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.
Investigating Education and Ethnic Identity
How do sociologists actually turn an idea into a piece of research? In this interactive activity, you take on the role of a sociological researcher investigating how education may influence the ethnic identities of pupils. Rather than simply choosing a research method, you will work through the different stages of a real research investigation and…
What Do Sociologists Actually Do?
If sociology is the study of society, what does a sociologist actually do? Do they sit around thinking about capitalism? Do they spend their time reading statistics? Do they interview people? Do they watch how people behave? Do they advise governments? Do they expose inequality? Or do they simply spend their careers arguing with other…
What Is Sociology? Understanding the Society Behind the Individual
One of the first problems sociology students encounter is that sociology appears to be about almost everything. Families? Sociology. Education? Sociology. Crime? Sociology. Social media, poverty, gender, ethnicity, religion, politics, work, youth culture, inequality and relationships? All sociology. So what actually makes sociology a separate academic discipline? The answer lies less in what sociologists study…
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