ShortCutstvBlog

Sociology Summer Transition Work

May 13, 2025

If you’re looking around for some inspiration for “Transition Work” you can set your prospective students over the coming summer months, look no further.

Or rather, start here and then I’ll suggest ways you can look further afield.

It seems like every couple of years I get around to thinking about those long, hot, summer holidays and how we can stop students wasting their time doing stuff like “having fun”, “chilling” or, worst of all, “relaxing”, while not actually doing any of the hard graft ourselves.

And that, of course, is when my mind turns towards finding examples of Summer Transition Work you can give to your students while basking in the approbation of Senior Management safe in the knowledge that no-one’s likely to discover that you just cribbed it all “from the Internet”.

It’s a win-win for everyone (except your students and those teachers who had to create it all in the first place. Their sacrifice will not be forgotten. Until it is).

So, without further fanfare, here’s what I’ve managed to find so far (and don’t forget that it might be worth flicking through the previous stuff I’ve posted if there’s nothing here that catches your eye).

Harris Academy Greenwich: Straight out of the gate is a set of exercises that seem to be based around concepts of class, family and education: students have to watch an episode of a BBC programme called Motherland and answer a few questions about the characters and their behaviour.

Wilberforce 6^th Form College: Students write 500 – 1000 words on the topic of “what they think needs changing most about this country and how they are going to change it”. Apparently this work counts towards a student’s “effort grade”, which is a new one on me.

The Deepings School: A mixed-bag of activities that involves things like making notes on a range of basic Introductory concepts (socialisation etc.) and then applying them to an understanding of “real life” situations (how are we socialised by our family, for example). There’s also a short “research task” that involves doing some simple background investigating of three classic sociological texts (Learning the Labour, Housework and The Making of a Moonie) and a video-based exercise around inequality.

Poole High School: On a slightly different tack, this is a short Handbook (5 pages with lots of lovely white space) that introduces students to the basics of the (AQA) A-level course. It does, however, include a slightly different take on Transition Work in that it asks students to look out for articles about various aspects of family life (domestic labour, violence, children and much, much, more) as a way of getting students involved in the work they will do on the course. It’s an interesting idea, but whether it works or not I’ve no idea. Worth s shot though.

Wallingford School: If the previous Transition tasks are a little bit “dip your toes into the sociological waters”, these Transition tasks have more of a “sink or swim” vibe (which is fine. Each to their own etc.). First-up there’s a 1000-word essay on a “Culture or sub-culture with which you’re familiar”. This is followed by an Identity task that seems to involve a great deal of personal research around TED talks, podcasts and BBC programming, although the task itself is very simple and straightforward. A final Media task is noted but then seems to have been omitted. So don’t spend time looking for it like I most definitely didn’t.

Kind Edward 6^th Lichfield: This Transition Pack from GCSE to A-level offers a number of tasks that range from the relatively simple (matching “social issues” to the areas students will be studying) to more time-consuming (and tangential) stuff like reading 1984 the novel, watching some YouTube clips about it and then noting some of the key ideas involved. Personally I’m not convinced it “prepares students for the course” but presumably it’s something the King Edward teachers have found works. Next up there’s a task involving watching some “post-apocalyptic thriller” trailers and writing a paragraph about “What these films suggest will happen to society in a post-apocalyptic world?”. Not sure how it prepares students for studying stuff like families or identities but there you go. Continuing the filmic, if not necessarily social breakdown, theme are suggested films and documentaries with “sociological themes”. A section of carrying our social research offers up a couple of examples and then asks students to briefly analyse a piece of research on Troubled Teens (the original hyperlink has changed). Again, it’s a bit of a left-field Task but who am I to question etc. As a final task students have to complete a 5-word glossary using both a definition and symbol (which is an interesting attempt at dual-coding but I must admit I was stumped for symbols for some of the words (“Theory”?).

Worcester 6^th Form College: This is quite an interesting mixed-bag of tasks: make simple notes about “What Is Sociology” after watching a short YouTube video, keep a journal of everything done in the first hour after waking up and comparing it with the routines of family members, write short definitions of some key concepts. There are also tasks that touch on concepts of class and gender – read an online article and answer a short question – and some suggested films / documentaries to watch.

Etonbury Academy: Whoever teaches Sociology at the Academy has decided to delegate the task of Introducing Sociology to a 3^rd Party – in this instance the Tutir2U website and its free “Introduction to AQA Sociology” online course. This, I have to say, is an awesome move by said unnamed teacher because it fulfils the requirement to bring students up-to-speed with the subject by delegating the task to someone else so you can enjoy your Summer holiday. Students have to enrol on the “2 – 4 hour course” but, as I’ve noted, this is free and all that’s required is to sign-up to the site. I haven’t personally tried the course (yet), but it’s something I definitely plan to do…

Coome Wood: A bit of a Curate’s Egg, this consists of tasks like defining 20 “introductory concepts”, briefly summarising 4 Sociological perspectives, creating Mind / Concept Maps around “What is Sociology” / various research methods and a short Education task based on identifying “inside school” and “outside school” factors affecting “white, working-class, boys’ educational failure” – which is, at one and the same time, both oddly specific and over-generalised.

Crime in England and Wales: 2025

May 7, 2025

The latest edition of Crime in England and Wales, hot off the National Statistics press, has arrived with a dull thud on our doorstep and because you’re all probably way-too-busy Tik-Toking (or whatever “the kids” do nowadays in lieu of revision) I thought I’d do my usual Chicken Nuggets review (just the most tasty bits in easy-to-swallow mouthfuls).

However, before we get down to the nitty gritty of the highlights it’s important to point-out that you’ve probably been taught there are basically two main sources of crime data for England and Wales:

1. Police Recorded Crime (sometimes called “Official Crime Statistics”) that you will have been told lack reliability. While it’s probably not a good sign that the Government’s own Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) have repeatedly warned, since 2014, that many police forces fail to accurately record crime in their locality, steps seem to have been taken to try to address this general problem. The OSR have, for example, recently noted “Police forces are recording crime more accurately now than in 2014”.

While reliability problems do persist, it’s not simply a case pf the police massaging the figures through a range of quaint techniques, such as coughing (getting an offender to admit to multiple similar crimes), cuffing (downgrading the seriousness of an offence so the perpetrator may be charged with something less serious) and skewing (pursuing crimes that are easier to solve at the expense of crimes, such as burglary, that are difficult to solve). Police forces frequently come under pressure to prioritise crimes that “the public” find important and this can result in crime statistics reflecting increased police activity rather than a real crime trend. It’s also important to note that police recorded data is far more likely to be reliable for high-harm, low-volume crimes such as murder – which, slightly-ironically, brings us to:

2. The Crime Survey of England and Wales (formally The British Crime Survey) which, you may well have been taught, have a much higher validity than their police counterparts. This has partly come about because the CSEW has historically focused on low-harm, high-volume crimes that are much less-likely to have been reported to the police (again, for a variety of reasons, such as a lack of faith in the police’s ability to solve the crime). Again, for reasons I’ve just noted, this isn’t necessarily the case. For some forms of crime, such as homicide or car theft, official crime statistics are perfectly valid: they measure what they claim to measure, albeit for different reasons. Dead bodies, for example, are notoriously difficult to hide (and I should know) while the fact all cars need to be insured gives people an incentive to report their theft.

As you might have suspected, there is a third measure that can be used: the aforementioned Crime in England and Wales that combines data from both of the above sources. One reason for this you might find useful is that while the CSEW tends to focus on crimes against households and those over the age of 16, Police Recorded Crime includes a much wider range of offences, including those against businesses and children. Combining the two forms of data, therefore, makes sense.

More importantly perhaps, combining domestic and officially reported crime, can increase data validity. CSEW data, for example, shows that fewer than 1-in-6 (around 15%) rape victims reported their victimisation to police.

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Beyond Zimbardo: The Stanford Prison Experiment

May 4, 2025

The Stanford Prison Experiment, arguably one of the most controversial experiments of the 20^th century, has polarised opinions for over 50 years:

To its supporters, the transformation of perfectly decent college students into brutal guards or compliant prisoners demonstrated the power of situations to determine behaviour.

To its detractors, the study is a perfect storm of unethical behaviours and outrageous researcher interventions that created what Le Texier concluded was “an incredibly flawed study”.

While acknowledging the importance of this debate, Professor Stephen Reicher argues that to truly understand the significance of the Experiment we need to go “Beyond Zimbardo” in a way that gives your students both a fresh insight into – and a more-critical perspective on – the underlying rationale of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

This short film gives students an insight into both the Experiment itself and the more-recent evidence from the Stanford Archive about how it was constructed and conducted.

More-importantly perhaps it builds on this evidence to argue that the researchers were not neutral observers but active participants in a complex experiment centred around social identities and the implications this interpretation has for our understanding of brutal behaviours.

Dynamic Learning: Mindmaps

April 28, 2025

The next in our popular Dynamic Learning series of Study Skills films is Mindmapping, a note-taking technique originally popularised by Tony Buzan in the 1970’s. Despite the huge number of dauntingly complicated and confusing examples splattered across the Internet, it’s a technique that’s actually simple to learn and apply once you understand four simple principles outlined in the film.

Mindmapping is what’s called a visual note-taking technique and if you’re accustomed to taking linear notes they might take a bit of getting used to. This is because Mindmaps let you combine text and images across a single page in a way that dual-codes information. When done correctly, research has shown this can significantly improve your ability to remember and recall information because linking verbal and visual information helps to encode it in memory.

While Mindmaps aren’t particularly great for taking notes in fast-moving situations like lectures, where you don’t always have the time to think carefully, they’re really useful when you do have time to reflect, such as taking notes from a textbook or putting your lecture notes in order.

This makes them ideal for things like brainstorming and problem-solving where the focus on a single topic and connecting key ideas helps you develop and evaluate your thoughts along different branches of the map. These are things that can help you in high-pressure situations like exams, where the ability to quickly generate ideas and solve the problems posed in exam questions will help you achieve your best possible grade.

Collections 6 | PowerPoint Presentations

April 24, 2025

The next set in the Collections series covers both Sociology and Psychology and covers a mix of PowerPoint Presentations, some of which I’ve lifted from the Web but a lot of which I’ve created.

These, as you might expect, are not your conventional “list of bullet-points on a white screen” Presentation and so may not be to everyone’s taste.

If, however, you’re after stuff that’s a little more exotic (and interactive) then some of these might just be worth exploring.

Sociology

Introductory

Investigating Sociology: If you’re looking for a new and radically different way to kickstart your Introduction to Sociology sessions, this is the Presentation for you. Otherwise, I’d just stick to a textbook and some bullet points.

Origins of Sociology: Introduce students to 9 of Sociology’s founders using an interesting Time Line effect that, believe me, took a very long time to perfect.

Core Concepts: Culture, Identity and Socialisation.

Theories of Self and Identity: A range of theories to evaluate.

Culture and Identity: Set of official OCR Presentations.

Global Culture: 3 Views: Outlining some of the key features of three different interpretations of the impact of globalised cultural forms.

Five Methods of Socialisation: Definitions of Selective exposure, Identification, Modelling, Sanctions (rewards and punishments) and Nurturance.

Agencies of Socialisation: Identifies and explains the role of a range of primary and secondary socialising agencies: family, peers, education, workplace, media and religion.

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Do Modern Audiences Shape Modern Media?

April 13, 2025

Or how a $19 Strawberry illustrates the changing world of media effects.

Okay, I’ve taken a bit of a liberty here because, outrageous as it undoubtedly is, the $19 Strawberry isn’t, of itself, indicative of how our understanding of the way the media affects our behaviour has changed over the past 25 years.

What’s actually the focus here is people’s beliefs about how a $19 Strawberry sold in a luxury outlet is supposed to look and taste – and, perhaps more importantly, how superior it is to an ordinary, store-bought, 30 cent Strawberry.

As the following clip from the Jimmy Kimmel Show demonstrates, when people believe a situation is real, it is real in its consequences (the Thomas Theorem). In this instance people were stopped in the street and asked if they would like to try a “$19 Strawberry” – something actually sold in Erewhon, a luxury grocery store in Los Angeles.

While each respondent believed they were sampling a luxury Strawberry, what they were actually tasting was a bog-standard 30-cent store-bought Strawberry…

What this clip demonstrates is how our understanding of the world is shaped by how we are encouraged to see that world and while this idea is by no means new (see, for example, Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory and Mean World Syndrome in particular) it does suggest a different way of looking at how the mass media affects an audience.

Or, if you prefer, how audiences affect the media.

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The New Penology

April 8, 2025

The New Penology refers to changes in the roles played by control agencies (both formal, such as the police and informal, such as schools) in contemporary societies that can be summarised in terms of three main ideas:

1. The Extension of control

This refers to the idea that social controls in the late 20^th century have been increasingly extended, both in terms of the number of people subjected to such controls and, not coincidentally perhaps, the kinds of behaviours that have been increasingly subjected to such controls. In this respect Cohen (1979) has suggested we need to think about three ways social controls have gradually been extended in modern societies:

Firstly in terms of blurring the boundaries between deviance and non-deviance, deviant and non-deviant, criminal and non-criminal. For Cohen, the 19^th century development of “segregated institutions of incarceration”, such as prisons and asylums had one virtue: they clearly defined the boundary between the deviant and non-deviant. Modern forms of penology blur these boundaries, through various programmes and treatments, to create a continuum of control that involves a range of preventative, diagnostic and screening initiatives, from ‘pre-delinquents’ (those who haven’t ‘as yet’ committed an offence) at one extreme, to high risk populations (persistent offenders) at the other.

In this respect the argument here is that modern penology has shifted the focus away from the simple punishment of objective offences to ideas about risk management and the control of “anti-social behaviours”.

Risk management, for example, represents part of what Feely and Simon (1992) have termed a “new discourse” around how control agencies are encouraged to view crime – one that replaces conventional ideas about moral or medical descriptions of the individual with an actuarial approach that involves “probabilistic calculations and statistical distributions applied to populations” (actuaries working for insurance companies, for example, mathematically calculate levels of risk, such as things like ‘early death’ probabilities for those buying life insurance). What has been called an “economic approach” to crime and social control involves things like:

• identifying and managing “unruly groups” with high probabilities of criminal involvement. On the punitive side this may involve the increased use of formal police resources, such as more-frequent patrols, while less-punitive interventions may be made through schools and social services.

• the development of “low-cost” / “cost-effective” forms of control such as electronic tagging.

• managingcriminal activity through risk assessments that identify possible situations and areas that require additional surveillance or police resources. This may involve processes such as “hotspot policing”, whereby more police resources are targeted at very specific public areas (such as clubs and pubs) that attract large number of young people.

• resource targeting is similar to the above but involves the idea of concentrating police resources in areas where “high probability offending groups” such as young, working-class men live, work and play.

• sentencing according to risk acknowledges the idea that incarceration in prisons doesn’t reform offenders, but when offenders are in prison they can’t commit further crimes. Rather than sentencing offenders for what they’ve done, therefore, sentencing should reflect the risk of reoffending; habitual offenders, for example, represent a high-risk category and should be given longer sentences than low-risk offenders.

One particularly notable example of this kind of sentencing was the introduction of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) in 2005. Under this policy an offender convicted of “a serious offence” and who was considered “dangerous” to the public could be kept in prison until they were “no-longer deemed a threat to the public”. Even though IPPs were abolished in 2012 “for all new offences”, those originally sentenced under the policy are still subject to it. As of 2024 there were still over 1,000 prisoners serving indeterminate sentences who are currently designated as too dangerous to release by the Parole Board.

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Collections 5 | Flipbooks

March 1, 2025

The next Collection in a series that includes Learning Mats, Revision Resources, Simulations and the ever-popular Introductory Sociology, brings together all the Flipbook posts dotted around the Blog I could find and puts them into one handy cut-out-and-keep post.

Research Methods

The first four to be given the Flipbook treatment are actual, physical, book chapters that I wrote back in the days when I was Quite Interested in writing textbooks.

The Research Process:

Quantitative Research Methods

Qualitative Research Methods

Mixed Methods

Overt Participant Observation illustrated by Venkatesh’s “Gang Leader for a Day”

Theory

Systems Theory: It’s Functionalism, Jim. But not as you know it.

Modernity and Sociological Theory

Postmodernity and Sociological Theory

Globalisation: Economic, political and cultural dimensions.

Global Culture: 3 views on the nature and extent of changing global culture.

Global Culture – Video Version: As above except this version uses video examples rather than static pictures.

Risk Society: It’s modernity, Jim. But not as you knew it.

Click for education, Crime, revision and Media

The Helpful Professor

February 25, 2025

The Helpful Professor site offers a range of free Study Guides for both Sociology (115 guides) and Psychology (30 guides) aimed at American University students doing Introductory courses in these subjects (Sociology 101, for example). The level at which they’re pitched, however, wouldn’t be out of place on an A-level Sociology or Psychology course.

Each Guide is based around a key concept or theory (from Anomie to Worldview, Attachment Theory to Sublimation…) and generally follows a standard format of providing a short definition, examples and brief criticisms. A few of the Guides also have accompanying animated video clips and while I’m not sure how many there are, the one’s I’ve seen are generally short, interesting and informative.

As you may have noticed, I didn’t qualify “examples” because, for whatever reason, these tend towards the excessive. Does any Sociology student, for example, really need:

23 examples of Achieved Status?
9 Agents of Socialisation?
16 instances of Cancel Culture?
13 examples of Charisma?

Now, while I don’t know (I can guess) why the Guides should be packed with so many examples it seems to me they’re a bit of a distraction for students to be faced with so much information when a couple of examples would suffice. The fact something like Social Capital has a far more manageable 4 examples shows they could do it if they really wanted to…

And if you think the Psychology Guides are any different, they’re not. Attribution Theory has 10 examples, plus 5 “case study examples” thrown in for good measure.

This isn’t to say the Guides aren’t useful. It’s just that you may have to wade through an awful lot of stuff you really don’t really need. Which is basically to say the Guides could probably have done with a bit of judicious editing.

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Situational Action Theory: Online Magazine

February 17, 2025

I thought that for the 1,000^th SCTV blog post I’d make an effort to do something a bit different. But then I came to my senses and thought “why break the habit of a lifetime?”, which is why this Milestone Post is just another of my GoTo favourites – the flipbook (although I’ve decided to call it an Online Magazine to see if potential readers can be tricked into thinking it’s something worth reading).

Probably not, but at this stage it’s something of a wait-and-see game.

While I’m starting to get the impression that the Flipbook Format is one that very few people other than myself have much of an interest in – even though you can Turn The Pages Like An Actual Magazine! – I like to give people the option of reading stuff in this format.

And in this particular instance the Stuff in question is a collection of the various Situational Action Theory posts I made around a year ago (I may be slow, but I get there eventually). Although you can read these in the original blog post, it’s not really the same as viewing a custom-made booklet filled with words and pictures whose pages You Can Turn Like A Real Magazine. Something I may have already mentioned, but which deserves saying again.

And if you’re still not convinced, there’s always the pdf version – all the words, pictures and coloured backgrounds but, sadly, without the facility to flip the page…

If you need any more encouragement to have a butcher’s at the Stuff, what makes Situational Actional Theory particularly interesting – and perhaps a little unusual – is that it’s a theory of criminal behaviour that has grown alongside and out of Wickstom and Trieber’s groundbreaking work on the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+). A longitudinal study that has been running for around 20 years, with the next phase due to begin in 2025.

PsychEd: Free Resources

January 26, 2025

A rather unprepossessing WordPress blog about A-level Psychology, run by someone called “Ed” (hence the title) and featuring 8 posts in 2 years isn’t the kind of thing I usually feature on the blog.

But I’ve made an exception because, much like the proverbial duck, while there may not be much happening on the surface (which isn’t to say the posts about things like essay-writing aren’t interesting or useful) there’s one heck of a lot of work going-on just under the surface.

And that work involves creating a load of free Psychology resources aimed predominantly at teachers using the Cambridge International Psychology Specification. These, in the main, involve ready-made PowerPoint “lessons” and one advantage of this format is that the materials are relatively easy to edit if you want to add or subtract stuff to your personal teaching taste.

While the materials themselves edge towards the far end of “basic” (pretty much your standard bullet-point list with pictures and video links) the fact that PsychEd has done a lot of the heavy lifting for you in terms of putting together a lesson should probably count for something.

Whether or not it does probably rests on how many of the materials you’re able to use. If you’re following CIE this means pretty much all of them. For other Boards, maybe not so much.

Click to Access the Resources

Flipbook: Testing the Marshmallow Test

January 24, 2025

For those who prefer their information in a more-colourful magazine-style format than bare-bones blog posts, I’ve put the two recent Marshmallow Test posts together in an online flipbook format that adds to the growing collection I’ve put together over the years.

A flipbook, if you haven’t come across the format before, is basically an online document where you turn the pages using a mouse click or motion. While that may not sound very exciting -probably because it isn’t actually very exciting unless you live a very sedentary, sheltered, existence – it mimics the way we read offline.

And this is significant because studies such as Mangen et al (2013) and Delgardo et al (2018) have shown that reading printed paper texts increases levels of student comprehension.

Now, the obvious question here is whether reading an online text that mimics a printed paper text has the same effect by fooling the brain into thinking it’s something that it’s not?

And the obvious answer is “who knows?”. But it’s an interesting idea that, I think we can all agree, should probably merit a lot more research funding.

However, leaving aside the ins-and-outs of academic research funding, as I’m afraid we must, online flipbooks have one main advantage over both their offline and online (pdf) cousins: namely the ability to show embedded video. In the case of the Marshmallow Test this is a big advantage because it allow students to see examples of something like the actual experiments.

The other advantages of the flipbook over the blog post format involve various technical bits-and-bobs such as the ability to annotate and print pages or view page thumbnails (granted, not the world’s greatest technical advantage but it does allow for quick searching).

Finally, when you’re encouraging your students to read a little more, anything that makes it a slightly more pleasant experience is probably something we should welcome.

Theories of Crime and Deviance

January 20, 2025

Three short(ish) films dredged-up from The Archive (I’m not exactly sure which Archive but it probably sounds more-authentic than “found on an old neglected hard drive”) that provide a good overview of the major theoretical strands in the history of sociological theorising about crime and deviance.

1. The Social Causes of Crime introduces students to the idea that crime and deviance is not simply an individualistic pursuit – it has clear social causes. With contributions from leading sociologists such as Stan Cohen the film traces these causes from the classical criminology of the 19th century focused on the nature of the crime, to the positivist analyses popularised in the mid-20th century that focused on the nature of the criminal. This was expressed not just in terms of a “defective individuality” (the medicalisation of crime and deviance) but also a “defective environment” – the idea that the social causes of crime and criminality could be found by understanding the social environments that encouraged either conformity or deviance.

2. The Social Construction of Crime: Labelling, Radical Criminology and Left Realism: The second film starts by looking at the development of Interactionist approaches to crime as a social construction. The focus here was less on explaining crime and deviance as either a component of the individual and / or their social environment and more on looking at how individuals and social groups create crime and deviance through their reactions to the behaviour of others. Deviance, in other words, was in the eye of the beholder.

Click For More….

The Marshmallow Effect | 2

January 14, 2025

The first part of this post provided some background to Mischel et al’s (1990) Marshmallow Test and started to question the idea it could be used to predict things like future academic performance.

This concluding post looks in more depth at exactly why this should be the case…

From A to B…

There are two significant problems with the claim that delayed gratification is a cause of both improved academic achievement (what we can term the “soft hypothesis” because it only makes a limited, but still significant, claim about the Test) and a wide range of adult life benefits such as better health, higher incomes and the like (the “hard hypothesis”).

The first is that delayed gratification itself can’t be a cause of something like academic improvement. There has to be a mechanism, such as “willpower” or self-control, through which delayed gratification is expressed. In other words, the claim here is something along the lines that children who have high levels of self-control are able to delay gratification in the Marshmallow Test. This, in turn, explains why these children become academically successful – presumably through things like showing greater determination to overcome problems or having the self-discipline to study rather than use their time in some other way.

As Michio Kaku, a strong advocate of the predictive powers of the Test, puts it:

“The ability to delay gratification is a key predictor of success because it reflects self-control, discipline, and the ability to plan for the future. These traits are crucial for academic achievement, as they help students stay focused, manage their time effectively, and persist through challenges.”

Assuming these traits really are “crucial for academic achievement” – something that ideally needs to be tested rather than (conveniently) assumed – a second problem involves showing how “self-control” directly connects to and determines improved academic ability. In other words, we don’t actually know if those students who delayed gratification and performed well academically did so because they developed greater self-discipline, determination, grit and so forth. Proponents of the Marshmallow test simply assume that they do.

Now you see it…

Leaving aside the argument that advocates of the Marshmallow Test are simply assuming relationships they should be proving, the general takeaway here is that will-power is a hugely-important trait that not only determines our chances of educational success, it also determines things like our future body-mass index (the extent to which we are under or over weight), general health, happiness and income. More importantly, will-power is not only something that can be set at a very young age, it is seemingly resistant to change, in the sense that once you have it, it remains with you throughout your life – which, although it seems improbable, is something we’ll let pass. There are more-significant problems with the Test – the first of which is does it actually measure what it claims to measure?

This is a slightly-odd question because when we normally consider the validity of something like an experiment we’re generally looking at the relationship between certain pre-defined variables.

For example, if we wanted to know how a plant (the dependent variable) is affected by changes in light (the independent variable) we need to define exactly what we mean by “a plant”. If we didn’t accurately define it we might accidentally measure the effect of light on something we mistake for “a plant”, such as television (not a great example, but you probably get the drift).

In other words we assume the variables themselves aren’t up for debate.

In the case of the Marshmallow Test, however, recent neuroscientific developments (that obviously weren’t available to the original researchers) have suggested that what the original researchers thought they were measuring may not have been what they were actually measuring.

And that presents a Very Big Problem.

We’ve known for quite some time that different parts of the brain serve different functions but it wasn’t until it became possible to scan the brain to see images of what was actually happening inside our heads in real time that we could see exactly which parts were active under what conditions.

The Marshmallow Effect | 1

January 13, 2025

Although the concepts of immediate and delayed gratification have been widely used in both psychology and sociology for over 50+ years, perhaps their most well-known application has been through Mischel’s “Marshmallow Test”. This experiment has seen its influence spread from the world of academic psychology to the wider shores of both the popular imagination and, more-interestingly perhaps, into many schools and colleges.

To understand why this has been the case – and to suggest why this should be a cause for concern – we need to look briefly at the test itself and a range of contemporary psychological and sociological critiques.

What Is It?

Although the ideas underpinning the Marshmallow Test have, in one shape or another, been around since at least the late 1950’s – Mischel’s (borderline racist – maybe to be charitable they were different times…) 1958 study of children in Trinidad arguably being one of the first – the test itself involves a young (4 years old in Mischel’s 1990 study) child being presented with a desired object (such as a marshmallow) and told the examiner will leave the room for 15 minutes. If the child can delay eating the marshmallow until the examiner returns they will be given a second marshmallow to eat.

As Mischel put it, the main objective of these studies was “to create a conflict for young children between the temptation to stop the delay and the desire to persist for the preferred outcome when the latter required delay”.

Although the 1958 study looked specifically at cultural influences in the behaviour of two distinct ethnic groups (the “presence or absence of the father within the home, age, and socioeconomic status”), later studies focused more on individual gender differences based around measured differences in “willpower” or self-control. The 1990 study, for example, tested “male and female preschoolers in the Bing School of Stanford University, a preschool for mostly middle-class children of faculty and students from the Stanford University community”.

Why Is It Important?

As a stand-alone piece of research the Marshmallow Test is interesting, but what catapulted it into the wider public consciousness was the follow-up studies Mishcel et al (1990) carried-out when their original respondents were 16 and 18. More-specifically they found their respondents SAT scores reflected their ability to delay gratification: in a nutshell, the 4 year old students who were able to delay their gratification had higher levels of academic achievement at age 16 than those who didn’t.

To cut a long story short, the relationship between self-control and academic achievement not only became an accepted part of the discourse – if you wanted to be successful, both academically and in later life, you needed to develop and exercise self-control from a young age – it also spawned a small sub-genre of self-help manuals designed to teach “willpower” and, more-worryingly perhaps, found its way into the curriculum of a significant number of American schools.

Toasted?

So, is the hype justified? Let’s approach this from a few different directions, starting with some general observations about the Tests.

Study Smarter: Giving Your Ideas Legs

January 7, 2025

Whether you’re a teacher looking to instil in your students the idea there are a wide range of scientifically-demonstrated techniques you can use to improve your performance in examinations or a student looking for a quick fix to improve your recall and presentation skills, there’s no-doubt “study skills” (or whatever you prefer to call them) are an integral part of the learning process.

And while the ability to master these skills – from better note-taking to improved memory and increased productivity – isn’t going to magically transform you into a Grade A student without you putting in the academic mileage (despite what you may have seen on YouTube or, possibly even worse, TikTok) there’s no-doubt that combining an understanding of how to study (metacognition) with a strong study ethic (you attend classes, do the reading, contribute your ideas to lessons…) is a winning formula.

But, as I’ve just indicated with the two film clips above, not all study skills “secrets” or “tricks” are created equal. While most of the stuff you see on social media is banal (“concentrate more!”), weird (“take a cold shower after studying to boost your adrenaline and memory”) or quite possibly both (“treat yourself like a dog!”) there are things you can do to improve your ability to study effectively.

There may be, for example, times when you’re faced with writing a particularly obtuse and seemingly intractable essay.

Or times when you’re trying to get to grips with an idea introduced previously in class.

It’s in these situations that you need a little creative boost to get things moving in the right direction and one simple thing you can do to provide it is, according to a study by Oppezzo and Daniel (2014), to take a hike.

Literally rather than figuratively.

In a series of four experiments the researchers tested how different types of walking – inside on a treadmill and outside in the open air – impacted on an individual’s creatively (using Guilford’s Alternate Uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking).

And what they found was that even under different experimental conditions, some form of walking exercise resulted in a measurable creativity boost for a large majority of the participants. As they put it:

“The effects of outdoor stimulation and walking were separable. Walking opens up the free flow

of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity”.

Walking, it seems, can be good for both the Mind and the Body.

A Top 10 of Psychological Myths

December 9, 2024

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).

Read On…

Experiments: The Asch Test

December 2, 2024

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.

Play It Again, Sam*

November 30, 2024

Someone whose name escapes me once said:

“We do not remember days, we remember moments”.

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.

It will be our little shared moment.

Differential Achievement: The Raw and the Cooked

November 24, 2024

“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.

What they found has interesting implications:

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Sociology: The Core Concepts Trilogy

November 21, 2024

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:

Formal and informal rules
Norms
Values
Culture
Cultural diversity
Social construction
Cultural change
Globalisation
Global culture
Cultural homogeneity

socialisation and identity

BPS Teachers’ Toolkit

November 5, 2024

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.

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Introducing Sociology

October 31, 2024

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…

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Dynamic Learning: Procrastination

October 30, 2024

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.

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Steve Bassett’s Sociology Channel

October 15, 2024

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:

What Is Sociology
Social differentiation and Stratification
World Sociology (Globalisation)
Mass Media
Youth Culture
Sociological Theory
Political Sociology
Research Methods
Exam and Study Skills

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Learndojo Psychology

October 8, 2024

If you’re a teacher or student looking for AQA A-Level and GCSE Psychology resources then Learndojo is probably a pretty good place to start.

*Pdf versions of site sections are also available. For free if you’re a teacher.*

The site offers extensive Notes on a wide range of AS and A2 topics (Methods, Approaches, Issues, Debates and a whole heap more) plus a couple of sections on Practice Exam Questions and How to Write 16 Mark Essays. The accompanying Blog has more of the latter type of resources to investigate.

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.

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(Re)Discovering Sociology

September 27, 2024

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…*

Although when they say “papers” you only actually get one summary per issue, so if you’re hoping to build-up some sort of extensive easy-access library for your students, this might take some time: the previous issue, “The Unhomely of Homeschooling” appeared in October 2023, although to be fair, Issue 2 (“Feeling Time, Fashioning Age: Pre-teen Girls Negotiating Life Course and the Ageing Process Through Dress.”) was only 6 months prior to that and Issue 1 ‘It Felt Like a Little War’: Reflections on Violence against Alternative Subcultures” came out a little while before that. Or, to put it another way, I’m not exactly sure because I wasn’t paying attention.

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.

Having said that, this issue’s contribution is “Disability, Social Class and Stigma: An Intersectional Analysis of Disabled Young People’s School Experiences” and as with each of the other Issues you get a bonus interview with the authors (in this instance Dr Stella Chatzitheochari and Dr Angharad Butler-Rees). How useful you and your students find the latter is only something you – and indeed they – will know.

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Definition of the Situation: The Thomas Theorem

September 24, 2024

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 soci a l 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.

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Sociology Film Club

September 6, 2024

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.

So we did.

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How much do you really know about crime?

August 28, 2024

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.

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Investigating Sociology: PowerPoint

August 13, 2024

*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.

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The Spirit Level at 15

July 23, 2024

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 Guardian also has an article containing an interesting overview of the new research from the authors that you might find useful.

The Real CSI

July 13, 2024

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:

CSI 34: Did hate crime double after Brexit?

CSI 30: Cybercrime

CSI 29: Homelessness in the UK

CSI 27: Are British parents investing less time in their children?

CSI 25: Trends in educational mobility

CSI 21: Social class mobility in modern Britain

CSI 17: Who is at greatest risk of poor health?

CSI 15: The uneven distribution and decline of social capital in Britain

CSI 11: Is Class Inequality at KS4 decreasing?

CSI 9: Is the UK becoming more gender equal?

CSI 7: Has our level of education increased?

CSI 4: Is crime really falling?

Education: Control, Inequality and Innovation

June 9, 2024

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.

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Better Sleep: Better Grades

May 21, 2024

The 9^th 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.

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.

Sweet Dreams. are made of this…

If you want to delve deeper into the science of sleep, understand how important it is to your life as a student and maybe learn a little more about the benefits of sleep to student life, the article 40+ tips and tricks for students to embrace the power of sleep for wellbeing and learning is worth a read.

Spaced Repetition

May 14, 2024

The 8^th 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.

Psychology OER PowerPoints

May 11, 2024

As with their Sociology counterpart, Lumen Learning also supply a range of Psychology PowerPoint Presentations to support their (free) online Psychology course and complement the equally-free Openstax Introduction to Psychology Textbook.

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.

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Sociology OER PowerPoints

May 10, 2024

If you’re interested in free textbooks – of either the Sociology or Psychology variety – you may well have come across the Openstax Introduction to Sociology textbook published by Lumen Learning.

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.

Or something.

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Power Notes

April 24, 2024

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.

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:

“You’ll remember better (and understand much better) if you try and re-organise the material you’ve been given in your own way” (Make study more effective, the easy way: 2011).

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.

How to create power notes…

Revision Tips

April 17, 2024

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”).

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Defining Religion | 2: PowerPoint

April 12, 2024

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.

Defining Religion: PowerPoint

April 2, 2024

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:

Background image of a church and title "Defining Religion"

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 scroll 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.

Structuration: A Bluffer’s Guide

March 29, 2024

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.

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 argues structure 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.

Anticipation Guides

March 27, 2024

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.

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.

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PowerPoint: The ABC of Investigating

March 18, 2024

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).

Podcasts with Pictures: Learning Academy

March 14, 2024

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 19^th 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.~~ and these have duly appeared in 2025. Which just goes to show. Something.

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…).

Origins of Sociology: PowerPoint

March 6, 2024

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).

Situational Action Theory

February 23, 2024

Click to download copy of SAT — Situational Action Theory

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.

Both an awareness of the significance of these two levels and, perhaps more importantly, how they are integrated is, for Wikstrom, the key to understanding youth crime (an idea we explore in more detail in subsequent posts: Situational Action Theory: Crime and Social Disadvantage and Crime and Social Disadvantage: The Evidence).

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).

Crime and Social Disadvantage: The Evidence

February 22, 2024

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 21^st 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.

In this final part of what no-one is calling the SAT Trilogy we can examine some of this evidence (the previous parts – Situational Action Theory and Situational Action Theory: Crime and Social Disadvantage – are also available if you want to read them).

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.

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Situational Action Theory: Crime and Social Disadvantage

February 16, 2024

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.

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.

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