This scenario-based quiz helps students apply AQA A Level Sociology ideas about poverty, social class and ethnicity to one realistic example. As students work through the questions, they are asked to connect the scenario to key concepts such as wealth and income, the poverty trap, the cycle of deprivation, culture of poverty, welfare dependency, tax avoidance, tax evasion, tax relief, and the living wage, while also considering how racism in employment, discrimination, educational outcomes and intersectionality shape poverty differently across ethnic groups.
The activity also introduces students to contrasting sociological explanations of poverty. Students are encouraged to distinguish between New Right views linked to Murray and Marsland, and structural explanations associated with writers such as Townsend, Lister, Alcock, Miliband and Westergaard and Resler. It also draws on research commonly used in discussions of ethnic inequality, including Flaherty et al, Platt, Kenway and Palmer, and Barnard and Turner, helping students see that poverty is not simply about low income, but about wider patterns of inequality, power and disadvantage.
Social Class, Ethnicity and Poverty: Scenario-Based MCQ Quiz
This activity uses one realistic fictional scenario to help students apply ideas about class inequality, ethnic inequality, poverty, wealth, income and competing explanations of disadvantage.
Scenario: Amina is 29 and works full time in a supermarket warehouse. She lives with her partner and their young son in a privately rented flat on the edge of a large city. Her wages cover basic bills, but after rent, travel and food, there is very little left. When her son needed a school trip and new uniform, she borrowed money from her sister.
Amina has applied for several better-paid office jobs, but she feels she is often overlooked despite having the right qualifications. Her older brother Imran says some employers make assumptions about names, accents and “fitting in” with customers. A local charity report says child poverty is especially high in some minority ethnic households because low pay, housing costs and insecure work overlap.
In the same town, a property developer who owns three houses pays an accountant to reduce his tax bill using legal tax reliefs. A newspaper columnist argues that poverty continues because some families become dependent on benefits and pass on a culture of poverty. A community organiser disagrees and says poverty is better explained by low wages, unequal opportunities, discrimination in employment and the way wealth is concentrated at the top.
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