A-Level Sociology: Theory and Methods

Theory and methods runs through the whole course (on AQA's specification, for example, it is examined alongside education in Paper 1 and alongside crime and deviance in Paper 3), and a methods question can arrive attached to any topic on the specification. What it tests is not whether you can define reliability, but whether you can look at a stated aim and a stated constraint and say which method survives both — and what that choice costs.

So the method questions here always give you all three things. A researcher with four weeks, no travel budget and a whole county to cover is not choosing between good and bad methods; she is choosing breadth and paying for it in depth, and the question asks you to name the price. A researcher building rapport with homeless participants through unstructured interviews is trading consistency for truthfulness, which is the reliability-against-validity distinction stated as a decision rather than as a pair of definitions.

Three questions are on perspectives, and one of them is deliberately an argument inside a perspective rather than between two: a sociologist who locates the family's oppression in patriarchy and one who locates it in capitalism are both feminists, and knowing that is what separates a top answer from a competent one. The others cover a functionalist account of socialisation and the postmodernist rejection of grand theory.

The remaining questions cover stratified sampling against a stated population, the Hawthorne effect, the interpretivist objection to official statistics, and the ethical problem that covert research cannot solve.

Every researcher and study described in a scenario is invented; real sociologists are named only for claims genuinely theirs. Nothing is taken from any exam board specification, past paper or mark scheme.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with any exam board and it is not an exam centre.

• Match a method to a stated research aim and a stated practical constraint, and name what the choice costs
• Use reliability and validity as a trade-off in a real decision rather than as a pair of definitions
• Attribute an argument to the perspective that makes it, including where two strands of one perspective disagree
• Choose a sampling technique that fits the population described
• State the interpretivist objection to official statistics as a claim about what can be known
• Identify the ethical problem covert research cannot design its way out of

A researcher (invented for this question) wants to find out how many hours a week sixth-formers across a whole county spend in paid work. She has four weeks and no budget for travel. Which method fits both the aim and the constraint, and what does choosing it cost her? — one of ten scenarios written for this set.