This scenario-based quiz helps students apply AQA A Level Sociology ideas about poverty, gender and family structure to one realistic example. As students work through the questions, they are asked to connect the scenario to concepts such as the feminisation of poverty, division of domestic labour, lone-parent families, benefit erosion, inheritance, childless families and single-person households, while also evaluating competing explanations such as welfare dependency.
Poverty, Gender and Family Size: Scenario-Based MCQ Quiz
This activity uses one fictional scenario to help students apply concepts about gendered poverty, family structure, family size, wealth distribution and contrasting explanations of poverty.
Scenario: Mia is 34 and lives in rented accommodation with her three children aged 4, 7 and 11. She works 18 hours a week as a care assistant, but childcare costs and caring responsibilities make full-time work difficult. She does most of the cooking, cleaning, school communication and budgeting herself. Her ex-partner’s maintenance payments are irregular.
Mia says that after rent, food and travel costs, her wages and benefits do not stretch as far as they used to. Her widowed aunt Sheila lives alone on a small pension and often cuts back on heating. Meanwhile Mia’s brother Dan and his partner Leah, who do not have children, both work full time and recently used money from Leah’s grandmother to put down a deposit on a flat.
In a local newspaper, one columnist argues that some families become dependent on welfare. A community worker disagrees and says many people move between low-paid work and benefits because insecure jobs, caring responsibilities and family size make poverty hard to escape.
Fishbowl Debate: Which Feminism Best Explains Inequality?
One of the most useful ways to help students evaluate feminism is to get them comparing different feminist explanations directly. Students often understand the basic differences between liberal feminism, radical feminism and Marxist feminism, but find it harder to judge which explanation is strongest when applied to real patterns of social inequality. The Fishbowl Debate…
New Right Claim Clinic: Evaluating Claims About Family, Gender and Ethnicity
he New Right Claim Clinic is a classroom activity designed to help students move beyond simply describing New Right arguments and begin testing them sociologically. It works particularly well for Cambridge OCR A Level Sociology: Understanding Social Inequalities, because it encourages students to identify assumptions, consider missing structural factors and use evidence to evaluate claims…
Functionalism Case Diagnosis
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