This scenario-based quiz is designed for Cambridge OCR A Level Sociology and focuses on the Youth subcultures specification point on subcultures in relation to social class. OCR’s delivery guide lists this as part of the core content for the youth subcultures option and recommends that students use illustrative examples of subcultures to explore how and why youth culture is formed, including changes across time and links to class. The guide even points to examples such as skinheads in the 1970s and 1980s when thinking about subcultures and social class.
The activity uses one fictional scenario to help students apply some of the class-based explanations and examples OCR commonly rewards, including CCCS / Hall and Jefferson, Hebdige, A. Cohen, Cloward and Ohlin, Miller and Willis. OCR’s own mark scheme for questions on whether youth subcultures are based on social class also lists examples such as Teddy boys, skinheads, punk, anti-school subcultures, and class-based explanations linked to status frustration, resistance and illegitimate opportunity structures, while also allowing evaluation that not all youth subcultures are class-based.
Subcultures and Social Class: Scenario-Based MCQ Quiz
This activity uses one realistic scenario to help students apply ideas about social class, youth subcultures, resistance, status frustration, school, style and peer-group identity.
Scenario: Callum is 17 and lives on a large estate in a town where several factories have closed over the last twenty years. He and his friends spend most evenings together in the precinct, wear a recognisable style, listen to the same music and joke about school being “for other people”. Teachers describe them as unmotivated, but Callum says that within his friendship group, acting tough and dismissing school earns respect.
Some of the group admire older local men who left school early, do cash-in-hand jobs and talk about “looking after your own”. Callum says the group’s clothes, humour and attitude make them feel different from middle-class students at the local sixth form, who are seen as “trying too hard”. A local newspaper article describes the group as a problem, but Callum says their style and behaviour are really about belonging, pride and not being looked down on.
One sociology student in Callum’s class says the group is a reaction to blocked opportunities and class inequality. Another says youth subcultures today are much more fluid and not always rooted in class in the same way as older studies suggested.
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