Key Terms Flashcards
What is the A* to C economy?
A system at which schools concentrate their efforts on those pupils they see as most likely to gain five A*-C grades at GCSE and so boost the school’s league table position.
What is ageism?
The negative stereotyping of people on the basis of their age.
What is alienation?
Where an individual or group feels socially isolated and estranged because they lack the power to control their lives and realise their true potential.
What is assimilation?
An approach to immigration policy that believes immigrants should adopt the language, values, and customs of the ‘host community’ or country in which they settle.
What is banding?
A form of streaming.
What is a beanpole family?
A family that is vertically extended but not horizontally extended. For example, grandparents, parents and children, but not aunts, uncles or cousins.
What is the birth rate?
The number of live births per thousand of the population per year.
Who are the bourgeoisie?
A Marxist term for the capitalist class, the owners of the means of production. (factories, machinery, raw materials, land etc). Marx argues that the bourgeoisie’s ownership of the means of production also gives them political and ideological power.
What is childhood?
A socially defined age-status. There are major differences in how childhood is defined, both historically and between cultures. Western societies today define children as vulnerable and segregate them form the adult world, but in the past they were a part of the adult society from an early age, These differences show that childhood is a social construction.
What is a civil partnership?
The 2004 Civil Partnership Act gave same-sex couples similar legal rights to married couples in respect of pensions, inheritance, tenancies and property.
What are close-ended questions?
Questions used in a social survey that allow only a limited choice of answers from a pre-set list. They produce quantitative data and the answers are often pre-coded for ease of analysis.
What is a comparative method?
A research method that compares two social groups that are alike apart from one factor. For example, Durkheim compared two groups that were identical apart from their religion in order to find out the effects of religion on suicide rates. This is often used as an alternate to experiments.
What is compensatory education?
Government policies such as Operation Headstart in the USA that seek to tackle the problem of underachievement by providing extra support and funding to schools and families in deprived areas.
What was the comprehensive system?
A non-selective education system where all children attend the same type of secondary school.
What are conjugal roles?
The roles played by the husband and the wife. Segregated conjugal roles are where the husband is the breadwinner and the wife is the homemaker, with leisure spent separately. In joint conjugal roles, husband and wife each perform both roles and spend their leisure time together.
What is content analysis?
A method of analysing the content of documents and media output to find out how often and in what ways different types of people or events appear. For example, the Glasgow University Media Group (1976) used content analysis to reveal bias in how television news reported strikes.
What is a controlled group?
In experiments, scientists compare a control group and an experimental group that are identical in all respects. Unlike the experimental group, the control group is not exposed to the variable under investigation and so provides a baseline against which any changes in the experimental group can be changed.
What is a correlation?
When two or more factors or variables vary together; e.g. there is a correlation between low social class and low educational achievement. However, the existence of a correlation between two variables does not necessarily prove that one cause the other. It may simply be coincidence.
What is a correspondence principle?
Bowles and Gintis’ concept describing the way that the organisation and control of schools mirrors and ‘corresponds to’the workplace in capitalist society. For example, the control teachers exert over pupils mirros the control managers exert over workers.
What is the critical race theory?
It sees racism as a deep-seated feature of society resulting not merely from the attitudes of individuals but from institutional racism. CRT identifies several ways in which the education system is institutionally racist , including selection, the ethnocentric curriculum and assessment. CRT argues that racism cannot be removed by merely passing laws against it but requires direct action by oppressed groups.
What is cultural capital?
The knowledge, attitudes, values and language, tastes and abilities that the middle class transmit to their children. Bourdieu argues that educational success is largely based on possession of cultural capital, thus giving middle class children an advantage.
What is cultural deprivation?
The theory that many working class and black children are inadequately socialiswed and therefore lack the ‘right’ culture needed for educational success; e.g. their families do not instil the value of deferred gratification.
What is culture?
All those things that are learnt and shared by a society or group of people and transmitted from generation to generation through socialisation. It includes shared norms, values, knowledge, beliefs and skills.
What is a curriculum?
Those things taught or learnt in educational institutions. The overt or official curriculum includes the subjects, courses etc offered (e.g. the National Curriculum), while the hidden curriculum includes all those things learnt without being formally taught and often acquired simply through the everyday workings of school, such as attitudes of obedience, conformity and competitiveness.
What is death rate?
The number of deaths per thousand of the population per year.
What is deferred gratification?
Postponing immediate rewards or pleasures, generally with the aim of producing a greater reward at a later date, e.g. staying in to revise rather than going out with friends, which will bring success in exams.
What is demography?
The study of population, including birth, death, fertility and infant mortality rates, immigration and emigration, and age structure, as well as the reasons for changes in these.
What is dependency culture?
When people assume that the state will support them, rather than relying on their own efforts and taking responsibility for their families. The New Right see the welfare state as over-generous, encouraging people to remain unemployed and dependent on their benefits, and as responsible for the growing number of lone-parent families and rising crime rate.
What is dependency ratio?
The relationship between the size of the working population and non-working or dependent population.
What is deviance?
Behaviour that doe snot conform to the norms of a society or group. Deviance is a social construction and is relative. This means that what counts as deviant varies between groups and cultures and over time.
What is differentiation?
Distinguishing or creating differences between individuals or groups. In education, streaming is a form of differentiation that distinguishes between pupils on the basis of ability.
What is discrimination?
Treating people differently, whether negatively or positively, usually because they are of a particular social group.
What are documents?
There two types of documents. Public documents are produced by governments, schools and media etc. They include Acts of Parliament, school prospectuses, newspaper articles etc. Personal documents are created by individuals and often provide first-person accounts of events and experiences. They include diaries, letters, autobiographies etc. Both are used as secondary sources of qualitative date in sociological research.
What is domestic labour?
Work performed in the home, such as childcare, cooking, and cleaning. Functionalists see it as part of the expressive role performed by women, while feminists regard it as a major source of women’s oppression.
What is a dual burden?
When a person is responsible for two jobs. Usually applied to women who are in paid work but are also responsible for domestic labour.
What is educational triage?
The process whereby schools sort pupils into ‘hopeless cases’, ‘those will pass anyway’, and ‘those with potential to pass’, and then concentrate their efforts on the last of those groups as a way to boost the school’s exam league table position. Sorting may be based on stereotypical ideas about pupils’ ability.
What is emotion work?
The work involved in meeting the emotional needs of other people e.g. looking after a sick child involves responding to emotional as well as physical needs. Some sociologists argue that women carry a triple burden of housework, paid work and emotion work.
What is empathy?
An understanding of how another person thinks, feels or acts, achieved by putting oneself in their place. Interactionists advocate the use of qualitative methods such as participant observation as a way of achieving empathy and obtaining data high in validity.
What is an empty shell marriage?
A marriage in name only, where a couple lives under the same roof but as separate individuals. It may occur where divorce is difficult for legal, religious or financial reasons, or where a couple decides to stay together for the sake of children.
What are ethics?
The issue of right and wrong; moral principles or guidelines. There are ethical objections to research that deceives or harms its participants or fails to obtain their informed consent.
What is an ethnic group?
People who share the same heritage, culture and identity, often including the same language and religion, and who see themselves as a distinct group e.g. the Bangladeshi community in Britain. As well as having ethnic minority groups, societies such as Britain have an ethnic majority.
What does ethnocentric mean?
Seeing or judging things in a biased way from the viewpoint of one particular culture e.g. the National Curriculum has been described as an ethnocentric curriculum since it tends to value white, western music, literature, languages, history, religion etc and disregards or does not value black and Asian cultures.
What is the exchange theory?
The idea that people create, maintain or break off relationships depending on the costs and benefits of doing so; e.g. a person may provide a relative with accommodation in return for childcare.
What are experiments?
A laboratory experiment is a test carried out in controlled conditions in an artificial setting to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between two or more variables. A field experiment has the same aim but is carried out in a natural setting.
What is exploitation?
Paying workers less than the value of their labour. According to the Marxists, it is the process whereby the bourgeoisie extract surplus value or profit from the labour of the proletariat. Feminists see men as exploiting the domestic labour of women.
What is an expressive role?
The caring, nurturing, ‘homemaker’ role in the family. Functionalists that women are biologically suited to performing this role, but feminists reject this.
What is extended family?
Any group of kin (people related by blood, marriage or adoption) extended beyond the nuclear family.
What is family diversity?
The idea that there is a range of different family types, rather than a single dominant one (such as the nuclear family). It is associated with the postmodernist idea that in today’s society, increasing choice about relationships is creating greater family diversity.
What are family practices?
The routine actions through which we create our sense of ‘being a family member’, such as doing the shopping or the DIY. morgan prefers the term to that of family structure because it conveys the idea that families are not ‘things’, but what their members actually do.
What is family structure?
The composition of a group of people who live together as a family unit. Structures include the nuclear family, the extended family, the reconstructed family, lone parent and same-sex families.
What are families of choice?
People who are not necessarily related by blood or marriage but who feel a sense of belonging together and who choose to define themselves as a family. For example, gay and lesbian people have created support networks of friends, relatives and so on who they regard as family.
What is fertility rate?
The total fertility rate is the average number of children women will have during their fertile years. For statistical purposes, this is defined as age 15-44.
What is feminism?
A sociological perspective and political movement that focuses on women’s oppression and the struggle to end it. Feminists argue that sociology has traditionally taken a ‘malestream’ viewpoint that ignores women. Instead, they examine women’s experiences and study society from a female perspective. There are different strands of feminism, including Marxist, radical, liberal and difference feminism.
What is Fordism?
A type of industrial production based on a detailed division of labour, seeing closely supervised, low-skilled workers and assembly-line technology to mass-produce standardised goods. Named after the car manufacturing techniques first introduced by Ford Motor Company in the early 20th century.
What is a function?
The contribution that a part of society makes to the stability or well-being of society as a whole. For example, according to Durkheim, one function of religion is to give individuals a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves and so integrate them into society.
What is a functional fit?
Parsons’ theory that, with industrialisation, the structure of the family becomes nuclear to fit the needs of industrial society for a geographically and socially mobile labour force.
What is functionalism?
A consensus perspective on sociology that sees society as based on shared values into which members are socialised. It sees society as an organism, each part performing functions to maintain the system as a whole; e.g. the family and education system perform socialisation functions.
What is gender?
The social and cultural characteristics of men and women. Unlike sex differences, which are biological and inborn, gender differences in behaviour are cultural in origin and learned through gender role socialisation. Definitions of feminism and masculinity are socially constructed and vary between cultures and social groups.
What are gender domains?
The tasks and activities that boys and girls see as ‘territory’ of their respective genders; e.g. mending a car is seen as within the male gender domain. Children’s beliefs about gender domains are shaped by their early experiences and adults’ expectations.
What is globalisation?
The idea that the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and barriers are disappearing, e.g. as a result of instantaneous communication systems, deregulation of trade, the creation of global markets and global media and culture. Many see it as creating new risks, uncertainties and choices, and an increased rate of social change.
What is a habitus?
A concept introduced by Bourdieu. It refers to the learned, taken-for-granted ways of thinking, acting and being shared by a particular social class or group. It includes preferences for particular lifestyles and consumption patterns, and beliefs about what is realistic for members of that group to aim for.
What is the Hawthorne Effect?
Where the subjects of a research study know they are being studied and begin to behave differently as a result, thereby undermining the study’s validity.
What is hierarchy?
An organisation or social structure based on a ‘pyramid’ of senior and junior positions and top-down control; e.g. an army with its different ranks and command from above.
What is a household?
A group of people who live together and share things such as meals, bills, facilities, or chores, or one person living alone.
What is a hypothesis?
An untested theory of explanation, expressed as a statement. Sociologists seek to prove or disprove hypotheses by testing them against the evidence.
What is an ideal pupil?
An image held by teachers of the kind of pupil they prefer to teach: bright, hardworking, cooperative and so on. Teachers are likely to see white, middle-class pupils as closest to this ideal.
What is identity?
The individual’s sense of self, influenced by socialisation and interactions with others; a sense of belonging to a community. Postmodernists see identity as a choice that individuals make from among different sources of identity, such as gender, ethnic group, religion, sexuality, leisure interests, nationality etc.
What is ideology?
Originally a Marxist idea meanign a set of beliefs that serve the interests of a dominant social group by justifying their privlieged position. The term usually implies that the beliefs are false or only partially true.
What is immediate gratification?
A preference for immediate pleasure or reward, without regard for the longer term consequences; e.g. going out with friends instead of doing homework.
What is impression management?
Involves manipulating the impression of ourselves that we give to others.
What is industrialisation?
The shift from an agricultural economy to one based on factory production.
