Introducing Geographic Offender Profiling
For students of crime and criminology, not to mention psychology and sociology, Geographic Offender Profiling is a relatively recent development in our attempts to understand the behaviour of serial offenders – from burglars to rapists to murderers. Unlike it’s Criminal Offender Profiling counterpart, Geographic Profiling is less concerned with the psychology of the individual offender […]
Student Standby’s: Transferable Concepts and Transgressive Thinking
The idea of a Student Standby can be best-expressed as a tip, trick or technique that can be used to generate ideas and information quickly and efficiently, particularly but not exclusively in time-pressured situations such as an exam. One such Standby I’ve posted about previously is the transferrable concept – a key idea students can […]
Family Demography: is average good enough?
When we look at demographic concepts like “life expectancy” it’s not unusual to see statistics that show women, on average, have a longer life expectancy than men – something that holds true for just about every country in the world. This observation can be explained in a variety of ways, from the explicitly natural at […]
Tutor2U Teaching Activities
As many of you will already know, Tutor2U produces a shed-load of revision-type resources, from workbooks to flashcards to complete courses. Most of these can be purchased for varying amounts of cash (all major credit cards also accepted) but there’s plenty of stuff you can get for free in exchange for an email address (the […]
If It’s Important, Then I’m Curious
As you may or may not appreciate, I’m a firm believer in two things: 1. There is no “secret formula” to helping students reach their full academic potential (despite what various forms of magical thinking – both analogue and, more-recently, digital – might claim). 2. If you’re able to stimulate a student’s curiosity in a […]
Crime in England and Wales: March 2022
While the latest set of Official Crime Statistics covering England and Wales come with what should, by now, be the familiar methodological qualifications concerning both their reliability – or, more pertinently perhaps, their unreliability – and validity, they are nevertheless useful as general indicators of crime patterns. As such, they’re worth perusing if you have […]
Sociology: No. 5 with a Bullet…
We’ve been doing a bit of research on the rising popularity of Criminology, mainly it has to be said in Wales (the popularity, not the research) and speculating about why no English exam board currently offers the subject at a-level (WJEC currently offer an a-level equivalent Diploma that’s recognised by UCAS, but it’s mainly only […]
Methods in Context: Crime in England and Wales
Keeping abreast of the various statistical sources and data on crime can be both time-consuming and somewhat confusing for teachers and students – both in terms of the volume of data and the reliability and validity of different data sources. For these reasons the Office for National Statistics statistical bulletin is a brilliant resource for […]
Education and Setting
It’s probably fair to say that most discussion of concepts like setting, streaming and banding in a-level sociology focus on things like the basic principles involved or the social and psychological consequences of different kinds of “ability grouping”. While this is, of course, a perfectly valid set of concerns (pun sort-of intended), there tends to […]
Manification and Mentrification
Read the following and, within 5 seconds of finishing, provide an answer: “A father and his son are involved in a car accident, as a result of which the father is very badly injured and his son is rushed to hospital for emergency surgery. However, the surgeon takes one look at the boy and says […]
Nine Family Trends
To keep you up-to-date, demographically-speaking, with all the latest family facts from the UK Office for National Statistics. 1: Families are increasing. In 2021 there were 19 million families, a 6.5% increase since 2011. 2: Households are increasing too. And at almost the same rate as families. In 2021 there were 28 million households in […]
Researching Media Inequalities: Beyond Bechdel
While the Bechdel Test – does a film contain two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than men? – is a useful way of highlighting broad gender inequalities in the media, it wasn’t designed to capture anything but the most basic forms of gender inequality, particularly and most-notably in Hollywood […]
Scaffolding for Students
The idea of “scaffolding” – providing some kind of tangible support for students when they are asked to learn something new, as opposed to simply “throwing stuff out there” and trusting that they get it – is normally traced to the work of psychologist Jerome Bruner in the mid-1970s and his social interactionist argument, familiar […]
Victim Survey Report
The study of crime victims has, until quite recently, been a largely-neglected aspect of policing in England and Wales (and everywhere else come to that) so it may surprise you to know that since the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), there have been a succession of Victims’ Commissioners whose role is: “To promote […]
Key Studies and Maths in Psychology
While students who decide to take Psychology at A-level or in High School may be generally aware it involves “some sort of mathematical component”, as the British Psychological Society perceptively notes: “Students beginning A-Level psychology are often disheartened to learn that mathematics is an inescapable part of the subject. Many students are drawn to psychology […]