Paper 2: Studies

Question 1

Outline Rosenthal and Jacobson’s study

Answer 1

• pupils were given an IQ test
• interviewers identified that some pupils were likely to spurt academically
• however, the students were randomly selected
• the pupils were re tested and the ‘spurters’ did do better
• proves self-fulfilling prophecy
• field experiment
• produced qualitative data
• lacked reliability, representativity & generalisability
• caused ethical concerns of deception

Question 2

Outline the UK national census

Answer 2

• a survey that is sent out to every UK household every 10 years
• includes basic information about who lives there, employment, education

Question 3

Outline young & willmotts study

Answer 3

• researched extended families in East London
• structured interviews
• formal employed interviewers
• concluded that the family has become more equal over time & there are more joint conjugal roles

Question 4

Outline the Milgram study

Answer 4

• laboratory experiment that investigated how far ordinary people would go in obeying an authority figure, even when it conflicted with their moral conscious
• actors were the ‘learners’, participants were the ‘teachers’
• participants were told to administer a voltage shock that increased every time if learners got the answer wrong
• shocks were fake but ‘teachers’ thought they were real
• however, no control group
• ethical issues: deception, harm (psychological distress), lack of a right to withdraw (prods egged on participants by telling them they had to continue)
• low validity (scenario was lab based)
• high reliability
• low representativity (only used 40 men)
• conclusion: obedience is driven by the situation and because of authority

Question 5

Outline Dobash and Dobash’s study

Answer 5

• researched domestic violence
• used police reports and unstructured interviews
• qualitative, interpretive approach
• 109 in depth interviews (practical issue of time but high validity)
• allowed the researchers to create a safer and more comfortable environment for participants and ask further questions
• allowed them to discover things the researchers did not mention - built rapport & verstehen
• triangulation: by examining police reports and court records to see how the justice system handled these cases
• concluded that violence is systemic, not isolated
• marriage reinforces male power
• argued that there was a dark side to family
• economic dependence made it difficult for women to leave

Question 6

Outline Oakley’s ‘the sociology of housework’ study

Answer 6

• outlined women during pregnancy and after they gave birth
• used instructed interviews that were long and in depth
• helped her build rapport & verstehen, making it feel less like a transaction and more of an in depth interview
• women became interested and later called her to give more information
• conclusion: becoming a mother is a major, often traumatic life event dominated by medical control and social expectations rather than a woman’s own experience

Question 7

Outline Humphrey’s study

Answer 7

• studied men who engaged in homosexual acts in public restrooms
• conducted in the 1960s when homosexual acts were illegal and highly stigmatised in the US
• covert participant observation (he posed as the lookout who coughs when police or strangers approach, allowing him to observe hundreds)
• took notes on routines, signals and the kind of people involved & visited them at their homes a year later
• disguised as a health service researcher (more deception), he interviewed men about their personal lives (marital status jobs, etc) to get data
• 54% of his subjects were married men living with their wives, and many were socially and politically conservative (debunked stereotypes)
• highly valid
• no informed consent, violation of privacy, deception

Question 8

Give an overview of Durkheim’s suicide study

Answer 8

• studied whether suicide is an individual act or based on social factors
• positivist approach including official statistics (analysing quantitative data from various European countries) - secondary data analysis
• identified that suicide rates are very constant over time, suggesting they were caused by social structure rather than individual psychology
• ev: concepts like intergration and regulation weren’t operationalised, making his findings hard to verify

Question 9

Give an overview of Willis Learning to Labour study

Answer 9

• studied why working-class boys actively chose working class jobs and chose to reject the education system
• qualitative, ethnographic approach over two years to gain a deep understanding of the subculture
• overt participant observation (of them in classrooms, during leisure time, and in career classes)
• unstructured interviews & group discussions (used to understand their personal interpretation of school and their future - explaining this in their own terms)
• triangulation: spoke to teachers, carers, parents)
• high validity: long term immersive nature that allowed him to gain depth and build verstehen
• low representativeness, generalisability & reliability (small sample size)
• researcher bias: Willis’ prescience would’ve triggered the Hawthorne effect, although he argued that a two year observation period meant the boys would eventually stop caring
• ethical concerns: witnessed illegal activities (vandalism, bullying,fighting) but did not report them

Question 10

Give an overview of the crime survey of England and Wales

Answer 10

• structured survey that measures the amount of crime in England and wales, assess public attitudes toward the police and track long term trends
• primarily face-to-face
• quantitative positivist research
• large scale representative sample - high reliability and generalisability
• gives insight to the dark figure of crime
• can be invalid if respondednts don’t accurately remember

Question 11

Give an overview of ‘Venkatesh: Gang Leader for a day’ study

Answer 11

• aimed to understand the social structure of the gang and its role in the community
• overt participant observation
• ethnographic work
• collected data from the gang, spoke to gang members, resident and prostitutes
• the long duration (7 years) allowed deep rapport building fur understanding illegal behaviours
• low reliability and generalisability (cannot be easily replicated)
• concerns regarding safety (being held hostage)

Question 12

Outline an overview of ‘Townsend - Poverty’ study

Answer 12

• wanted to measure the true extent of poverty in the UK (as he argued that government measurements were too low)
• argues that people are in poverty if they cannot participate in the typical activities, customs and diet of their current society
• poverty is being excluded from ordinary living patterns
• large scale survey/questionnaire administered to over 2000 households
• high validity: measured lifestyle as well as financial data
• high reliability: large sample size