Defining and Measuring Crime
Some Notes that have been hanging around on my hard drive doing nothing useful that I’ve finally got around to posting. There are plenty more where these came from but whether or not I’ll ever get around to digging them out is anyone’s guess. Defining Crime and Deviance Deviance ‘To deviate’ means ‘to stray from […]
A New Year and a New Resolution
Active Listening: The Film
Anchoring the Abstract: Curiosity
One of the things I’ve found students find difficult about subjects like Sociology is the frequently abstract nature of the ideas they’re being asked to understand and apply. Ideas that range from the relatively simple (socialisation, identity, culture…) to the not-quite-so-simple (positivism, postmodernism, methodology…) and the downright difficult (risk society, hegemony, autopoiesis …) And since […]
A Whole Bundle of Risk
I think it’s fair to say Beck’s concepts of Risk and Risk Society aren’t well-covered at A-level, partly because his ideas are difficult to get across to students and partly because, not to put too fine a point on things, they’re not easy to understand and encapsulate in a few pithy points. Be that as […]
Research Methods: Consuming Passions?
Some time ago I was asked by a publisher (who shall remain nameless because I’ve mercifully forgotten their actual name) to run an introductory computing course for sociology teachers. I initially agreed because it was a topic that interested me and the money they were paying was okay. Always the most important consideration. Or so […]
Approaches to Health and Illness: Biomedical and Social
Quite by chance, the other day I came across a very useful diagrammatic representation of the debate between biomedical and social approaches to health and illness. Probably when I was looking for something else. You know how it is. The diagram is based on the American County Health Rankings National Findings Report created by The […]
Review: Equity in Education
In their new book Equity in Education Professor Lee Elliot Major and Emily Briant offer a practical guide for teachers looking to play their part in levelling the playing field of learning. When I used to teach about equality of opportunity in education I’d start things off by choosing the smallest student in the class […]
The Sociological Detectives: Creating Curiosity
As you may have noticed if you’ve looked at our latest Psychology releases, we’ve recently turned our collective attention towards the topic of metacognition which, in basic terms, involves understanding how and why students learn. Or, equally-importantly, why they fail to learn. Either way, the first batch of films in what promises to be a […]
GCSE Sociology Revision Booklets
From time-to-time I come across GCSE Sociology resources that I think are worth passing-on to teachers and students and these two documents are no exception. Because if they were I wouldn’t be linking to them. Obviously. The first is a Revision Pack created by C Pym of Whalley Range High School. It covers the 2022 […]
British Social Attitudes: Domestic Work
The latest British Attitudes Survey on Gender Roles (and domestic labour in particular).
This is complemented by a short film (either 30 minutes or the 3 minute extract) on the Wages for Housework movement that developed out of feminist arguments in the early 1970’s.