criticism that structuralist accounts are over-deterministic and neglect individual agency. The strongest answers use Giddens’s concept of structuration — the idea that structure and action shape each other continuously, so that people act within structures that constrain them while their actions simultaneously reproduce or change those structures — to argue that neither tradition alone is adequate, and reach a reasoned judgement rather than simply describing both sides in turn.

Essay 5 should identify and explain at least two practical problems (for example, gaining access requires permission from gatekeepers such as a head teacher who may refuse it; an adult researcher cannot pass as a pupil, so covert observation among pupils is not realistic, and even an overt researcher in a staff role may find pupils change their behaviour in front of them; and bullying often happens unpredictably and out of sight, so it may go unobserved even with access granted) and at least two ethical problems (informed consent is difficult to obtain from minors and their parents across a whole school; and a researcher who witnesses bullying faces a dilemma, since failing to intervene leaves a pupil at risk of harm, while intervening changes the situation being studied). It should then explain why an interpretivist would prefer participant observation to a questionnaire for this specific topic. Interpretivists seek verstehen — an empathetic understanding of the meanings people attach to their own actions — and participant observation lets the researcher see bullying as it actually happens, in its natural setting and over a sustained period, rather than relying on what pupils are willing or able to report. It can reveal the meanings pupils give to behaviour (for example, what they themselves treat as “just banter” rather than bullying) and the group processes involved, such as bystanders, peer status and group norms, which a questionnaire’s fixed, researcher-imposed categories would miss. It also avoids a questionnaire’s reliance on self-report, since pupils may under-report bullying through fear or embarrassment. For all these reasons the data is likely to be higher in validity. The strongest answers weigh this preference against participant observation’s own weaknesses — the practical and ethical problems already discussed, the Hawthorne effect where pupils know they are observed, low reliability because the study cannot be repeated in the same way, a small and unrepresentative sample, and the risk that the researcher’s own interpretations bias what is recorded — against the questionnaire’s advantages of reliability and generalisability, before reaching a conclusion.

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Where marks are usually lost

• Confusing reliability with validity.
• Describing a perspective without applying it to the question.
• Evaluating a method in the abstract instead of for this research topic.
• Giving only one side of an essay question rather than weighing both traditions or both problems against each other.
• Confusing ascribed with achieved status.