Sociology Families and Households Glossary

Sociology Families and Households Glossary


Ageism: The negative stereotyping of people on the basis of their age, e.g. are often portrayed as vulnerable, incompetent or irrational, as a burden to society.

·      Banding: A form of streaming.

·      Bourgeoisie: A Marxist term for the capitalist class, the owners of the means of production (factories, machinery, raw materials, land, etc). Marx argues that the bourgeoisie’s ownership of the means of production also gives them political and ideological power.

·      Case Study: Research that examines a single case or example such as a single school, family or workplace, often using several methods or sources.

·      Childhood: A socially defined age-status. There are major differences in how childhood is defined, both historically and between cultures. Western societies today define children as vulnerable and segregate them from the adult world, but in the past they were part of adult society from an early age. These differences show that childhood is a social construction.

·      Civil Partnership: The 2004 Civil Partnership Act has given same-sex couples similar legal rights to married couples n respect of pensions, inheritance, tenancies, and property.

·      Close-ended Questions: Questions used in a social survey that allow only a limited choice of answers from a pre-set list. They produce quantitative data and the answers are often pre-coded for ease of analysis. An example is ‘Will you vote in the next election?’ where the choices are Yes, No, Don’t Know.

·      Comparative Method: A research method that compares two social groups that are alike apart from one factor. For example, Durkheim compared two groups that were identical apart from their religion in order to find out the effect of religion on suicide rates. The method is often used as an alternative to experiments.

·      Conjugal roles: The roles played by husband and wife. Segregated conjugal are where the husband is breadwinner and the wife is homemaker, with leisure spent separately. In joint conjugal roles, husband and wife each perform both roles and spend their leisure time together.

·      Content Analysis: A method of analysing the content of documents and media output to find out how often and in what ways different types of people or events appear. For example, the Glasgow University Media Group (1967) used content analysis to reveal bias in how television new reported strikes.

·      Control Group: In experiments, scientists compare a control group and an experimental group that are identical in all respects. Unlike the experimental group, the control group is not exposed to the variable under investigation and so provides a baseline against which any changes in the experimental group can be compared.

·      Correlation: When two or more factors or variables vary together; e.g. there is a correlation between low social class and low educational achievement. However, the existence of a correlation between two variables does not necessarily prove that one causes the other. It may simply be coincidence.

·      Cultural Capital: The knowledge, attitudes, values, language, tastes and abilities that the middle class transmit to their children. Bourdieu argues that educational success is largely based on possession of cultural capital, thus giving the middle-class children an advantage.

·      Cultural Deprivation: The theory that many working-class and black children are inadequately socialised and therefore lack the ‘right’ culture needed for educational success; e.g. their families do not instil the value of deferred gratification.

·      Culture: All those things that are learnt and shared by a society or group of people and transmitted from generation to generation through socialisation. It includes shared norms, values, knowledge, beliefs, and skills.

·      Death Rate: The number of deaths per thousand of the population per year.

·      Demography: The study of population, including birth, death, fertility and infant mortality rates, immigration and emigration, and age structure as well as the reasons for changes in these.

·      Dependency Culture: Where people assume that the state will support them, rather than relying on their own efforts and taking responsibilities for their families. The New Right see the welfare state as over-generous, encouraging people to remain unemployed and dependent on benefits, and as responsible for the growing number of lone-parent families and rising crime rate.

·      Dependency Ratio: The relationship between the size of the working population and the non-working or dependent population.

·      Deviance: Behaviour that does not conform to the norms of a society or group. Deviance is a social construction (defined or created by social groups). Deviance is relative: what counts as deviant varies between groups and cultures and over time.

·      Differentiation: Distinguishing or creating differences between individuals or groups. In education, streaming is a form of differentiation that distinguishes between pupils on the basis of ability. In the study of stratification differentiation refers to the process of distinguishing between people on the basis of class, gender, ethnic, age etc differences.