EySKuBe: The Addiction Simulation
To complement the free chapter on addictive behaviour you can give your students a taste of addictive behaviour with this simple – and harmless – simulation. This was originally created by Todd Campbell (Texas A & M University) and the instructions here are filtered through the work of Linda Walsh (University of Northern Iowa) Purpose The […]
Sociological Detectives: Evidence Summary Sheet
To complement the Theory Summary sheet you can combine it with the Evidence Summary sheet that performs a similar function within the Sociological Detectives sim. In this respect it provides: A basic structure for students to follow when making notes about the different kinds of evidence they can use to support or question theoretical explanations […]
Sociological Detectives: Theory Summary Sheet
If you’re using the Sociological Detectives sim you might find this simple Theory Summary sheet useful because it provides a couple of helpful things: A basic structure for students to follow when examining different theories of differential educational achievement. It allows them to record information in a simple, consistent, way. If you’re sharing information around […]
The Sociological Detectives: DEA
In this sim students take the role of “sociological detectives” investigating the reasons for differential educational achievement. Broadly, the sim involves: identifying a range of theories that can be used to explain differential educational achievement across and within categories of class, gender and ethnicity. identifying and collecting evidence that can be used to test (support […]
7 Sims in 7 Days – Day 7: Cards, Cakes and Class
The final offering in what no-one’s calling “The Wonderful Week of Sims” is designed to give students practical experience of social inequality based on the unequal distribution of economic resources (wealth) – the eponymous “cake” of the title. While this can be an end in itself – a central part of the sim is the […]
Seven Sims in Seven Days – Day 5: Trial by Jury
As with some of the others in this series, “Trial by Jury” is a building block sim that gives you a basic template that can be used to organise and run a wide range of possible simulations. In basic terms if there’s an area of the Sociology / Psychology course that involves comparing and contrasting […]
7 Sims in 7 Days – Day 4: The Anomie Within
This short (5 – 10 minute) sim can be used whenever you want to introduce the concept of anomie, such as if you’re introducing Merton’s Strain Theory or looking at Garfinkel’s breaching experiments. The package includes a little bit of background on breaching experiments and a couple of different anomie variations – mild and strong […]
7 Sims in 7 Days – Day 3: Window Shopping / The Art of Walking
Although these are two different sims I’ve included them together because both involve thinking about the “rules of everyday social interaction”, albeit in different ways: Window shopping is designed to encourage students to think systematically about the “underlying rules” of relatively mundane behavior. It can be used to simulate sociological research (such as field experiments […]
Seven Sims in Seven Days – Day 2: Cultural Deprivation
Cultural deprivation, as an explanation for differences in educational achievement (particularly those of class and ethnicity), is something of a Vampire Theory in the sense that no matter how many times sociologists have tried to kill it off it refuses to die. It is, for example, an explanation that continues to have currency among UK […]
Seven Sims in Seven Days – Day 1: The Urinal Game
Background We can illustrate the idea of cultural learning (and show how the concepts of roles, values and norms are inter-related into the bargain) using Proxemic theory – the study of how people understand and use space in a cultural context – originally developed by Hall (1966). Although we are born with the ability to […]