Sociology cheat sheet

Structure and agency

Social structures shape opportunities and constraints. Agency concerns people’s capacity to act within and sometimes change those conditions.

Avoid explaining every outcome through either individual choice or structure alone.

Socialisation

Socialisation is the process through which people learn social meanings, expectations and practices. It continues beyond childhood.

Family, peers, education and media can influence socialisation.

Institutions

Institutions are relatively enduring arrangements of roles, norms and practices, rather than only physical buildings.

Education can be studied as an institution as well as through individual schools.

Association and explanation

An association between variables does not by itself establish causation. Sampling and operational definitions affect what a study can support.

Ask how each variable was measured before interpreting a correlation.

Culture and social norms

Culture includes shared meanings, practices and material forms. Norms are expectations about behaviour; their strength and interpretation vary within as well as between groups.

Distinguish a description of a norm from a claim that every group member follows it.

Stratification

Social stratification concerns patterned inequalities in resources, power and status. Different approaches explain how these patterns are produced and reproduced.

Income, wealth, education and occupational status are related measures but are not identical.

Research ethics

Consider informed participation, privacy, power relationships and possible harm. Ethical reasoning continues during analysis and publication, not only during recruitment.

An anonymised quotation can still identify someone through unusual contextual details.

Levels of analysis

Individual experiences, interactions, organisations and wider structures can be analysed at different levels. Evidence at one level should not automatically be used to explain another.

A neighbourhood’s average income does not establish the income of each resident.

Worked example: social survey

In a sample of 120 respondents, 72 report using public transport weekly. The sample proportion is 60%. Whether this represents a city depends on sampling, non-response and the definition of weekly use.

Give the denominator and recruitment method alongside the percentage.

Common mistake: explanation equals approval

Explaining the social conditions under which a practice occurs is different from endorsing it. Separate descriptive findings, causal interpretations and ethical judgements.

State which kind of claim your evidence is intended to support.

Check your understanding

What is the ecological fallacy?

Inferring individual characteristics or relationships directly from aggregate group data.

Curriculum connections

Sources