The Blog, now in its 10th year, features resources for teachers and students of Sociology, Psychology and Criminology and contains a mix of Revision Resources, Notes, Lesson Plans, PowerPoint Presentations, Films, Digested Research and more.
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In which Ben Ambridge takes 15 minutes out of his very busy life (probably. I’m speculating. I don’t actually know. He might just have had nothing to do on a wet Tuesday) to both identify and – here’s the kicker – sadly disabuse your belief in any or indeed all of the following psychological phenomena:
Man are from Mars, Women are from Venus: How different are men and women actually? Well, it’s “not so much a case of Mars and Venus, more a case of Mars and Snickers”. I.e. not really very different at all.
Rorschach (Ink Blot) test: “No validity when it comes to diagnosing people’s personality…”. Although if you’re in two minds about whether or not to believe Ben you’re apparently in good company because if you do use the Ink Blot tests in such a way you’re likely to be over-diagnosing schizophrenia, for reasons that are well above my pay-grade and level of psychological maturity.
Learning Styles: If you need to think about whether you’re a visual, audio or kinaesthetic learner the Bad News is that “learning styles are made up”. If you think that’s a bit harsh, you’ll probably be disappointed to learn they also have “no scientific validity whatsoever”. And if you’re finding that a bit difficult to understand it’s not because I’ve presented the information in a Read / Write style that doesn’t match your visual-audio preference. It’s because you’re Quite Gullible (and probably desperate for some Magic Bullet technique that will turn your average students into world beaters).
I always found teaching “the experimental method” in sociology a little dull because there were relatively few examples I could use to illustrate the genre.
And most of what were available seemed to be created by psychopaths psychologists.
It obviously didn’t help that a couple of the really good examples weren’t something that could be easily replicated in the classroom. There are also, apparently, “rules and regulations” covering exactly who you can and can’t keep locked up against their will – or put “in the hole” (a broom cupboard, as it was more-conventionally known) when they fail to follow simple instructions.
To which my “Who knew?” response didn’t seem to reassure “The Powers That Be”.
And once the Engineering Department rejected my entirely-reasonable request for a Shock Machine on the basis that I had been repeatedly warned about “introducing instruments of torture into the classroom” (it went against College Policy. Apparently) I was left with little or no option but to submit my students to an Asch Test.
Which I’m glad I did, because it turned-out to be fun for all involved. With the possible exception of the student victims.
If you’re not familiar with the background, I’ve scanned a copy of Solomon Asch’s short (only 4 pages!) “Opinion’s and Social Pressures” in which he describes the basic experiment and it’s variations. In simple terms a small group of respondents were asked to say which of three lines of varying height – one longer, one shorter and one the same length – were a match for a fourth line.
All but one of the respondents were in on the game in which, for the first couple of rounds, they would all answer correctly. For most subsequent rounds the first respondent would answer incorrectly and their confederates would match this answer. The “test”, of course, was whether the experimental subject (otherwise known as “The Victim”) would trust the evidence of their own eyes and go against the group decision.
Overall, Asch found that around one-third of the test subjects gave-in to the (incorrect) consensus even though most were perfectly well-aware the majority were in the wrong. As you’ll discover if you read the document I’ve taken so much time and trouble to find and distribute, under slightly different conditions – such as when there were two experimental subjects in the group – the results were radically different.
While the original Asch Tests were exploring the nature of conformity and social pressure, for my sociology students I used it to introduce and explain some of the basic mechanics of experimentation (dependent and independent variables, confounding variables and the like) in a way they could partly understand by experiencing the process. This was not, of course, always perfect.
When I ran the experiment I tended to have around 15 – 20 confederates in the classroom (which is way too many but I wanted to give everyone the chance to experience the test) and just one experimental subject. They were always the last person to return to class after a break. This allowed me to brief the confederates about how to respond to the test, select a test subject randomly and not feel too guilty about selecting one of my students for the deception. They deserved it for daring to return late to class.
In the Good Olde Days of Not Having Computers in the Classroom (a slight exaggeration. I did have a single 386 machine I’d managed to blag from the Computing Suite when they were upgrading their stuff) I had to create the Test Cards out of cardboard and sticky-back plastic.
I didn’t strictly need the latter, but saw it as an ironic commentary on the state of education at the time. You can probably tell why I never made it out of the classroom and into the ranks of Senior Management. I’d have been happy with Junior Management, but alas it was Not To Be (I am of course joking. I would not have been happy with Junior Management).
I do recall laminating the cardboard under the (mistaken) belief I would need to use them more than a few times.
The reason I didn’t, despite the Test being something the students enjoyed, was that it just took too much time out of the teaching scheme. When I started teaching A-level Sociology we had around 6 hours of class contact time a week. By the time I jacked it all in moved on to explore my potential as an author and filmmaker, this had been cut to 4 hours a week – just not enough time to indulge in fanciful educational games. Or even “education”, as such. This, in a roundabout way, is why I’ve dug around for what’s probably the next best thing to being there: film of other people being there.
The first clip consists of a couple of two-minute examples of the Asch Test.
From the clothes and hairstyles the first looks like it’s from the 1970’s, the second a few decades later – the reason for including both being to show that even though generations change the need to conform stays fairly constant. If you’re a sociologist that’s something you might want to develop in relation to ideas like social structure and conformity, but it’s your choice.
The second, coming in at around 5 minutes, is perhaps more useful and interesting for a couple of reasons:
Firstly, it’s introduced by Philip Zimbardo, who explains the basis of the Asch Test. This may or may not be a good reason for watching, depending on your view of Philip Zimbardo.
The second is more compelling. The clip not only shows an example of the classic Asch Test, 5 confederates and 1 test subject, it also demonstrates some of the variations introduced by Asch. In particular it shows what happens when the test subject has a partner (Spoiler Alert: they feel much more comfortable going against “the consensus”).
As an added bonus we hear from the test subjects themselves – what they were feeling during the test and why they tended to go with the majority flow.
And that’s the thing about memory. It doesn’t really work the way commonsense tells us it works.
It’s not a simple mechanical process whereby memories are stacked and stored in nice neat compartments, like boxes in a warehouse. Rather, it’s probably better to think about memory as a creative process: it’s not that we actively make-up memories, as such.
It’s more to acknowledge that memories are fallible.
And they can be easily influenced and manipulated – both by ourselves (we tend to recall events differently, depending on how we’re feeling at the time) and by others.
The bottom line, when you start to think about memory, is the extent to which it can be trusted and Daniel Reisberg is well-known for his work in this area, particularly how our memories are constructed and how they can intentionally and unintentionally mislead us.
If you want to introduce his ideas – or just stimulate an interest in memory in your students – this short interactive video (you can not only play along in class, it’s something you should encourage your students to do) is a good start.
And if you find this useful and interesting there’s a second activity you can use as the basis for getting your students thinking not just about memory in general but the concept of false memories in particular…
*If you use the first of these two films (or maybe it’s the second – I forget) the reason for this Casablanca misquote will become apparent.
“Gap in GCSE results between private and state schools widens at highest level” New figures highlighting the results gap between different school types have sparked fresh concerns about education inequalities.
The Independent: August 2024
This newspaper headline is fairly indicative of how exam results in England and Wales are generally reported – the raw (unadjusted) numbers of exam grades showing a picture of successful private schools (teaching around 7% of GCSE students and 12% of sixth-form pupils) wildly out-performing their struggling state school counterparts.
The Independent goes on to add that “The figures have sparked fresh concerns among social mobility experts about inequalities in the education system and widening attainment gaps between rich and poor youngsters”.
And while these concerns about the impact of social and economic inequalities are both real and important, a new study by Anders et al (2024) suggests that the educational picture in England and Wales, as it relates to socio-economic class, is a little more nuanced than simply looking at raw IGCSE / GCSE results and drawing appropriate conclusions – whether these conclusions relate to ideas about innate / inherited intelligence, the effects of social and economic environments or some combination of the two..
Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study the researchers looked at “the relationship between GCSE performance and social factors like family income and parental occupation”. More-specifically, they looked at GCSE performance between private and state school students once these variables (proxy indicators of socio-economic class) were controlled.
Many of you will be familiar with the Cornetto Trilogy of films, the brilliant Shaun of the Dead, the equally-funny Hot Fuzz and that third one they brought-out because of some contract obligation.
Allegedly.
I could be wrong.
Anyways, far be it for me to compare this trilogy with that trilogy. There simply is no comparison so I’m not really sure why I mentioned it in the first place.
So. While the Cornetto Trilogy can be used to have a Fun Night In (again, not guaranteed) on a wet Friday night, these three films dating from around 2007 can be used to introduce students to three building blocks of contemporary Sociology.
Guarenteed.
The first looks at the concept of culture and covers ideas like:
Not to be confused with the much older (but still useful) Psychology Teachers Toolkit, this particular Teachers’ Toolkit has more-official origins in the sense it’s a co-production between the British Psychological Society and the Association for the Teaching of Psychology. While both sets of resources are aimed pretty-squarely at A-level / AP Psychology students, the BPS Toolkit covers a much wider range of resources than the lesson-plan focus of the Psychology Teachers’ Toolkit.
And while the latter is no-longer being updated, the BPS Toolkit seems to be going from strength-to-strength in terms of the range and depth of the free resources it has to offer.
Getting down to the important stuff, the site has two sections, the first of which, Videos, is probably the least-interesting unless you really have a thing about watching 30 – 60 second clips of different types of psychologist – educational, forensic and the like – talking about their job. There’s also a link to the main BPS YouTube Channel that has a serendipitous (and then some) mix of films, the most-interesting to me being the half-a-dozen short (60 second) clips offering useful study skills advice. Other viewers might, of course, find some of the many other films fascinating.
What seems like half a lifetime (but was actually around 20 years) ago I posted a YouTube Trailer called What is Sociology that was part of a much longer 3-part film called Introducing Sociology. Since then the trailer’s garnered around 350,000 views and, as far as I can tell, the original film is no-longer available.
So, since I happen to have a copy of aforesaid film I thought it might be interesting to put it out there, as I’m told “The Kids” often say.
The other reason for posting the film is a comparative one in that it looks at and talks about Sociology at the turn of the Millenium, something that gives us an opportunity to consider social changes and continuities over the past quarter century, not just from within Sociology but also from without: such as the development of the Internet, mobile technology and the like.
If you want a point of comparison, it might be worth having a look at one of our later attempts to explain “What Sociology Is”.
While the first, major, part of the film is concerned with an outline of what sociology is – with a particular emphasis on changing ideas about culture and identity – the second part, Introducing Sociology as a Subject, adds what it calls “the Student Experience” into the historical mix. Broadly this section answers the question “what’s it like being a sociology student?” (albeit at the World-Famous London School of Economics – of which, in the interests of full disclosure, I am An Actual Allumnus. Student experiences at other, I hesitate to say “less-well-known”, institutes of learning may be slightly different).
Anyway, this section not only covers various aspects of what being a sociology student entails, it also has an interesting illustrative section based around the relatively new (2006-ish) phenomenon of the mobile phone, looking beyond its simple functionality and into the broader implications for surveillance and social control – something that, 20 years later, has expanded in ways it would be sociologically-useful to explore…
The latest in our Dynamic Learning series of films aimed at helping students improve how they study looks at something that most of us experience at one time or another: procrastination.
Or as it’s technically known, “Putting stuff off ‘til tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. Sometime, anyway. No, definitely. OMG is it really due in today?”.
Unlike a lot of the study skills stuff that’s out there, the Dynamic Learning series is specifically designed to help students take control of their learning. It’s not just a case of identifying a problem and telling you what you need to do to overcome it.
Rather, the aim is to show you how to overcome a problem – from how to take effective notes, through improving your ability to recall information to, in this particular instance, how to stop putting things off and getting them done.
The first film, Avoidance and Denial, helps students understand what psychologists call avoidance strategies – the techniques we use and stories we tell to convince ourselves that we don’t really have a problem.
And once we recognise we have a problem, the next step is to resolve it – and instead of simply telling you what you should be doing (set yourself goals, work on self-discipline, use time management …) Prevention Strategies suggests three possible techniques that show you how to overcome the problem of procrastination.
Steve Bassett’s Channel consists of around 250 reasonably short (10 – 15 minutes mostly) “video lectures”, the last was made around 6 years ago. The earliest content here was made around 11 years ago so if you use the films you need to be aware of possible curriculum changes (in terms of topics and content covered, for example) and the fact that some of the information – particularly the statistical stuff – may be a little dated now.
Judging by the topics covered, I’m guessing the films were made for students studying the OCR Specification:
The material on offer broadly consists of clear, well-written, Notes with the odd graphic thrown-in to lighten the tone. There’s also the odd hyperlink that takes you into a more extensive discussion of a concept, theory or topic. I was looking at a section on Gender Bias and followed a link to Milgram’s obedience study that delved much deeper into Milgram’s studies than you get in the vast majority of A-level textbooks – the sort of thing that hyperlinks were invented to do. Probably.
Speaking of textbooks, I get the impression the site exists to replace the need for (expensive) written textbooks and, to be honest, I think it’s doing a pretty good job as far as Psychology is concerned. There seems to be plans for further A-level subjects (History, Biology and Geography) but unlike their GCSE counterparts (where History and Business Studies are available) there’s no indication of when – or if – they might become available.
If you don’t subscribe to the British Sociological Association’s “Discovering Sociology” newsletter you’re missing-out on the free “journal corner” offering of “curriculum friendly summaries of papers published in the BSA journal Sociology” (which presumably means cutting-out all the dull bits and just moving straight to exam-friendly stuff – I could be wrong).
Unfortunately the budget doesn’t seem to extend to design…
What I’m saying, in a meandering, roundabout way, is that while these condensed versions are useful, don’t get your hopes up for more than one or two a year.
The Thomas Theorem, created by W.I.Thomas and his wife Dorothy (The Child in America, 1928), is a simple and interesting way to introduce students to the social constructionist / Interactionist approach in Sociology, for a couple of reasons:
Firstly, the Theorem – “It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct, if we define situations as real, they are real in their consequences“ – is relatively easy to both grasp and demonstrate, using a wide range of possible examples.
One simple way would be to ask your students about their current definition of the situation (an education class) and how this definition is both created and, perhaps more-importantly, maintained.
A couple of years ago – November 2022 to be precise – we launched the Psychology Film Club as a way of offering our complete Psychology library of films to schools and colleges at a reasonable and affordable subscription rate (£25 a year or roughly 50p a week for access to what is currently 50+ films).
While the intention had always been to launch a similar Sociology Film Club we’ve been a little side tracked this past year making a whole host of (what no-one has actually called) “ground-breaking” Study Skills films and it’s only now we’ve managed to get around to addressing the intention.
However, rather than launching a separate Sociology Film Club site to site alongside it’s Psychological counterpart we decided that this would be altogether too much of a faff and that it would be much quicker and easier to simply add our Sociology catalogue to the existing Psychology Film Club site.
The fact students come to Sociology with a certain level of prior knowledge about the areas they’re studying – from families through education to crime – is something teachers can exploit to demonstrate how sociological knowledge and research can be used to question many of the taken-for-granted assumptions we make about the social world.
And while the content will obviously be different, the technique is the same whatever topic you’re teaching: present your students with a list of questions about the topic they’re about to study, reveal the answers and use the ensuing confusion and disbelief to introduce relevant sociological evidence and explanations.
And if by some weird twist of fate your students all provide perfectly correct answers (unlikely but stranger things have happened at sea. Apparently) you can just skip the “evidence” part and move straight to the sociological explanations.
Download “Investigating Sociology” with instructions…
If you’re a teacher looking to spice-up those first Introductory lessons – the ones where you talk your students through “the basics” of Sociology and introduce them to a different way of thinking about the world with the aid of some fascinating-but-strangely-lifeless bullet point slides – you might like to know that I’ve been giving it some thought over the long, hot, summer months.
The upshot of which is this new PowerPoint deck “Investigating Sociology” that riffs on the Sociological Detective theme I’ve developed, on and off, over the past few years. This, I think, is probably a more-developed, coherent, version of this idea and one I’m likely to pursue a little more over the coming months, time-permitting.
The basic idea has been to offer a different, hopefully more-interesting and thoughtful, way to introduce your new students to Sociology. It’s a deck designed to give you, the teacher, control over how and why you develop particular ideas. It’s not something you can simply present to your students “as is” in a fire-and-forget kind of way. Think of it as providing a basic support structure for you to use as a background to your introductory lectures.
Professors Wilkinson and Pickett’s “The Spirit Level”, originally published in 2009, is arguably one of the most important books on social inequality published in recent times, not just for the clear causal links it draws between inequality and a wide range of social issues such as crime, but also for it’s easy accessibility to students of all levels.
Fifteen years after it’s original publication the authors, in combination with the Equality Trust, have released a 2024 update to their original research that, in addition to adding important new data to the pot in areas like environmental issues, climate change and child poverty, has the distinct advantage in these straightened times of being available for free.
The Centre for Social Investigation – not to be confused with the long-running TV series – was established at Nuffield College in 2014 as an “interdisciplinary research programme” with the aim of addressing “contemporary social issues of public interest”.
To which end, the upshot of all this collaborative enterprise and expertise is an archive of 35 Briefing Papers, ranging across social inequality, family life and crime, that are a potentially useful resource for Sociology teachers – particularly since each Briefing runs to just 4 pages and is packed with statistical analysis and insightful commentary.
As an added bonus each Briefing Paper has a student-friendly bulleted summary of its Key Points – something you can check-out by browsing some or all of the following I’ve personally selected for your reading pleasure:
1979 is a key date in the development of education in England and Wales because it was in that year that Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister and began a process of modernising conservatism, under both Conservative and Labour governments, that still, nearly 50 years later, exerts a vice-like grip on primary, secondary and, increasingly tertiary (University), education.
This period, for example, has seen the introduction of a wide range of policies that reflect what Foucault (1977) characterised as indicative of how the modern state tries to exert social control through institutions such as education. These include:
A National curriculum (1988) that set out the subjects to be taught in all state schools with a special emphasis on English, Maths and Science (a recurrent theme in subsequent reforms).
Key Stage testing began in 1991 at ages 7, 11 and 14 and set attainment targets in English and maths for all pupils.
Literacy and numeracy hours were introduced into primary schools in 1998.
The “English Baccalaureate” (EBacc) was introduced in 2010 to specify the “core subjects” students should study to GCSE – with, again, a particular emphasis on English and Maths.
The compulsory teaching of Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPaG) was introduced in 2013.
Alongside these developments we could also cite a wide range of reforms, from the Academisation programme that started under the Blair Labour government and increased rapidly in pace under subsequent Conservative governments to changes in the way students are assessed, such as the removal of a coursework element in GCSE and A-level assessments in favour of written exams.
In other words, the education system in England and Wales has, over the past 50 years, been subjected to increasingly centralised control.
With one key exception.
Public or Independent Schools (i.e. private businesses or charities who charge fees for educating students).
These schools are exempt from the reforms governing State schools and while many may follow some, or all, of the rules and regulations governing schools in the State sector – particularly in relation to things like examinations – the key concept here is choice. Private Schools can pick-and-choose which rules they follow. State schools can’t.
The 9th film in our Dynamic Learning seriesdesigned to introduce students to a range of important ideas and skills related to the science of studying.
The series combines both theoretical insights and practical demonstrations of how an understanding of study skills can enhance student exam performance.
Better Sleep is a companion-piece to our earlier Sleep and Memory film (and you thought we just pumped-out films randomly). The latter, you may recall, looked at how sleep – and the lack of same – impacts on our ability to remember and recall information. It also revealed some of the simple sleep hacks students can use to improve their academic performance.
Now, you may be thinking this is all-well-and-good but that’s not much comfort or use to students who find it difficult to get a good night’s sleep – particularly when faced with upcoming tests or exams.
Well, we’ve got that base covered with the latest film in the series, Better Sleep: Better Grades. Here we demonstrate four scientifically tried-and-tested strategies students can use in order to actually get the kind of good night’s sleep that aides the development of strong, successful, memories.
The 8th film in our Dynamic Learning Series designed to introduce students to a range of important ideas and skills related to the science of studying.
The series combines both theoretical insights and practical demonstrations of how an understanding of study skills can enhance student exam performance.
This short film introduces a tried-and-tested technique for memorising information, both as part of a general course of study and as a way to fine-tune your revision. In basic terms the film explains why students should be doing spaced repetition and, more-importantly, how they can make it an integral part of their learning.
Historically, research has shown that when we learn new information we’ll have forgotten around half of it within a day and three-quarters within a week. This is called The Forgetting Curve and while it’s useful for getting rid of all the stuff we don’t need to remember, it can be a big problem if we forget the stuff we really need to recall.
This is where Spaced Repetition comes into play. It’s a simple to implement learning technique that helps us remember more of the material we need to remember by reviewing new information soon after we’ve learned it – and continuing to review and recall it at increasingly-lengthy interviews.
It is, in short, a relatively simple way to ensure the transfer of information into our long-term memory – where instead of forgetting 80 or 90% of what they’ve just learned, students actually remember 80 – 90% of it.
Dynamic Learning: Spaced Repetition is now available to Buy and on 7-day Rental.
If you’re not familiar with this particualr text it’s an example of a growing field called OER (Open Educational Resources). These are resources created by educational institutions, companies and individuals that are given away under a Create Commons license to anyone who wants to use them. This particular Openstax CC license allows anyone to take the basic text and change it in any way they want to meet the needs of their particular students.
And if you haven’t Openstax is an example of a growing field in education called OER (Open Educational Resources). These are resources created by educational institutions, companies and individuals that are given away under a Create Commons license to anyone who wants to use them. In this particular instance the Openstax CC license allows anyone to take the basic text and change it in any way they want to meet the needs of their particular students.
While the basic textbook is widely available online there aren’t that many free resources to accompany it. And while this isn’t an insurmountable problem – teachers are obviously well-used to making their own resource materials – it can help if you’ve got something to fall back on. This is where Luman Learning’s free PowerPoint Presentations come into the picture.
Each module runs to around 35 – 40 slides and while, as you can see from the screenshot, the slides are what one might charitably describe as “functional” they do the job.
Whatever that job might be.
One advantage of having such a basic set of slides is, of course, that you can easily edit them, either to make them a bit more attractive / less text intensive or to add / subtract information.
Having said that, these are something of a gift horse and, as we know from bitter experience, we should look into a gift horse’s mouth.
In the normal course of events Power Notes are a simple way to organise your note-taking.
If push-comes-to-shove, however, they can also be a very effective way to re-organise your conventional linear notes to make them more revision-friendly.
Although there are a variety of patterned / visual note-taking techniques around, it’s a good bet the default mode for most teachers and students tends to be linear: which, when you come to think about it, isn’t that surprising.
Not only do linear notes mimic how we conventionally learn to write across a page, so there’s no great learning curve involved, they’re also well-suited to a variety of situations in which we need to take notes. This is particularly the case for fast-paced situations like lectures or videos where large amounts of information are often delivered and received at such a speed as to require an accurate recording system that can process this data quickly and efficiently.
Unfortunately, one downside to the speed and efficiency of linear note-taking tends to be that by the end of a two-year course you end up with a lot of notes. And by a lot I mean several folders packed with closely-written pages of text.
Power Notes Example
And if you’re the kind of student that leaves revision until you’ve finished the course, you’re going to have around 12 weeks max to relearn all the stuff you last studied up to a year and a half ago.
A relatively short amount of time, coupled with an intimidatingly large number of folders filled with notes tends to result in just one thing: a feeling of being overwhelmed. And this, in turn, makes it much less likely you’re going to remember what you’re revising because, of necessity, you’ll try to cover it all too quickly.
You’ll use, for example, techniques like reading and re-reading your notes, coupled with things like highlighting key ideas. While these are a super-efficient way to cover all the course information quickly, research has shown them to be a very inefficient way of remembering and understanding information.
The upshot of all this is that while you end-up doing a massive amount of work, you don’t really remember much of what you’ve revised. And you don’t have to take my word for it (although, if we’re being honest, you probably should). Tom Stafford, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield, says it’s pointless to “stress yourself with revision where you read and re-read textbooks and course notes” (Make study more effective, the easy way: 2011).
“Trying to remember something has been shown to have almost no effect on whether you do remember it. The implication for revision is clear: just looking at your notes won’t help you learn them” (Five secrets to revising that can improve your grades: 2014).
While this seems to leave you with no room for manoeuvre – on the one hand you’ve got all those notes taking up valuable storage space while on the other your exams are, if you’re lucky, a few short weeks away – all’s not lost:
While completely re-organising your notes might sound a bit desperate – why waste precious revision time restructuring notes you already have? – it’s actually going to help you revise. Power Notes are a tool to help you re-organise and categorise your existing notes in a way that focuses on the essential things you need to know for your exams. And by doing this you make your revision easier, more-productive and more-useful.
You probably won’t be too surprised to learn that this is the time of the year when revision advice is thrown around more freely than confetti at a wedding. If you’re taking an exam in the next few months it probably feels like everyone and their dog is only too willing and able to offer guidance about how to revise.
And I, of course, am no exception.
Although in my defence I would say I’m not so much offering advice as conveying that of others.
Which in this instance is some useful stuff I’ve found on the Innerdrive web site – a site that’s well-worth the time to visit for things like free posters and studies. Although you should probably be aware they really, really, really, like the work of Rosenshine and, to-a-lesser-extent-but-even-then-I-personally-wouldn’t-touch-him-with-a-ten-foot-pole, Lemov.
Even if you’re not particularly interested in Rosenshine (he seems harmless enough) and his “10 Principles of Instruction” the site actually offers a lot of solid study-related information and their “10 tips to prepare for your first exam” (I’m starting to sense a theme here…) gives teachers a Pretty Poster to put on the wall (so that SMT can see how seriously you take this whole revision thang) and students revision tips that range from the essential (spaced learning!) to the “Maybe we should have just gone with 6 or 7 tips?” (“surround yourself with positive people”).
You know that thing they say about buses – you wait ages for one and then two arrive at once? Well, by what some might call a mysterious and inexplicable coincidence, the same seems to be true of PowerPoint Presentations on religion.
Having seen neither hide nor hair of anything vaguely religious-looking on the site for ages, along came Defining Religion, to be followed in quick order by Defining Religion | 2 – about which you’ll probably be wanting to know a bit more before you download it.
So, where the first Presentation laid the groundwork by outlining three basic aspects of religion (Beliefs, Practices and Organisation), Part 2 digs quite a bit deeper by looking at three more complex areas:
religious diversity
inclusive approaches
exclusive approaches.
For the sake of continuity between the two Presentations, this second part continues with the Timeline format, where information slides on and off the screen like a thing that slides. While the basic navigation system is the same across both Presentations, Part 2 adds a new feature whereby moving the mouse pointer to the left or right edge of the screen automatically moves the Presentation forward or, indeed, backward.
As ever, you’ve got a range of download options, from the standard PowerPoint Presentation (.pptx) you can use if you have later versions of the program (2019, 365…) and want to see how it all works, to the PowerPoint Show (.ppsx) version you can use if you just want a Presentation that auto-runs without the need for the main PowerPoint program. As an added bonus there’s also a version that has background music.
Although you may be thankful this only runs when the main menu’s onscreen.
This PowerPoint Presentation is designed to be a fairly simple introduction to the topic of religion by suggesting how it can be defined in terms of three main criteria:
Beliefs
Practices
Organisation
It introduces students, in other words, to some instances of how religious behaviour differs from other types of non-religious (secular) behaviour.
As such, it’s a perfectly serviceable Introduction to Religion and rather than go down the traditional “bullet point list” route, this Presentation uses a simple timeline effect to introduce the information.
And although I say “simple”, you probably wouldn’t believe the huge amount of sweat and tears that went into creating it and making it work (and yes, before you ask, that is a psuedo-parallax scoll you think you’re seeing).
One small step for PowerPoint. One giant leap for me…
Trust me when I say the relatively calm, stripped-down, visuals are hiding a whole heap of work going on under the hood – and this means you’ll need an up-to-date version of PowerPoint if you want to run the pptx version of the Presentation.
If you’ve got an earlier version of PowerPoint – or don’t have the program available at all – you can still run the standalone PowerPoint Show (ppsx) version.
While A-level students are usually well-versed in the difference between structural and action approaches, a lot less time, effort and teaching tends to given-over to alternative perspectives, such as Structuration. Which is a national disgrace bit disappointing.
To remedy this potential learning deficit I’ve put together this quick ‘n’ dirty guide to the main features of Structuration that will undoubtedly get you out of a tight spot in an exam.
Which, since you’re reading this, is not something entirely beyond the realms of probability.
Structure and action represent two sociological approaches to understanding the social world in the sense that each is interested in seeing and understanding human behaviour in different ways.
Structural sociology – which includes perspectives like functionalism, Marxism and feminism – is similar to looking at a society from a satellite in space; from this view you might see things like the shape of a society’s borders, its road and railway systems and so forth. You would, in other words, get a broad picture of that society – but what you wouldn’t see is people.
Anthony Giddens
Interactionism, in a similar way to perspectives like postmodernism and post-feminism, is like observing behaviour from a street corner; you get a close-up view of the hustle and bustle of people going about their daily lives, but you would have little or no sense of the “bigger picture”.
We could, however, argue concepts of structure and action are both important, in terms of understanding the relationship between society and the individual and in some ways complementary. Although we’re all individuals, our behavioural choices are influenced, limited and enhanced by the network of rules and responsibilities (social structures) that surround us. Just as we can’t conceive of society without individuals, it’s impossible to think about people without referring to the various ways our behaviour is structured.
Giddens (1984) Structuration theory arguesstructure and action are equally significant in terms of our ability to understand the relationship between the individual and society and the key to understanding this perspective, he argues, is the idea of practices (the things people do):
‘Structuration states that the basic domain of social science study is neither the experience of the individual nor the existence of any form of societal totality, but social practices. Through social activities people reproduce the actions that make these practices possible’
In other words, as people develop relationships, the rules they use to govern their respective behaviours are formalised (as norms, for example) into practices or routine ways of behaving towards each other. Once we start to think of the huge range of practices surrounding our lives we start to develop a sense of structure to the social world, which necessarily involves:
• Rules considered in terms of both the way our actions create behavioural rules and the idea that such rules become externalised (they seem to take on a life of their own, separate from our individual behaviours). In effect, therefore, although we may be involved in rule-making behaviour, such rules ‘reflect back’ on our behaviour in ways that suggest or demand conformity.
• Resources refers to concepts such as power and relates to how and why rules are created. Some rules, for example, are negotiated between individuals (your relationship with your friends, for example, is based on a series of unwritten and unspoken rules you’ve negotiated among yourselves), but others – such as laws governing things like the definition of murder – are, in some respects, non-negotiable; some rules are created by powerful groups and are simply imposed on people. Whatever your beliefs about a particular law, it applies to you whether you believe it does or not.
A couple of key criticisms of this perspective relate to:
• Power: One possible criticism of structuration is it doesn’t sufficiently take account of the way power in society is unequally distributed (for example, the rich have more power than the poor, men have more power than women). The practices of the powerful may become entrenched, in the sense they are beyond the ability of the powerless to change. In other words, the relatively powerless do not, through their everyday practices, ‘create society’; rather, it’s through everyday practice that people experience the power of ‘society’.
• Structure or action: A number of criticisms have been aimed at the claim we can easily combine these two very different ideas. Clegg (1989), for example, argues that although structuration theory talks about structure and action being equally significant, Giddens, in effect, considers human action as being considerably more significant. Similarly, Layder (1987) argues structuration gives very little attention to the concept of social structures as ‘determinants of action’. In other words, there is little sense that social structures (as opposed to human practices) can have very much effect on people’s behaviour.
Although Anticipation Guides are similar to pre-questioning in both form and purpose – they encourage much the same kinds of skills – there are significant differences between the two approaches.
Anticipation Guide Templates
Where pre-questioning asks students to predict the answers to a set of questions they receive before being exposed to a lecture, video or reading, Anticipation Guides require students to think about the extent to which they agree or disagree with a small number of statements, typically 4 – 6, about a topic both before and after they study it. In addition, Anticipation Guides can be used to ask students to explain both their pre-learning and post-learning beliefs about a topic.
The objective of Anticipation Guides is, in this respect, both subtly different and worth trying for a range of reasons:
1. They encourage students to identify and explore their own preconceived ideas about a topic. This can be both objective (asking them to estimate a number, for example) or subjective (such as asking them about their beliefs).
2. They can be used to demonstrate how sociological thinking can be counter-intuitive to commonsense thinking.
3. They encourage students to be curious about their beliefs and whether or not these beliefs are confirmed or refuted by sociological evidence. Curiosity is also a very valuable quality to encourage in students.
4. They can be used to encourage students to make predictions about things they don’t know (such as how many crimes were committed last year) based on what they do know (their perception of the extent of crime in society). This kind of predictive learning can be a valuable skill because it enables students to reasonably speculate about something they may not have explicitly studied based on the knowledge they have about a related topic.
If, for example, students understand the general principles of a sociological perspective like functionalism or interactionism they should be able to broadly predict how functionalists or interactionists view institutions like the family or education system.
This spin-off from the burgeoning Sociological Detectives Universe™ is a vehicle by which you can simply and not-a-little-secretly introduce a soupcon of Study Skills into what we’re contractually obliged to call “The Student eXperience” (sic).
In other words this PowerPoint Presentation is a slightly different way to encourage your students to take information you provide (via lectures, handouts, books, video, audio or whatever else you use) and do something more with it than simply store it neatly away somewhere.
And the “more” in this instance involves three simple tasks (Attach, Broaden and Challenge (hence the “ABC” method) that will help your students master some simple – but hugely effective – study skills without really being aware this is what they’re doing).
Although the Presentation has been designed (yes, really) to be fairly self-explicable there’s a couple of things you might want to note before launching it upon unsuspecting students.
Firstly, you need to provide some sort of information they have to analyse / understand. This can take whatever form you want (lecture, book chapter, video, podcast…) so you could, if you want use the Presentation at the end of a lecture to push your students into extending their knowledge and understanding.
Secondly, you can use the Presentation in a couple of different ways, depending on your teaching style and the time available. You could, as I’ve said, introduce it as a whole class exercise. Alternatively you could take a flipped teaching approach whereby your students do the tasks in their own time and then you spend time in the classroom discussing their ideas. If you go down this route it will probably be easiest to run the Presentation past the whole class first so your students can understand what the three tasks involve.
Aside from these choices all you really need to do before you use the Presentation is familiarise yourself with its little foibles. As ever, while the basic mechanics are fairly simple I’ve added a few little twists you’d do well to understand before you let the Presentation loose in the wild.
As ever, for reasons I’ve previously explained and can’t be bothered to explain again (that’s what hyperlinks were invented for. Possibly), I’ve included two versions of the Presentation:
Choose PowerPoint Presentation if you want to have a look at how I’ve put it together (or if you want to alter any of the text. Each task currently requires students to identify one idea, you might want them to do more…). A word of warning here. Because the Presentation uses the Morph function that’s not available in earlier versions of PowerPoint you need to make sure you’ve got a reasonably up-to-date version available (such as PowerPoint 365) if you want to poke around changing stuff.
Choose PowerPoint Show for a standalone version that doesn’t require PowerPoint (but might mean you have to negotiate your browser’s over-efficient anti-virus protection).
Another in the “Podcasts with Pictures” series designed to bring to your attention video materials you or your students might find useful. In this instance we have a series of “video lessons” created by The Learning Academy.
Each of the 14 lessons lasts between 10 and 15 minutes and consists of someone talking about a topic while you look at a slide that, by-and-large, contains the information being talked about. Although this is supplemented by a few pictures and direct screen annotations these don’t necessarily add much to the lesson – although to be fair this does vary from lesson to lesson. In some the annotations just mirror what’s presented on-screen while in others they do introduce new information.
One problem with this approach is that it wastes a lot of time while the viewer watches the narrator annotate the screen while telling us what they’re writing. Why not just prepare the slide beforehand with this information?
That quibble aside – and there are others: the pictures that appear on-screen don’t seem to have much connection to what’s being discussed, small white text on a black background is very tiring to watch – the lessons cover three broad areas:
“Introduction to Sociology” gives you a brief overview of the subject.
Perspectives introduces 5 approaches (Functionalism, Marxism, Interactionism, Feminism, The New Right)
Education covers a slightly-odd amalgam of perspectives, school organisation, labelling, subcultures and identity. These categories are, however slightly-misleading in terms of content because, for whatever reason, more-conventional categories (such as differential educational achievement) seem to be covered. Why they’ve done things this way I can only guess. It may be because they’re trying to cover different Specifications, but I could be wrong.
The content itself is generally sound and there’s a welcome, if slightly obsessive and overdone, focus on intersectionality – although I chanced upon some curious and jarring errors in the films I watched (I didn’t sit through all of them so maybe I was just unlucky).
The Functionalism film, for example, had a section on “Talcott Parson” who apparently viewed society “in a similar way to the functionings of a human body” which is, apparently, an “organic analogy”. While the latter is a common mistake (it’s an “organismic analogy” because it’s based on the idea of bodily organs) this view of society was actually proposed by Herbert Spencer in the 19th century. Parsons (note the “s”) didn’t see society in this simplistic way – it’s just a device we use to help students get a basic grip on the underlying ideas contained in general Functionalist thought.
There was also the rather curious assertion that “Interactionism rejects the concept of socialisation since individuals have free-will to make their own choices” – a statement that illustrates one of the main potential problems with these lessons: they’re not really long enough to cover the stuff they’re aiming to discuss. Things get said that sometimes require further elucidation, otherwise they just sit on the screen looking (and sounding) a bit daft.
There were quite a few other mistakes I picked-up on (the suggestion that the “nuclear family” was a relatively modern (1950’s) invention because “nuclear” was a modern word (it’s not…) kind-of misses the point quite spectacularly) so you need to be a bit careful when using these materials.
Another thing that might be a problem is that the lessons only cover education, a brief Introduction to Sociology and some stuff on Perspectives. Whether there were supposed to be more lessons in the series isn’t clear – there are a couple of mentions of topics like Crime and Deviance – but since all the lessons were made in 2022 I think we should probably infer form this there will be no more.
As you can probably tell, I’m a bit ambivalent about these materials. On the one hand, the format makes them a bit dull at times and they aren’t really long enough to cover topics in any sort of depth. On the other, if you’re looking for some relatively short revision films – particularly for Education – these might help (but if you’re a student it might be useful to ask your teacher to give them the once-over to identify any misconceptions…).
This new PowerPoint Presentation introduces students to some (okay, 9) of Sociology’s founders, from the Big Three of Marx, Durkheim and Weber to lesser-known, but equally important in their own way, names such as Harriet Martineau and William Du Bois.
And while Sociology Specifications in the UK no-longer feature discrete sections on the Founders of Sociology this doesn’t mean a quick and relatively simple introduction to sociology’s origins isn’t both useful and academically important.
Many of the writers featured in the Presentation are not merely historically significant. Their ideas and work still, in many cases, inform contemporary sociology. They are, in this respect, writers that students will come across time and again throughout their course of study – either as contributors to our understanding of social processes in their own right or, in some cases, founders of, or major contributors to, the various sociological perspectives that seem to form such a large part of the various curricula.
In terms of the Presentation itself, it’s designed to be used in a kiosk style: students view the Presentation individually rather than as a classroom group. And because it’s not the usual kind of
“here’s a load of bullet points that I’m going to show you and then slowly read aloud to you” PowerPoint, the Presentation might take a little getting used to.
Having said that, I’ve included simple Instructions (using a nifty little menu system, of which I’m not a little proud) and once students start to play around with the Presentation they should pick it up fairly quickly.
There are two versions of the Presentation you can download:
1. Origins of Sociology PowerPoint Show is a standalone (.ppsx) version that doesn’t need a copy of PowerPoint to run. It also means that if you have an earlier version of PowerPoint on your system the file will still play. The only downside to using this version is that when you try to download it from this site some browsers will warn you the file is “unsafe”. What they mean is that it could conceivably contain a virus. This warning is given because what you’re downloading is a runtime program – a program that will run automatically once you click it (a bit like an app or an exe file). Since PowerPoint Presentations can contain macro files than can be used to change files in ways that might well be construed as “unwanted” this type of warning is both fair and useful.
Unfortunately, if you don’t have an up-to-date version of PowerPoint (2021 onward) and you load the alternative version I’ve provided into it (see below) then it will very likely not work because earlier versions don’t support the morph and zoom functions used in this Presentation.
If in doubt, therefore, download this version and run it through a virus check (or disable macros in your version of PowerPoint). Since it doesn’t contain macros there is nothing untoward about the file and it’s perfectly safe to run.
2. Origins of Sociology PowerPoint is a version (.pptx) that will load into PowerPoint if you have it on your system. This must be 2021 onward (this includes Microsoft 365) otherwise some of the functioning will get messed-up and the Presentation won’t work as intended (presupposing you can even load this file into earlier versions of PowerPoint).
Most a-level teachers and students will probably be most familiar with Per-Olof Wikstrom’s work on the Peterborough Adolescent Development Study (PADS), a longitudinal study of youth crime in a “provincial English town”. One that sits mid-way between the teeming Birmingham metropolis and Norwich. Which, with the best will in the world, can neither be described as “teeming” nor metropolitan. Trust me. I’ve been there.
What you may be less familiar with is situational action theory (SAT), the theory that, among other things, underpins the study.
In basic terms, SAT represents an attempt to understand crime and criminality by integrating two levels of analysis:
The individual: this refers to the various processes, such as family socialisation and formative experiences that shape individual moralities – the way in which they see and think about the social world.
The situational: this refers to the specific social situations through which the individual moves at various points in their life. It represents, as it were, the contexts against which individual moralities are played-out.
This short introduction to Situational Action Theory covers the basic ideas involved and includes examples you can use to sensitise your students to how the theory works.
The subsequent posts noted above can be used to show how the theory has been applied to both understand youth crime and the limitations of various New Right crime theories (such as Routine Activities).
One of the more-interesting things about the use of Situational Action Theory (SAT) to explore the relationship between crime and social disadvantage is that it developed alongside Wikstrom’s Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+). This longitudinal study of young people’s behaviour in the early part of the 21st century has proven to be both a valuable resource in its own right and, more-importantly perhaps, a rich source of empirical evidence with which to test many of the hypotheses Wikstrom developed out of his application of SAT to an understanding of how and why youth crime occurs.
As Wikstrom and Trieber (2016) argue, the objective here is “to advance knowledge about the relationship between social disadvantage and crime involvement through the application of situational action theory (SAT) and the analysis of data from a random sample of U.K. adolescents from the longitudinal Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+).”. To this end we can have a look at a broad overview of what, according to Wikstrom, PADS+ data tells us about both criminal involvement and its relationship to social disadvantage.
Wikstrom’s longitudinal study followed a randomly selected sample of 716 young people, aged 12 – 16, living in and around the English city of Peterborough over a period of 13 years (roughly 2002 – 2015). One of the unique features of the study was that, in line with Wikstrom’s focus on the idea of situational action, it was interested in studying the participants as both individual actors (their sense of moral purpose in particular) and the social environments (situational settings) in which they lived and moved.
While the relationship between social disadvantage and crime has long been known, an important question that’s often ignored is why only a relatively small proportion of the socially disadvantaged seem to engage in persistent criminal offending?
Wikstrom’s Situational Action Theory provides an interesting, thought-provoking, possible answer…
The Crime Paradox
Most A-level crime and deviance students will quickly come to understand the relationship between social disadvantage – what Wikström and Treiber (2016) term “the comparative lack of social and economic resources”- and various forms of persistent, mainly low-level, criminality, overwhelmingly committed by young, lower class, males. Crimes that involve relatively small levels of economic reward (arson, vandalism, theft, shoplifting, robbery, car crime and burglary) or which involve routine low-level violence (assault). In basic terms, social disadvantage is generally seen as a cause of crime.
Professor Per-Olof Wikstrom
The problem with this characterisation, however, is that it’s both true – statistically, most persistent offenders do come from a socially-disadvantaged background (at least as far as the kinds of crimes we’ve just listed are concerned) and not true: social disadvantage doesn’t, in and of itself, cause crime because only a relatively small proportion of those classified as socially disadvantaged become persistent offenders. The majority do not. Which is not something we would expect if the relationship was a causal one.
Free online Introductory Sociology Flipbook aimed at GCSE students.
As you may be aware – I may have mentioned it once or twice – I really like the idea of a visual sociology that involves integrating text and graphics to create narratives for students that have much greater appeal than the simple textbooks of yore (or even the more-complex Textbooks of Today that plonk a few pictures next to some text and call it innovative…).
Maybe it was the distant echo of childhood comics – both the bog-standard British and, very, very, occasionally the wonderful world of Marvel and DC – that appealed to my sense of sociology as story-telling.
Until very recently it certainly wasn’t the idea of dual coding information in a way that made it accessible and memorable. That, as they say, was an unintended bonus.
Anyway, while there have been a couple of reasonably-successful attempts to produce visual sociology books, such as Sociology in Pictures (2012) which covers Theories and Concepts and a follow-up (2016) covering Research Methods, the main drawback with these is that they’re print books and hence rather expensive for what you get. Although, given their relative age, you can at least pick up cheap 2nd hand copies.
My favoured format for this kind of endeavour is, of course, Flipbook and Free. I don’t know why but there’s something about being able to flip online pages as if they were a real-world magazine that appeals to my infantile sensibilities.
The “free” part is, of course, optional and it’s rare to come across a publication that combines the two, which is why I was interested to discover Sociology: Terms & Concepts Visualised. Created by Sanjana Saxena for the Indian Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) the flipbook combines interesting visuals with short descriptive text on a range of Introductory Sociological Terms (mainly around the idea of different groups – primary, secondary and the like) and Concepts such as Stratification, status and role. Both the style and content fit the English GCSE curriculum.
One drawback is that the flipbook was published in 2017 and since then Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Which is a bit of a shame because the flipbook is beautifully drawn and will definitely appeal to GCSE students (and teachers) looking for a different, potentially more-interesting, way to get into Sociology.
This section of Crime Notes focuses on a number of different aspects of victimisation with the initial emphasis on the concept of victimology, the social construction of victims and a range of victim-orientated policies introduced into England and Wales in the 21st century.
Over the past 50 or so years there has been a growth of interest in what Maguire et al. (2006) called the ‘experiences and needs of crime victims’ that has informed debates about ‘the relative rights of victims and offenders, policing policy, crime prevention and court processes’. This change of focus, particularly in the UK, from the offender to the offence and the victim, is significant for how crime impacts on three types of victimisation:
primary – individual victims
secondary – people such as family and friends close to the victim
The 7th film in our Dynamic Learning Series designed to introduce students to a range of important ideas and skills related to the science of studying.
Understandably perhaps, most students spend the vast majority of their study time thinking about what they’re learning, rather than how they’re learning it, on the not-too-questionable basis that if they can’t learn something they’re unlikely to succeed in examinations that test them on their knowledge of that information.
But there’s increasing evidence that understanding how we learn things can play an important part in actually helping us learn stuff.
And over 30 years of educational research has shown that metacognition – in broad terms, an awareness of how we think – helps students take more control over their learning, improve their grades and become more independent and confident learners.
The objective of this short film, therefore, is to show students how to develop a metacognitive outlook in their your by using three simple interrelated processes – planning, monitoring and reflecting – that can boost their understanding of whatever subjects they’re studying.
Dynamic Learning: Metacognition is available now to Buy or Rent (7 days).
Short set of Notes on a kind of complementary, albeit less revolutionary, approach to understanding crime and deviance that you can either lump-in with Critical Criminology or treat as a separate, neo-critical, perspective.
Your choice.
But let’s just hope it’s the right one, for everyone’s sake…
Left Realism: A Young Man’s Game?
Young (2003) suggests the job of realism is ‘to tackle all three sides of the deviancy process’. This three-cornered approach addresses the multidimensional nature of crime in terms of the relationshipbetween:
offender
victim
social reactions
Only by understanding their interaction – how each impacts on the other – can we understand crime as both a
private problem, in terms of its effects on victims
public issue, in terms of how it impacts on the quality of community life
A broad overview of a range of different Marxist interpretations of crime and deviance in words and pictures Or, if you want to be picky, film.
Marxist (or critical) theories of crime assume that no behaviour is inherently deviant. Behaviour only becomes criminalised through the creation and application of laws – and in capitalist societies to understand how and why criminal forms of deviance occur we must understand the economic relationships that give rise to class-based laws. As Croall (2001) argues, for Marxists ‘the criminal law and its enforcement reflect the interests of the powerful and are a means of controlling the activities of powerless lower-class offenders’.
Rule of law
Milliband (1973), for example, suggests that laws favouring the general interests of a ruling class are an extension of its political and ideological dominance – an instrumental form of Marxism that sees the law as a tool used to control the working classes. Poulantzas (1975), however, argues that while contemporary capitalist societies need laws that benefit the interests of the ruling class, these laws have (lesser) benefits for subject classes. This form of hegemonic Marxism sees a ruling class as able to head-off class conflicts by co-opting subject classes into the ‘benefits’ of capitalism and the ‘rule of law’ (as opposed to the reality – the rule of capital).
For Marxists, laws are framed to protect both social order and property relationships:
Social order relates to the legality of killing people, violent behaviour and the like. Everyone benefits from being able to go about their daily lives unmolested, but a ruling class gains additional benefits; an orderly society is one where those making the greatest profits gets to keep their wealth safe and sound.
Property/contract laws relate to the requirements of capitalism as an economic system; they exist to enshrine in law certain rights, such as private property ownership. While everyone benefits from a law against theft, those with the most to lose reap the greatest benefit.
For Marxists, crime is part of a structural process that sees the working classes as both more criminal and more criminalised. The working class experiences greater social pressures (higher levels of economic deprivation coupled with constant ideological injunctions to consume) that lead to higher levels of crime, while their behaviour is more closely defined, surveilled and policed as criminal. While these related processes go some way towards explaining crime, they do not excuse it.
A short overview of Feminist perspectives on crime and deviancecombining a bit of text with quite a lot of video.
Feminist approaches are many and varied, but all, to varying extents, focus on women as both offenders and victims — partly as a response to what Sharp (2006) suggests has been the male bias of traditional criminological research and partly because ‘the study of crime became equated with the study of male criminality’.
Feminist criminology attempts to redress this ‘malestream bias’ in two ways:
by confronting the conventional wisdom of greater male involvement in crime — what Maguire (2002) argues is a ‘universal feature…of all modern countries’
by exploring the reasons for female criminality. In this respect, knowledge of female offending is largely based around two main sources, official crime statistics and offender surveys, and we can use these as a way of exploring feminist criminology and explanations for female offending.
Statistical accuracy
Official crime statistics consistently show that men, in terms of raw numbers, have greater involvement in crime than women. Self and Zealey (2007), however, make the important point that males and females commit similar typesof crime. Theft, drug offences and personal violence are the main offences for both sexes.
From a feminist standpoint these observations are interesting, mainly because most explanations for crime have focused on explaining male criminality by using women as a form of control group. Where women are considered more likely to conform to social norms, the criminological focus is switched to the search for the attributes – biological, psychological and sociological – not shared by women and which supposedly explain male criminality.
An example here is the notion of males and females having different attitudes to risk-taking, which, in turn, explains greater or lesser involvement in crime. In basic terms, risk-taking is bound up with cultural ideas about masculinity, while conformity is held to be a cultural feature of femininity.
McIvor (1998), for example, argues that greater male involvement in youth crime is ‘linked to a range of other risk-taking behaviours which in turn are associated with the search for [masculine] identity in the transition from adolescence to adulthood’. Lyng’s (1990, 2004) concept of edgework also argues that many young males are attracted to crime precisely because of the risks involved; risk-taking affirms their masculinity.
There are two objections to this argument:
women are defined negatively in such theories, ‘by the absence’ of something men have (a need to take risks) rather than as individuals in their own right
there is an ecological fallacy: while many women are not involved in crime the same is true for men – yet significant numbers of each do offend.
A quick’n’dirty overview of the Interactionist perspective on crime and deviance.
Two ideas closely associated with Interactionist approaches are those of deviance as both relative and socially constructed.
Relativity refers to the idea that the same behaviour can be considered deviant in one context (or society) but non-deviant in another. A simple example here might be punching someone in the face. If you do this in the street you could be arrested, charged, convicted and imprisoned. If you do it in a boxing ring people might cheer…
This suggests, as Durkheim argued, that “if societies make the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance” then deviance is socially constructed – and this is important, as Becker (1963) argues, because it means deviance is not a quality of what someone does but rather a qualityof how others react to what they do.
And if this argument is valid it means that looking for “solutions to the problem of crime” in the behaviour or demeanour of ‘criminals’ is pointless because ‘criminals’ are only different from ‘non criminals’ when they are publicly labelled as such.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a general political perception that the ‘fight against crime’ was not only being lost, but that attempts to explain and solve offending behaviours were largely ineffective. The best that could be done was to develop ways that limited the impact of crime on communities and this led to a range of policies aimed at preventing crime, developed under the umbrella of New Right approaches to reflect a more conservative approach to dealing with crime. These approaches involved crime-reduction polices that drew on ecologicalideas about people’s relationship to their immediate environment – specifically in terms of their impact on encouraging or discouraging deviant behaviour.
Crime prevention
Indicative of this general perspective, Clarke (1980) argues that crime theory should focus on a realistic approach to crime prevention and management, rather than search for the ‘causes of crime’. He argues that criminal behaviour takes many forms – property theft, for example, is very different from rape – and it makes little sense to assume they have similar causes or outcomes. However, the majority of crimes had two important characteristics that made them amenable to prevention: first, the majority are opportunistic, and second, crime is territorial.
Opportunistic crime is the outcome of what Clarke terms, ‘the immediate choices and decisions made by the offender’. In other words, most crime is unplanned and carried out ‘on the spur of the moment’; if an opportunity occurs (a purse left unattended, for example) an offender may be tempted if the chances of being detected are less than the likely benefits. This reflects what Right Realists call a cost / benefit analysis of crime.
Analysis of Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) data for 2020 suggests that opportunistic crimes are not restricted to relatively small-scale thefts. Around 50% of all home burglaries, for example, were spur-of-the-moment decisions by the perpetrators as they responded to favourable opportunities to commit a crime that hadn’t necessarily planned or prepared to commit.
Territorial crime is, Wiles and Costello (2000) argue, generally local to the offender. Their research showed the ‘average distance travelled to commit domestic burglary was 1.8 miles’, which confirmed Forrester et al’s (1988) research into patterns of burglary in Rochdale.
While this “average” does, of course, hide wide individual behaviour discrepancies – some burglars, for example, target properties well outside this average – recent CSEW (2020) data has shown that around 50% of burglars knew their victims.
Territorialism is important for crime prevention and control since offences committed outside the offender’s local area are mainly related, as Wiles and Costello argue, to opportunities presenting themselves ‘during normal routines’, rather than being consciously planned (a ‘routine activity theory’ of crime). If measures are taken to reduce opportunities for crime in a particular area, crime rates will fall. The denial of opportunity, allied to territoriality, means the majority of crimes will not be displacedto other areas (although there are exceptions – activities like drug smuggling and prostitution, for example, are sensitive to displacement).
These ideas led to a range of crime prevention strategies, designed to make crime more difficult, less attractive and more costly for the potential offender, based around changes to the cultural and physical environments.
A short set of Notes covering a range of Functionalist explanations for crime and deviance, largely based around the concepts of anomie (both the Durkheimian and Mertonian interpretations) and Strain (Merton again plus Agnew’s General Strain Theory). There’s also a little bit of subcultural stuff thrown-in for good measure.
Traditional Functionalism
Functionalist approaches are based around an understanding of how societies solve what Durkheim (1938) called two problems of existence: how to create order and maintain social stability in a situation where millions of unique individuals, each with their own particular (self) interests, must be persuaded to behave collectively.
The simple answer involves the notion of collective sentiments – shared beliefs about society and the development of behavioural rules designed to reinforce this collective consciousness. However, the existence of behavioural rules, in the shape of formal and informal norms, presupposes that some will break the rules, because if they didn’t, rules would be unnecessary.
For Durkheim, therefore, deviance was normal, by which he meant functional (as opposed to beneficial). Deviance contributed to social stability because when people act ‘as a group or society’ against deviants it becomes a mechanism through which the collective conscience is both recognised and affirmed.
Behavioural boundaries
In complex societies, for example, the fact some people ‘break rules’ tells everyone where the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour lie. The public condemnation of deviants, through media, for example, establishes and reinforces consensual boundaries. In this respect, crime promotes social integrationand social solidarity through its ‘public naming and shaming’ function. Popular alarm and outrage at criminal acts serve to draw people closer together ‘against a common enemy’.
Testing tolerance
Deviance is also a mechanism for social change because it tests the boundaries of public tolerance and morality. It is a social dynamicthat forces people to assess and reassess the nature of social statics(such as written laws). Laws criminalising homosexuality in our society, for example, have gradually been abandoned in line with changing social attitudes.
Moral values
Matza’s (1964) study of juvenile delinquency provides empirical support for Durkheim’s basic argument when he suggests young people have little commitment to deviant (or ‘subterranean’) values that threaten the moral consensus. Matza found that, when caught, people employ techniques of neutralisation in an attempt to explain or justify their deviance. They deny, for example, personal responsibility (‘I was drunk…’), injury (‘no one was hurt’) or victimisation (‘they hit me first’) and by so doing show a commitment to conventional moral values. If they did not respect those values there would be little point trying to justify their guilt.
A short set of Notes looking at crime trends and patterns in England and Wales over the past 50-odd years. While students don’t require a detailed factual knowledge of trends and patterns they do provide a useful introduction to the next set of Notes covering theoretical explanations for crime and deviance.
One reason for measuring crime is to identify trends and patterns in the data, based around the categories of class, age, gender, ethnicity and location, that can then be explained sociologically.
There are two main sources of official crime data generally used to identity patterns and trends:
Police-recorded crime statistics are, as the name suggests, recorded by the police each time a crime is reported.
Official Crime Surveys: Ther initial type of official crime survey covering the years 1982 – 2012 was the British Crime Survey consisting of face-to-face interviews with a representative population sample. In 2012 the BCS was renamed as the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) to reflect the fact the data only covered England and Wales and not Scotland. During the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 the Survey switched to carrying-out telephone-based representative samples.
Crime Trends
Over the past 50 years official (police-recorded) crime statistics and the BCS / CSEW have both shown an initially upward trend that peaked in the mid-1990s and then gradually declined. Both sets of statistics have, however, shown a recent upward trend in crime that reflects the influence of Internet-based crimes – particularly varieties of fraud. In 2023, for example, an estimated 2 million additional crimes were attributed to computer-based fraud in the police-recorded statistics.
Some Notes that have been hanging around on my hard drive doing nothing useful that I’ve finally got around to posting. There are plenty more where these came from but whether or not I’ll ever get around to digging them out is anyone’s guess.
Defining Crime and Deviance
Deviance
‘To deviate’ means ‘to stray from the path’ and the path here is behaviour that a society considers normal – something that is always a matter for debate. In our society, for example, it’s normal to maintain a circle of space around our body extending roughly 60 cm, and we feel uncomfortable if people enter this ‘personal space’ uninvited. In other cultures, concepts of personal space are different – in Argentina, for example, personal space can be so small as to be almost non-existent. This example illustrates that:
all cultures develop ideas about ‘normal behaviour’
the rules – or norms – governing normal behaviour can be different from culture to culture (and frequently within the same culture at different times)
Deviance, therefore, refers to actions that deviate from the norm – the ‘underlying rules of social interaction’ that take two basic forms:
Formal norms involve laws and organisational rules that represent official standards of behaviour. They are usually written, formally policed and punishment (or ‘negative sanctions’) for deviance is clearly specified as part of the rule. If you break the law, for example, you risk being arrested and imprisoned. Unlike laws, organisational rules apply to a particular group or organisation, rather than society as a whole. School pupils, for example, may have to wear a uniform, but this rule doesn’t apply to their parents.
Informal norms are unwritten, informally policed and carry informal punishments that vary from group to group. This means the same behaviour may be seen differently depending on its context; swearing when with a group of friends may be considered acceptable behaviour, while swearing in front of your parents may be considered quite differently.
The Resource Guide is a compendium of 50 “Standards-Based Lesson Plans” created by Amanda Vanderbur and aligned with the US National Standards for High School Psychology. These, as you might expect, have evolved somewhat between the year this Guide was published (2014) and the year in which this post was published (2024).
If you’re an American High School Psychology teacher you will, hopefully, be aware of both the current standards and how they’ve changed. But in case you’re neither of those I’ve included a link that explains the difference. Because I’m nice like that.
The Guide also helpfully aligns the NSHSP standards to AP Psychology standards (for non-US readers, Advanced Placement (AP) Psychology is broadly equivalent to A-level standard).
Now we’ve got the standards-stuff out of the way, the Lesson Plans are organised into 7 sections:
Scientific Inquiry
Biopsychology
Cognition
Development and Learning
Sociocultural Context
Individual Variation
Application of Psychological Science
and each Plan provides you with details of the objectives they’re designed to achieve, details of the procedures involved and the preparation they require (including things like Handouts that are included in the Guide).
And that’s about it, really. All you have to do is download the Resource Guide and spend some time browsing its pages to see if there’s anything within you want to use.
And if you’re in the market for more-of-the-same-but-a-bit-different then why not have a gander at The Psychology Teacher’s Toolkit – a UK-based collection of Notes, Starter, Plenaries, Strategies and Sims with nary a Standard in sight.
To finally understand the significance of metacognition as an important cog in the dynamic of learning. And although you’re a little late to the Party, why not ease yourself in gently…
But why, you may be thinking, do students need to understand how to listen when the majority of them – you know who you are – spend a great deal of their school / college time in what scientists call “listening situations”?
And the answer is, of course, deceptively simple: because even though we’re physically present in the classroom we don’t always mentallyengage with what we’re hearing. Information either passes passively from teacher to student to page or it’s never even recorded because it simply hasn’t been heard.
Either way, I think you’d agree if you were listening, it means we frequently miss a lot of important information.
And if we’re not taking something in, we can’t recall it when we really need it. Which, while it’s not rocket science, is a bit of a downer when it comes to exams.
However, as you probably secretly suspected, it’s actually not that difficult to become a more active listener.
You just haven’t been shown how.
So in this short film we show you three simple strategies to improve your listening and make you better learners:
Pre-learning. Or how to prepare in advance for classes to enhance your ability to listen.
Focus. Or some simple things you can do when you’re actually in class to actively listen.
Over-learning. Or the idea of writing simple summaries and reviews of what you’ve just learnt in class.
A set of 21 short commentaries on a range of psychological studies by an ex-A-level Examiner.
I previously posted Tom Butler-Bowdon’s 50 Classic Studies in Psychology in which he provided a student-friendly commentary on said classic studies to save you the time and trouble of actually having to read the originals.
So why, you might well ask, do you need this collection of student-friendly commentaries on Classic Studies in Psychology by Stephen Williams?
If you want to give your students a visual reinforcement of some of these classic studies…
I’m glad you asked because there are a few reasons why you might want to add this collection to your…err…collection, the first being that it’s been put together by an ex-A-level Examiner, so you know the standard is going to be squarely on the money for this (pre-University) level.
The second is that it’s slap-bang-up-to-date (2023) and the third is that the Creative Commons logo means you’re not only free to copy / reproduce the document as many times as you like, you can also adapt the text to whatever your immediate teaching / learning needs may be.
And there’s more.
The 21 (count ‘em) studies are spread across 7 course areas:
About Psychology
Biological Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Research Issues
Age (Developmental Psychology)
Differences between people (Abnormal Psychology)
Social Psychology
Each of these contains commentaries on three studies – from researchers as diverse as Milgram, Zimbardo, Rosenhan and Levinson – and there are exam-type questions to answer at the end of each section if you need them.
Who doesn’t need a free set of “exam-type” questions?
And in the unlikely event you want to consult the original study, a full reference is provided.
Which means they don’t take a lot of time to read.
Unless you like to read through stuff really slowly.
Although the presentation leaves a lot to be desired – it’s basically a Word text document that I’ve converted to pdf – the content is something all A-level psychology students should find useful. Not the least because, as the author notes, “These notes should give you a head start” in A-level Psychology examinations.
Which is something we can all probably agree is a Good Thing.
One of the things I’ve found students find difficult about subjects like Sociology is the frequently abstract nature of the ideas they’re being asked to understand and apply. Ideas that range from the relatively simple (socialisation, identity, culture…) to the not-quite-so-simple (positivism, postmodernism, methodology…) and the downright difficult (risk society, hegemony, autopoiesis …)
Creating Curiosity…
And since grasping as wide a range of key concepts as possible is pretty much central to doing well in the subject, it follows that anything students and teachers can do to make this material more accessible is going to be beneficial for everyone. The problem, as you probably know, is how to achieve this desirable goal?
One way to do this is by anchoring the abstract in the concrete.
In other words, by using concrete examples to illustrate things that are, by their very nature, somewhat intangible. An added bonus of this process is that it encourages students to develop a sense of curiosity through their ability to both explore the abstract and tie it down to something more tangible. And as you’ll probably be aware (or maybe not) we’ve previously posted about curiosity and how to create it as part of a general metacognition thing we’ve been developing in our recent films.
I think it’s fair to say Beck’s concepts of Risk and Risk Society aren’t well-covered at A-level, partly because his ideas are difficult to get across to students and partly because, not to put too fine a point on things, they’re not easy to understand and encapsulate in a few pithy points.
Be that as it may, the basic idea of Risk Society is an important one in the context of a lot of sociological development because it gives students to opportunity to challenge the (over-) easy distinction that’s often made in textbooks and exams between modernity and postmodernity. Risk Society is very much a concept that rejects postmodernity (despite what you may have been lead to believe in some quarters…) in favour of understanding how “the modernist project” has evolved in what Beck – in common with theorists like Giddens – considers to be Late Modernity.
This post brings together the disparate resources, both text and film, we’ve posted over the past few years into one handy Bundle that’s ideal for teachers looking to update and expand their knowledge and understanding of Risk and for students wanting to get some sort of handle on the topic.
While it’s conventional at this point to say something like “Enjoy!”, if you’ve got even a passing acquaintance with the subject matter you’ll know how ridiculous that would sound.
“Endure!” would probably be entirely more-appropriate, but I’ve done my best to make the whole thing as understandable as is humanly possible. Whether or not I’ve succeeded, I’ll leave you to be the judge.
I always found teaching “the experimental method” in sociology a little dull because there were relatively few examples I could use to illustrate the genre.
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