Sociology

• Primary socialization occurs during childhood and is typically carried out by family members and close relatives.
• Research methods in sociology include structuralism and interpretivism.
• Structuralism is an approach focusing on the large-scale social structures in which people play defined roles.
• In structuralism, social roles and actions of people in fulfilling these roles are what is important, not the individuals.
• Macro approach theories are used to find social structures that may be hidden from individuals in structuralism.
• Emile Durkheim’s work on suicide’s links to society’s organization is an example of structuralism.
• Some people are delaying marriage, choosing not to have children or living in diverse family structures.
• Nearly 1 in 4 women have spent time in their life caring for a family member.
• This increased availability has allowed people to more easily change family or households if they are single or just co-habiting and are not legally bound by marriage, children and nuclear family structures.
• The increased availability of work has had a knock-on effect on family structures.
• The effects of globalisation do not affect everybody equally as factors like social class, gender, age and education can impact the opportunities that are available.
• Durkheim noted that the suicide rate yearly didn’t vary in a country but there were differences in suicide rates between countries.
• Durkheim tried to show that social forces drove individual actions, like suicide.
• Social force is the link between individual and family/religion, with stronger ties meaning lower suicide rates.
• Durkheim worked within the positivist framework and looked for causation and correlation.
• With an increasing population and prolonged lifespan, the state and government has to consider additional provision for elderly members, especially those who require assistance to look after elderly care themselves.
• Older people are more reluctant or challenging to reskill, train and upskill in relation to new technology.
• There is a perception that older people are untrained and uninformed on the latest technological trends and programmes, which can change rapidly, even for younger people.
• Consensus theorists (i.e. Functionalists) generally believe that the benefits of family life make up for (outweigh) the problems, while conflict theorists (i.e. Marxists & Feminists) take the opposite view.
• One view of elderly people and grandparents is they are reluctant to adapt to modern industrial societies, who have experienced massive changes due to globalisation and the digital era.
• The status and the perception of the elderly depends on their power and control over what is considered valuable.
• Feminists argue that an ageing population seems to place an additional burden on women to look after not only her parents but her husbands too, sometimes referred to as the 'pivot generation or sandwich generation'.
• The value of old age changes depending on the nature and function of the society at the time.
• Positivism is an approach that concentrates on producing quantitative data (usually as statistics) and believes researchers should be unbiased for accurate accounts of what actually happened.
• Positivists argue that even scientists can’t attain objectivity but sociologists should aim to be objective.
• The primary research goal of positivists is to explain social phenomena, which they believe is best done by studying sociology scientifically.
• A large sample size is a requisite for random sampling to work effectively there just be a large target population to select the sample of participants from.
• Strengths of systematic sampling include being more objective and inherent bias.
• Strengths of snowball sampling include providing valid data and being time consuming.
• Positivists tend to approach research by seeing how to test a hypothesis, a testable statement/prediction.
• Strengths of stratified sampling include being more likely to be representative and more complicated.
• Practical issues and time consuming sampling is difficult to obtain a truly representative sample of a target population and it requires time and effort to be able to produce something that would be reliable and valid.
• Strengths of cluster sampling include being cheap to conduct and biassed sample.
• Strengths of opportunity sampling include being practical and efficient and not representative.
• Opportunity sampling involves taking people who are available at the particular moment as the sample.
• reproduction of labour - by providing a supply of labour for the capitalist economy.

  
  

  household labour - by performing tasks necessary for the functioning of capitalist society.

  
  

  social control - by controlling the behaviour of children to conform to norms.
• Marxists argue that there are four ways family roles support the capitalist economic system: ideological control, reproduction of labour, household labour, and social control.
• Cluster sampling is used for survey populations spread over large areas, certain areas are chosen as sampling frames from which random samples are taken.
• The existence of family diversity contradicts Murdock’s views of the nuclear family as it excludes many other types of families.
• Simplistic to conduct sampling is a simple form of sampling to conduct as it requires less knowledge to complete the research and the researcher does not need to have specific knowledge about the data being collected to be effective at their job.