According to recent studies, China is home to one of the best education systems in the world, while Britain is trailing a long way behind. In some studies Chinese students are three years ahead of British students in reading and writing ability.
China is well known for its ‘tough education’ methods, but can these methods be used to improve the performance of British students? In a recent BBC documentary: ‘Are our kids tough enough? Chinese school’ a field experiment was conducted to find out.
Five Chinese teachers took over the education of a class of fifty Year 9 pupils at Bohunt School in Liphook and taught them (in one class of 50!) using Chinese teaching methods for a month, and then tested in English, Maths, Science and Mandarin, and the results compared to other students who remained receiving a more typical British Education.
The main features of the Chinese School consisted of:
The school day being 12 hours long with a 7 a.m. start consisting of a flag raising ceremony and outdoor exercises.
In the classroom, most lessons were essentially lectures. Teachers stood at the front writing the theory on the board, while the students (were supposed to) take notes and learn.
PE was a compulsory – and students were timed, tested and ranked against each other.
Results
The ultimate test of the experiment was to see if Chinese teaching methods improved educational performance – which they did (or at least appeared to have – see below). Students who attended the Chinese School for four weeks scored about 10% points (on average) higher in Mandarin, Maths and Science and they also did better in English, but with a smaller margin.
The experiment also revealed that there was something of a culture clash – those students were not particularly self-disciplined or well-behaved did not respond well to a Chinese style of teaching which is less student-centered and not as inclined to encourage individualism.
Limitations of the field experiment
I say that the Chinese-School kids achieved better test scores – what we’re not told is how much they improved, or what their ability was compared to the control group. I’m assuming all this was controlled for.
The Hawthorne Effect might apply – the improved results might be a result of the students knowing their involved in an experiment (and knowing they’re on TV) or the better results might simply exposing the kids to something different, rather than it being about those exact Chinese methods (a change is as good as a rest!)
It’s also not clear how representative this school is – Bohunt seems to be a brilliant school, enlightened (which is reflected in getting involved in this whole experiment in the first place). Would you get the same findings somewhere else?
Ethics: Some (wrong) individuals might try and argue that some of the children experienced harm to their self-esteem by being ranked in PE (other (right) individuals might argue this is just life, tough, get over it kiddo).
How useful are official statistics for understanding differences in educational achievement by social class, gender and ethnicity?
How do GCSE results vary by social class, gender and ethnicity?
The data below is taken from either the Department for Education’s document – Key Stage 4 performance 2019 (Revised), or Gov.uk ‘ethnicity facts and figures‘. The later shows data from 2017/18 (at time of writing this), but it is much more accessible than the ‘Key Stage 4 document’.
Firstly – GENDER – Girls outperformed boys in all headline measures in 2019.
For example 46.6% of girls achieved both English and Maths at grade 5 or above, compared to only 40.0% of boys, and girls are much more likley to be entered for the Ebacc than boys (45.9% compared to 34.3%
Secondly – ETHNICITY – Chinese pupils are the highest achieving group. 75.3% of Chinese pupils achieved a ‘strong pass’ (grade 5 or above) in English and Maths, with Indian pupils being the second highest achieving group, at 62%
Black Caribbean pupils have the lowest achievement of any ‘large’ ethnic minority group, with only 26.9% achieving a grade 5 or above in English and Maths
Gypsy/ Roma and Irish Traveller pupils have the lowest levels of achievement with only 9.95 and 5.3% respectively achieving a strong pass in English and Maths.
Thirdly – SOCIAL CLASS – Here, instead of social class we need to use the Department for Education’s ‘disadvantaged pupils’ category, which is the closest we’ve got as a proxy for social class, but isn’t quite the same!
The DFE says that “Pupils are defined as disadvantaged if they are known to have been eligible for free school meals in the past six years , if they are recorded as having been looked after for at least one day or if they are recorded as having been adopted from care”.
In 2019, only 24.7% of disadvantages pupils achieved English and Maths GCSE at grade 5 or above, compared to almost 50% of all other pupils, meaning disadvantaged pupils are only half as likely to get both of these two crucial GCSEs.
Some Strengths of Official Statistics on Educational Achievement by Pupil Characteristic
ONE – Good Validity (as far as it goes) – These data aren’t collected by the schools themselves – so they’re not a complete work of fiction, they are based on external examinations or coursework which is independently verified, so we should be getting a reasonably true representation of actual achievement levels. HOWEVER, we need to be cautious about this.
TWO – Excellent representativeness – We are getting information on practically every pupil in the country, even the ones who fail!
THREE – They allow for easy comparisons by social class, gender and ethnicity. These data allow us to see some pretty interesting trends – As in the table below – the difference between poor Chinese girls and poor white boys stands out a mile… (so you learn straight away that it’s not just poverty that’s responsible for educational underachievement)
FOUR – These are freely available to anyone with an internet connection
FIVE – They allow the government to track educational achievement and develop social policies to target the groups who are the most likely to underachieve – These data show us (once you look at it all together) for example, that the biggest problem of underachievement is with white, FSM boys.
Some Disadvantages of the Department for Education’s Stats on Educational Achievement
ONE – If you look again at the DFE’s Key Stage four statistics, you’ll probably notice that it’s quite bewildering – there are so many different measurements that it obscures the headline data of ‘who achieved those two crucial GCSEs’.
When it comes to the ‘Attainment 8’ or ‘Progress 8’ scores, it is especially unclear what this means to anyone other than a professional teacher – all you get is a number, which means nothing to non professionals.
TWO – changes to the way results are reported mean it’s difficult to make comparisons over time. If you go back to 2015 then the standard was to achieve 5 good GCSEs in any subject, now the government is just focusing on English and Maths, Ebacc entry and attainment 8.
THREE – These stats don’t actually tell us about the relationship between social class background and educational attainment. Rather than recording data using a sociological conception of social class, the government uses the limited definition of Free School Meal eligibility – which is just an indicator of material deprivation rather than social class in its fuller sense. Marxist sociologists would argue that this is ideological – the government simply isn’t interested in measuring the effects of social class on achievement – and if you don’t measure it the problem kind of disappears.
FOUR – and this is almost certainly the biggest limitation – these stats don’t actually tell us anything about ‘WHY THESE VARIATIONS EXIST’ – Of course they allow us to formulate hypotheses – but (at least if we’re being objective’) we don’t get to see why FSM children are twice as likely to do badly in school… we need to do further research to figure this out.
No doubt there are further strengths and limitations, but this is something for you to be going on with at least…
The theoretical, practical and ethical strengths and limitations of official statistics in sociology.
Official Statistics are numerical information collected and used by the government and its agencies to make decisions about society and the economy.
This post considers some of strengths and limitations of using official statistics in social research, focusing on practical, theoretical and ethical factors.
Official statistics are a type of secondary quantitative data and are one of the main methods you need to know about for the research methods component of A-level sociology.
Theoretical Factors
Theoretical advantages
Official Statistics make it very easy to get an overview of social life in Britain by, for example, clicking on the ‘UK snapshot’ or ‘focus on’ links on the ONS homepage.
Official statistics enable us to make comparisons between social groups and regions. The UK National Census is a good example of this.
They enable us to make historical comparisons over time because they often go back a long way – The British Crime Survey goes back to 1982 for example, League Tables go back until 1988 and and the UK Census goes back to 1841.
One of the most obvious strengths of official statistics is easy comparisons over time
Some large data sets might not exist if they were not collected by the government – because individuals and universities simply don’t have the funds to do such large-scale research as required by the Census, while large private companies would only focus on data collection which is profitable.
Official Statistics are favoured by Positivists because they allow us to spot trends, find correlations and make generalisations. They also allow the research to remain detached so there is less room for the subjective bias of the researcher to interfere with the research process.
Theoretical Disadvantages
Some Official Statistics lack validity. Crime statistics are a good example of this – certain crimes are notorious for being under-reported to the police – such as Rape and Domestic Violence for example.
The way that some social trends are measured changes over time – sometimes making historical comparisons difficult. For example, they way the Police Recorded Crimes changed twice in 2000s.
Official statistics may also lack validity because they are collected by the state and massaged to make things look better than they actually are. The UK government has changed the way unemployment is measured several times over the last decades, typically bringing the number of officially unemployed people down – for example by reclassifying anyone who is receiving unemployment benefit but on a work-related training course as not being unemployed.
Marxist and Feminist Sociologists argue that official statistics serve the interests of elite groups – Data is only collected on things which do not harm those in power. Marxists argue that Corporate Crime and Financial Crimes of elites are not focused on by the government, while Feminists argue that domestic violence is not taken seriously by the state.
Feminists argue that more than 1/1000 women are victims of sexual offences annually
Similarly, official statistics reflect the biases and prejudices of those in power – The fact that African-Caribbeans and Muslims are over represented in prison suggests people from these groups have higher levels of criminality. But according to Marxist criminologists this is not the case – such groups are over-represented in jail because of racial profiling by the police – the police spend more time actively policing the black and Muslim communities (with more stop and searches for example) and this is what leads to the higher arrest and imprisonment rates. Official Statistics thus give us a misleading impression of reality.
Practical Factors
Practical advantages
Many official statistics are freely available to researchers and the general public. This is a distinct advantage over ‘privately collected data’ which is collected by companies – Facebook and Amazon, for example, have a lot of data on individuals, but they are not going to share it for free! Official Statistics are more likely to shared with the public because they are paid for by taxes.
They are generally easy to access and to navigate – by using the Office for National Statics (ONS) web site for example.
It is possible to access many official statistics from home, and you can do comparative social research without needing any ‘people skills’.
Practical Disadvantages
Even though these statistics are free, they are far from cheap to collect. The ONS employs 4000 people merely to collate this data. On top of this, think of the time it takes other government officials to collect data. The Census in 2011 cost hundreds of million pounds to produce.
Official Statistics are collected for administrative purposes rather than for research purposes. Thus the data which exists and the categories and indicators used might not fit a researcher’s specific research purposes.
Ethical Factors
Ethical Advantages
Official Statistics are collected in the ‘national interest’ and so avoid the biases of private research, which would only collect data which would be of interest to the particular researcher, or data which is is profitable.
Official Statistics enable us to check up on the performance of public bodies such as the police and schools, making sure tax payers’ money is spent efficiently.
Ethical Disadvantages
The collection of some statistics can have harmful effects.
The introduction of school league tables and the requirement that schools publish there results has led to more teaching the test, a decline in creativity in education, and education generally being much more stressful for both pupils and teachers.
The collection of statistics might really be about surveillance and control – The collection of data on school performance for example enables control of teachers while the collection of data on pupils allows ‘problem pupils’ to be identified and managed by social services from a young age.
Secondary Qualitative Data is information that already exists in written or audio visual format. Secondary Qualitative Data typically take the form of documents – and there are a huge variety of them. They include government reports, newspapers, novels, letters, diaries, as well as pictures, and television and radio output.
It is useful to distinguish between official and personal sources of secondary qualitative data:
Official Documents are produced by organisations such as government departments and their agencies as well as businesses and charities and include OFSTED and other official government enquiries. These reports are a matter of public record and should be available for anyone who wishes to see them.
Personal documents are first-hand accounts of social events and personal-experiences, and they generally include the writer’s feelings and attitudes. They include such things as letters, diaries, photo albums and autobiographies.
Personal Documents may sometimes be referred to as Life Documents
Life documents are created by individuals and record details of that person’s experiences and social actions. They are predominantly qualitative and may offer insights into people’s subjective states. They can be historical or contemporary and can take a wide variety of forms. Ken Plummer (1982) illustrates this diversity when he says: “people keep diaries, send letters, take photos, write memo’s, tell biographies, scrawl graffiti, publish memoirs, write letters to the papers, leave suicide notes, inscribe memorials on tombstones, shoot films, paint pictures, make music and try to record their personal dreams.”
Strengths of Using Documents in Social Research
There is a wealth of different types of secondary qualitative information available – it is the richest vein of information available to researchers in many topic areas.
Sometimes documents might be the only means of researching the past.
Interpretivists generally favour using life documents in social research as they are not produced by the researcher, but written by respondents for their own purposes. This means they should give us an insight into the author’s own world view and meaning. This, of course, depends on us being able to verify the credibility and authenticity of documents (See limitations below).
At a practical level, many public documents are freely available to the researcher, and many of them are very in depth.
Ethically there are few issues with accessing public documents.
Limitations of Using Documents in Social Research
John Scott (1990) identifies four potential theoretical limitations which might undermine the usefulness of historical documents.
The document may lack authenticity – Parts of the document might be missing because of age, and we might not even be to verify who actually wrote the document.
The document may lack credibility – We may not be able to verify why somebody wrote the document, and what their motive was. We need to know if the document has been distorted for political reasons, for example, because this would mean they would put a spin on the content.
Meaning – It may be hard to interpret the meaning of the documents if they are written in an archaic language. With older documents it is not possible to get the authors to clarify what they meant if they are dead.
Representativeness – Documents may not be representative of the wider population – especially a problem with older documents. Many documents do not survive because they are not stored, and others deteriorate with age and become unusable. Other documents are deliberately withheld from researchers and the public gaze, and therefore do not become available.
In Summary: The main types of secondary data which you are likely to investigate as part of an A-level sociology course includes:
Official Documents:
Government Reports (‘public documents’)
Company reports and accounts (‘private documents’)
Personal Documents (or ‘life’ documents)
letters (including suicide notes)
diaries, blogs and vlogs
Individual Social media profiles
graffiti
autobiographies
Media Output:
The News (and ‘Fake News)
Various websites – Wikipedia should be of special interest to students
How useful is secondary qualitative data when researching education? This post considers some of the theoretical, practical and ethical limitations of Public and Personal Documents which are produced in the context of education – such as OFSTED reports, school prospectuses, school reports and messages sent between pupils.
Public Documents
Personal Documents
Ofsted and Inspection Reports
School Websites
School prospectuses
School policy documents
School text books
School reports on pupils
Pupils written work
Pupils’ and teachers’ diaries
Notes and text messages passed between pupils
Practical Issues with using documents when researching education
Since the 1988 education act many Public documents on education are freely available to the public – OFSTED reports on schools are easily obtainable, and schools publish a wide variety of information about themselves in their prospectuses and on their websites.
Schools also publish a huge variety of policy documents – such as student codes of conducts, equal opportunities policies and information about how they implement every child matters and safeguarding policies – all of which are likely to be made available to researchers on request, since they are a matter of public record. These are useful as they give an account of the ‘official’ picture of schools in Britain from the perspective of management.
Theoretical Issues with using documents when researching education
In terms of validity, while school web sites and prospectuses can be trusted to provide some basic information about what subjects are on offer, GCSE results and extra-curricular activities, the credibility of such sites is undermined by the fact that they produced to advertise the school in a positive light, and all of these web sites put a positive spin on the school or college. For example, although schools are required to publicise their results, they do have some freedom to emphasise the way they report them so they can portray themselves in the best possible light.
To what extent do school web sites provide a valid picture of school life?
Suggested activity: Visit the web sites of your past school and present college – to what extent do they give you an accurate picture of what life was actually like in that school?
Extension activity: Look at the web site from another school in your area. Pick one that is very different in terms of results and so on. Are the impressions you get of the two schools that different, or are they quite similar, which would suggest that school web sites are designed to a formula and really tell you very little about a particular school.
OFSTED reports may provide greater insight into what’s going on in a school than the statistical snap shot of the yearly GCSE results, but OFSTED inspections only last for three days, and are typically only done every four years, so it is quite easy for a school to put on an act for this short a period and produce a performance which is better than usual.
Might some schools be able to put on a better performance than usual during a brief OFSTED inspection?
Conversely, there are some schools that feel as if they have been harshly judged by OFSTED inspectors, and question the validity of OFSTED reports, feeling that the grade they’ve been awarded does not reflect the reality of school life. This is partly because OFSTED inspectors only really get to see one lesson by each teacher, which is not representative, but also because the focus of different OFSTED inspectors will be different in different schools, raising the prospect that schools are not being judged by the same standard.
Policy documents produced by schools, such as student codes of conduct might be useful for seeing how schools function in an ideal-world, but they lack validity in that they tell you nothing about how many students actually stick to the code of conduct or what’s done with students who break the code of conduct. If you wanted to get more of an insight into this, a researcher would have to gain access to individual reports of each student, which would be more difficult to obtain.
Representativeness and Public Documents in Educational Research
All schools and colleges are required to publish prospectuses and results, so these should cover a 100% sample of educational institutions, but the same cannot be said of OFSTED reports – schools graded outstanding go into ‘light touch’ mode and may not be observed for several years.
Using Personal Documents to Research Education
Suggested starter activity – Have a browse of this interesting blog – ‘Scenes from the Battleground’ – which has had over a million hits and is written by a teacher. What impression does this give you school life? How valid and representative do you think it is?
Personal documents in the context of education include school reports on pupils, pupils written work, pupils’ and teachers’ diaries and Notes and text messages passed between pupils
Practical Issues
For a start, these will be very difficult to access. Things like teacher mark books, records of conversations with students, and disciplinary records may not be available because of the ethical requirement to safeguard children’s privacy. The same could also be true of the written work of pupils.
Where private messages and texts are concerned, it is unlikely that researchers will be allowed access to students personal mobile phones or tablets, and even if they could gain access, threads of conversation may have been deleted shortly after they took place, and the more ‘anti-school’ such messages are, the more likely they are to have been deleted.
Validity and Personal Documents
The kind of personal documents which are readily available are likely to be of a public nature (social media accounts for example) and because they are public, they would have been subjected to impression management so they are acceptable – so while this can give us an insight into what teachers and staff think is socially acceptable, using these to give us a picture of what people actually think about school life is problematic. The more ‘personal’ and private a document is, then the higher the validity is likely to be – however, the number of people who write down in-depth personal accounts of their school experiences is tiny.
Representativeness
If one could gain access to social media accounts and personal messaging services, representativeness should be good as the majority of students have access and make use of these services.
As mentioned above, hardly anyone keeps diaries any more, and so representativeness here is a problem.
If a researcher is lucky enough to gain access to disciplinary records, these may not be representative of the actual underlying patterns of student disobedience – teacher bias may increase the number of certain types of students who have undergone disciplinary procedures.
Ethical Issues when using public and private documents in educational research
There are no particular ethical problems with using publicly produced documents,
When using private or personal documents, there are some ethical concerns. If the researcher is given access to teacher mark books, records of conversations with students, and disciplinary records this won’t necessarily be with the informed consent of the pupils for example.
Born out of the Enlightenment Positivists believe sociology is scientific and that it can be a force for social progress.
This post provides a brief overview of Positivist Research Methods, which consist of a scientific approach to social research using quantitative data to ensure objectivity and reliability. (In contrast to the Interpretivist approach to research which favours qualitative data.)
The historical context of Positivism is that it emerged out of The Enlightenment and The Industrial Revolution….
The Enlightenment refers to a period of European history spanning from 1650 to 1800. During this time, the authority of the church was challenged as people started to believe that knowledge should be derived from science rather than from God. The Enlightenment witnessed the birth of modern science which lead to massive social changes. The following three core beliefs (there were others too!) emerged out of The Enlightenment:
Underlying laws explained how the universe and society work (wasn’t just God’s will) Scientific study could reveal these laws.
All men could understand these laws (unlike religious belief – God’s will is unknowable)
Laws could be applied to society to improve it (the belief in progress and the pursuit of happiness).
The Enlightenment, Industrialisation, ‘Progress’ and the Birth of Sociology
The 18th and 19th centuries saw a number of new scientific discoveries in the fields of physics, chemistry and biology. Most notably for students of Sociology, scientific discoveries lead to new technologies which in turn lead to industrialisation, or the growth of factory based production and the building of such things as railways.
This in turn lead to much social transformation – such as Urbanisation and the growth of what Marxists called the Proletariat. Many commentators from the early 19th century onwards were disturbed by the contradiction between the huge advances, or progress being made in science and industry and the apparent worsening of the lives of the majority. As hundreds of thousands of people flooded into expanding industrial city centres such as Manchester and elsewhere in Britain and Europe, these new urban centres were plagued with new social problems – most notably poverty, unemployment, and social unrest.
It was in this context that August Comte founded Sociology – Comte basically believed that if we can use scientific findings to bring about improvements in production through industrialisation then we can study the social world and figure out how to construct a better society that can combat social problems such as poverty, lack of education and crime.
Auguste Comte (1798-1857): The Founder of Scientific Sociology (aka Positivism)
August Comte – The Founder of Positivist Sociology
Comte introduced the word “Sociology” in 1839. The term “Sociology” is derived from the Latin word Socius, meaning companion or associate, and the Greek word logos, meaning study or science. Thus, meaning of sociology is the science of society.
Comte concentrated his efforts to determine the nature of human society and the laws and principles underlying its growth and development. He also laboured to establish the methods to be employed in studying social phenomena.
Comte argued that social phenomena can be like physical phenomena copying the methods of natural sciences. He thought that it was time for inquiries into social problems and social phenomena to enter into this last stage. So, he recommended that the study of society be called the science of society, i. e. ‘sociology’.
The General Ideas of Positivism – or The Scientific Method Applied to the Study of Sociology
1. Positivists believe that sociology can and should use the same methods and approaches to study the social world that “natural” sciences such as biology and physics use to investigate the physical world.
2. By adopting “scientific” techniques sociologists should be able, eventually, to uncover the laws that govern societies and social behaviour just as scientists have discovered the laws that govern the physical world.
3. Positivists believe that good, scientific research should reveal objective truths about the causes of social action – science tells us that water boils at 100 degrees and this is true irrespective of what the researcher thinks – good social research should tell us similar things about social action
4. Because positivists want to uncover the general laws that shape human behaviour, they are interested in looking at society as a whole. They are interested in explaining patterns of human behaviour or general social trends. In other words, they are interested in getting to the ‘bigger picture’.
5. To do this, positivists use quantitative methods such as official statistics, structured questionnaires and social surveys. Statistical, numerical data is crucial to Positivist research. Positivists need to collect statistical information in order to make comparisons. And in order to uncover general social trends. It is much more difficult to make comparisons and uncover social trends with qualitative data.
6. These methods also allow the researcher to remain relatively detached from the research process – this way, the values of the researcher should not interfere with the results of the research and knowledge should be objective
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) – Positivism and Quantitative Sociology
Emile Durkheim – Founding Father of Sociology
The modern academic discipline of sociology began with the work of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). While Durkheim rejected much of the details of Comte’s philosophy “positivism”, he retained and refined its method. Durkheim believed that sociology should be able to predict accurately the effect of particular changes in social organisation such as an increase in unemployment or a change in the education system.
Durkheim believed the primary means of researching society should be the Comparative Method which involves comparing groups and looking for correlations or relationships between 2 or more variables. This method essentially seeks to establish the cause and effect relationships in society by comparing variables.
Durkheim’s Study of Suicide (1897)
Durkheim chose to study suicide because he thought that if he could prove that suicide, a very personal act, could be explained through social factors, then surely any action could be examined in such a way. Durkheim’s method consisted of comparing the incidence of various social factors with number of cases of suicide. Durkheim did this work so well, that seventy years later his study was still being cited in textbooks as an excellent example of research methodology
The starting-point for Durkheim was a close analysis of the available official statistics, which showed that rates of suicide varied: • From one country to another – countries experiencing rapid social change had higher suicide rates. • Between different social groups – The divorced had higher suicide rates than the married. • Between different religious groups – Protestants had higher suicide rates than Catholics
Durkheim noted that these rates were relatively stable over time for each group. The rates may have gone up or down, but the rates remained stable relative to each other. Durkheim theorised that if suicide was an entirely individual matter, untouched by the influence of social factors, it would be an astonishing coincidence if these statistical patterns remained so constant over a long period of time. Entirely individual decisions should lead to a random pattern.
Durkheim used his data to derive his now famous theory – that suicide rates increase when there is too little or too much social regulation or integration. Social Regulation is the extent to which there are clear norms and values in a society, while social integration is the extent to which people belong to society.
Even though this study is now almost 120 years old it remains the case that suicide rates still vary according to the levels of social integration and regulation.
Positivism and Social Facts Durkheim argued that social trends are ‘social facts’ – they are real phenomena which exist independently of the individuals who make them up. He claimed that by if sociology limited itself to the study of social facts it could be more objective. He argued that these facts constrain individuals and help us to make predictions about the way societies change and evolve.
Some Criticisms of the Positivist Approach to Social Research
Treats individuals as if they passive and unthinking – Human beings are less predictable than Positivists suggest
Interpretivists argue that people’s subjective realities are complex and this demands in-depth qualitative methods.
The statistics Positivists use to find their ‘laws of society’ might themselves be invalid, because of bias in the way they are collected.
By remaining detached we actually get a very shallow understanding of human behaviour.
Theory and Methods A Level Sociology Revision Bundle
If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my Theory and Methods Revision Bundle – specifically designed to get students through the theory and methods sections of A level sociology papers 1 and 3.
Contents include:
74 pages of revision notes
15 mind maps on various topics within theory and methods
Five theory and methods essays
‘How to write methods in context essays’.
Signposting and Related Posts
This post was primarily written for students studying the second year compulsory Theory and Methods module.
The diversity of families and households in the UK has been slowly increasing since 2012. Types of families on the rise include cohabiting households, reconstituted families, single-parent families, and ‘kidult’ households where adults live with their parents. There’s been a slight decrease in traditional ‘cereal packet’ families. Multigenerational households, however, saw a minor decrease, making up only 1% of households in 2022. Single-person households and lone-parent families also increased marginally yet represent significant proportions of UK households.
Families and households in the UK have become more diverse since 2012, although the rate of change is relatively slow paced. The types of family and households which have increased since the 1950s include:
cohabiting rather than married households
reconstituted or step families
lone parent families
single person households
Kidult households, where adult children live with their parents.
The statistics below focus more on the trends in the last decade.
A slight decrease in ‘cereal packet’ families
The proportion of opposite-sex non-married cohabiting family households increased in the last decades, from 15.7% of all family households in the UK to 18.4% of all households in the UK.
There was a corresponding decrease in opposite-sex married family households: from 67% of all households to 65.2% of all households (2).
The proportion of ‘cereal packet families’ is slowly declining.
An important analysis point here is that the rate of decline is not particularly fast or significant.
Opposite-sex married and cohabitating families together make up 81% of all family households.
In other words around 80% of households with children are still heterosexual two parent households!
Trends in Reconstituted Families
In 2011 there were 544,000 step families with dependent children in England and Wales.
This means that 11% of couple families with dependent children were step families.
The Number of step families has increased since the 1950s.
However, the number of step families has declined recently dropping from 631,000 in 2001 to just 544,000 in 2011.
If there is only one biological parent in the step-family, that parent is the mother rather than the father in 90% of cases.
NB it is more difficult to get up to date stats on step-families! However according to this Guardian article from 2021 an estimated 1 in 3 families are blended families. NB this is probably including families with non dependent children.
Trends in Lone Parent Households
There were 2.9 million lone-parent families in the UK in 2022, which is 15% of all families.
This is down slightly from 2012 when there were 3.0 million lone-parent families, representing 17% of all families
84% of lone-parent families were lone-mother families in 2022.
See source (2) below.
Separated Families
A separated family is defined as ‘one parent with care of a child 16 or under, or child aged under 20 if they are in full time Further Education, and with a non-resident parent’.
In 2020 there were an estimated 2.3 million separated families in Britain, with an estimated 3.6 million children.
89% of parents with care in 2020 were female and under the age 50, and 86% of the non-resident parents male and 80% were under 50.
Methodological note: Lone parent and separated families are not quite. the same thing!
Trends in Single Person Households
29.6% of all households in the UK were single person households in 2022.
This is equivalent to 8.3 million people or 13% of people who live in households.
This is up slightly from 2012 when 29% of all households were single person households.
According to Euromonitor International, the number of people living alone globally is skyrocketing, rising from about 153 million in 1996 to 277 million in 2011 – an increase of around 80% in 15 years.
Trends in ‘Kidult’ Households
The number of adults living with their parents rose by over 14% between 2011 and 2021 to 4.9 million adults.
Young adult males are more likely to live with their parents than young adult females.
In 2022 31% of males aged 20-34 lived with their parents compared to only 22% of females aged 20 to 34. (Source).
Overall, around 1/3 of adult men and 1/5th of adult women in the UK now live with their parents.
Trends in Multigenerational Households
Only 1% of households were multigenerational in the UK in 2022.
This is down slightly from 2012 when the figure was 1.1%.
For more posts on this topic area more generally please see my page on families and households, one of the options within the first year of A-level sociology (AAQA).
