3 | Socialisation and Identity

The third chapter in what’s rapidly becoming something of a legendary giveaway (in my mind at least) is one that applies the concept of socialisation to the development of a range of social and personal identities in contemporary societies (or as contemporary as things get, given this was first published in 2012). This chapter on […]

2 | The Process of Socialisation

Chapter 2 builds on the “culture material” in the first chapter by exploring how culture is created in one of two ways: 1. Through the influence of instincts, a largely non-sociological (‘nature’) approach to understanding culture. 2. Through the influence of our social environment, a conventional sociological approach that outlines different types and agencies of […]

GCSE AQA Sociology Revision Guides

I recently came across this interesting set of guides for the AQA Spec., written by Lydia Hiraide of The BRIT School. The guides are dated 2013 – and although I’m not sure how they might fit into the latest Specification, I’m guessing there’s going to be a lot here that’s still relevant. You can download […]

GCSE Revision Resources

While it’s probably fair to say that teacher-created GCSE revision resources are a bit thin on the ground (and take a bit of finding), there are useful resources “out there” if you’re prepared to do a lot of searching. To save you the time and trouble, here’s some I found earlier (the quality’s a bit […]

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 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 […]