A Level Sociology: Socialisation, Identity and Research Methods — Revision Notes

Condensed for the final weeks. For the full explanation, use the Socialisation, Identity and Methods study guide.

Nature, nurture and socialisation

The sociological case rests on evidence that human behaviour is learnt, not innate: cross-cultural variation in gender roles and norms, and feral children cases showing that individuals raised without human contact fail to develop language or normal social behaviour.

• Primary socialisation — in the family, in early childhood. Learning language, basic norms and values.
• Secondary socialisation — through education, peer group, religion, workplace and media.

Agencies of socialisation and their methods: the family (imitation, sanctions), education (formal curriculum and the hidden curriculum), peer group (peer pressure, sanctions), media (role models, representation), religion, and workplace.

Culture is the whole way of life of a group: norms (rules of behaviour), values (beliefs about what is important), roles, status and beliefs.

• Ascribed status — fixed at birth, such as caste or sex.
• Achieved status — earned through effort, such as an occupation.

Subculture — a group within society with distinct norms and values. Counter-culture — a subculture actively opposed to the mainstream.

Structure versus action

The organising debate of the whole syllabus.

	Structuralist (macro)	Social action (micro)
View of individuals	Shaped by society	Actively create society
Perspectives	Functionalism, Marxism, feminism	Interactionism, labelling theory
Metaphor	Puppets	Actors

• Functionalism — society is a system of interdependent parts maintained by value consensus; institutions perform functions for the whole.
• Marxism — society is characterised by class conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat; the superstructure serves the economic base; false class consciousness conceals exploitation.
• Feminism — society is patriarchal. Liberal feminists seek reform, Marxist feminists link patriarchy to capitalism, radical feminists identify patriarchy as the fundamental division.
• Interactionism — focuses on meanings and interaction; labelling, the self-fulfilling prophecy, and the social construction of identity.
• Postmodernism — grand narratives no longer explain society; identity is fluid, chosen and consumed rather than ascribed.

Giddens’s structuration offers the synthesis: structure and action shape one another continuously, since people act within structures that their actions in turn reproduce or change.

Research methods

Positivism wants objective, quantitative, reliable data and seeks causal patterns. Interpretivism wants verstehen — understanding meanings — and prefers qualitative, valid data.

Concept	Meaning
Reliability	Would repeating the study give the same results?
Validity	Does it measure what it claims to measure — a true picture?
Representativeness	Does the sample reflect the wider population?
Generalisability	Can the findings be applied more widely?

Quantitative methods tend to be high in reliability, low in validity; qualitative methods the reverse. That trade-off answers a large share of methods questions on its own.

Method	Strengths	Weaknesses
Questionnaire	Cheap, large samples, reliable, easily quantified	Low validity, low response rate, imposes the researcher’s categories
Structured interview	Reliable, comparable	Interviewer effect, little depth
Unstructured interview	High validity, rich data, flexible	Time-consuming, unreliable, small samples
Participant observation	Very high validity, uncovers the unexpected	Hawthorne effect, going native, ethical problems, unrepresentative
Experiments	Control, establishes cause	Artificial, low ecological validity, ethical limits
Official statistics	Cheap, large-scale, comparative	Socially constructed, defined by the state

Sampling: random, systematic, stratified, quota, snowball (for hard-to-reach groups), opportunity. A sampling frame is the list from which the sample is drawn — the absence of a usable frame is often the reason a non-random method is chosen.

Triangulation combines methods to offset each one’s weaknesses and increase confidence in the findings.

Ethics: informed consent, confidentiality, protection from harm, no deception, right to withdraw. Covert observation breaches consent and deception, which is exactly why it is defended only when overt research would be impossible.

Exam traps

• Confusing reliability with validity.
• Describing a perspective without applying it to the question.
• Treating structure and action as a simple either/or, ignoring structuration.
• Evaluating a method in the abstract rather than for the specific research topic.
• Confusing ascribed with achieved status.
• Giving only strengths or only weaknesses — evaluation requires both plus a judgement.

Self-test

1. Distinguish primary from secondary socialisation.
2. What two pieces of evidence support the nurture side of the debate?
3. Distinguish structuralist from social action perspectives.
4. Distinguish reliability from validity, and say which methods favour each.
5. What is triangulation and why is it used?

Answers: 1. Primary occurs in the family in early childhood and teaches language and basic norms; secondary occurs later through education, peers, media, religion and work. 2. Cross-cultural variation in norms and gender roles, and feral children cases where individuals raised without human contact fail to develop language or normal social behaviour. 3. Structuralist approaches see society as shaping individuals from above; social action approaches see individuals as actively creating society through interaction and shared meanings. 4. Reliability is whether repeating the study would give the same results — favoured by quantitative methods; validity is whether it gives a true picture — favoured by qualitative methods. 5. Combining two or more methods so that the strengths of one offset the weaknesses of another, increasing confidence in the findings.