Tag: surveys

How many teenagers are on antidepressants?

A recent survey found that 1/3rd of teens have been prescribed anti-depressants, but this is probably a result of sampling bias.

One in three teenagers are on antidepressants according to a recent iNews article published in August 2022.

headline data teen mental health

You can read the full article here: One in three teens on antidepressants as lack of mental health services puts pressure on GPs to help.

Now it may well be tough being a teenager these days, especially during the Covid-19 Pandemic, but this figure does sound alarmingly high!

And I’m not the only one who thinks so, and in fact this statistic may not even be accurate according to some deeper research and analysis by Nathan Gower on behalf of Radio 4’s More or Less show.

The figure above comes from a survey conduct in July 2022 by a charity called Stem4 which supports teenage mental health.

This was a broad ranging survey looking at teenagers mental health and well-being overall based on a ‘general national sample’ of 2007 teenagers and the question which yielded the results which lead to the headlines above was:

“Have you been prescribed antidepressants to treat depression or other mental health conditions.”

37% of 12 to 18 year old respondents reported that they had been prescribed antidepressants at some point in their life, which is where the one in three figure above comes from.

NB Stem4 was asked to add that question to their survey by Good Morning Britain and then they teamed up and had a great time discussing (uncritically of course) the findings…

Official Statistics on Antidepressant Prescriptions

The problem with above survey findings is that official statistics show VERY different proportions.

Dr Ruth Jack a Senior Fellow in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham who has also conducted research on the prescription rates of antidepressants to teenagers in England (rather than the whole of the U.K.).

Her methodology involved looking at hundreds of thousands of medical records from G.P.s in England up to 2017, and her findings are very different to those of the survey results above.

12-18 year olds in 2017 – 2.3% were ever prescribed an anti-depressant.

That 2.3% should cover most prescriptions because although specialist mental health practices and hospitals can also prescribe antidepressants to teenagers, most prescriptions revert back to G.P.s

Another alternative source we can use is from NHS in England which publishes data on how many patients are prescribed antidepressants in a year. NHS England uses different age groupings but the findings are similar to Doctor Jack’s – in the low single digit percentages.

So both of the above pieces of research which are based on the official NHS statistics and Doctors’ records show much lower figures than the survey conducted by Stem 4.

There is a MASSIVE difference: 37% of 12-18 year olds from one survey compared to 2.3% according to the Doctors’ own records, that is more than 10 times the difference according to Stem4’s survey based on the self-reporting of the teenagers themselves.

Stem4’s survey reports that there are higher rates of prescription among younger teenagers compared to older teenagers. However both the NHS data and Doctor Jacks’ research show the opposite: lower rates for younger teens and then higher rates for older teens – with the prescription numbers getting significantly higher for 16 years and older.

Statistics on the mental health of young people

Statistics on the mental health of young people shows the following according to NHS Digital:

In 2022, 18.0% of children aged 7 to 16 years and 22.0% of young people aged 17 to 24 years had a probable mental disorder.

Those figures are only for one year, rather than ‘have ever had mental health problems’ but even so, it’s still almost half of the almost 40% reported above.

It’s very unlikely that we’ve got a cycle of teens having bad mental health, deteriorating to the point of needing medication and then recovering completely so they’d report good mental health in a few years. This is the only thing that could explain the difference of 20% a year and 37% EVER been prescribed antidepressants.

It’s far more likely (and unfortunate) that the 18% of 7-16 year olds reporting poor mental health in 2022 persistently report poor mental health year on year. So we are seeing the same people reporting every year. And of them, around 15% are so bad they need to be medicated. Given us the 2-3% of children who have every been medicated mentioned in the official data.

Explaining the differences

The Survey data is from 2022 while Dr Jack’s data only goes up 2017, so it could be that the antidepressant prescription rate for teenagers has increased radically during the Pandemic, but this would mean there has been a HUGE 20 fold increase!

But this massive recent increase is unlikely the NHS data we have runs up to 2021 which suggests such that prescriptions did rise by about 10% during Covid, but not 20 times!

When interviewed by More or Less the CEO of Stem4 says that the objective of their survey was to hear the voices of young people by giving them an opportunity to express themselves and they saw no reason to hold back these findings which tell us what young people feel even if they are very different to the official statistics.

To support her survey findings she cites a a Freedom of Information request which was released in August 2021 suggested that GP prescriptions for those aged 5 to 12 had increased 40% between 2015 to 2021.

The More or Less Interviewer seemed to be trying to invite her to confess that her findings were completely invalid but she wasn’t backing down, suggesting that the rates of teen prescriptions were probably half way between her data and the official data.

However it was also clear that the data scientists from More or Less were having none of this – it simply isn’t possible that one third of teens have ever been on prescription anti-depressants, the official numbers just don’t validate this.

Credible Data versus Eye Catching, Distorted Data

Dr Jack’s data and the NHS data are valid and reliable results which accurately reflect the underlying reality and give us the actual rate at which teenagers are prescribed medication, and this data can help us tackle the problems of teenage mental ill health.

Stem4’S research is an invalid data set which has produced a distorted picture of reality in order to make an eye catching headline and bring people’s attention to Stem4 and the mental health support services they offer.

Explaining Stem4’s Misleading Survey Results

The first thing to note is that Stem4’s research is probably telling us something different to the NHS data – the former is asking ‘have you ever been prescribed’ while NHS data is current prescriptions.

So if it’s a difference of 2.3% every year then over 7 years (12-18) we get to around 15%.

But this is still a way off the reported 35%.

Personally I think that Sample Bias probably explains the rest of the difference.

Stem4’s own report on the survey results tells us that they used a company called SurveyGoo to conduct the research, a company which mainly focuses on online surveys. And it would seem a company that does a very bad job of administering such surveys.

There is a chance the marketing of the survey it would have been more appealing to those teenagers who have had mental health problems in the past.

Say that SurveyGoo has 10K teens in its panel and the survey goes out to all of them – a higher proportion of teens who have had depression would be interested in answering it compared to those teens who hadn’t had depression.

The problem here is that we can’t go back easily and check the data as it’s not freely available for public consultation.

Biased Research…?

There is an even darker side to this. This could be a case of deliberately misleading statistics being publicised for commercial gain.

The question above was asked by Good Morning Britain which is a sensationalist Tabloid Media show which wants eyes, and this is an eye catching headline, so what do they care about a possible biased sample.

And the same goes for Stem4 – they make their money selling mental health and wellbeing packages to schools and other institutions – it is in their interests to exaggerate the extent of teen depression and especially ‘prescription abuse’ because they are offering earlier intervention strategies, for a cost of course!

SignPosting and Related Posts

This should be of interest for the research studies module.

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Changing gender identities in the UK

Only one third of 18-24 year olds identify as ‘completely heterosexual’

Two YouGov tracking surveys demonstrate how far gender identities vary across the generations and suggest that gender fluidity is now the new norm among 18-24 year olds in the UK.

One survey on sexual orientation asks people to identify themselves on a scale of sexuality where 0 is ‘completely heterosexual’ and 6 is ‘completely homosexual’ (respondents also had the opportunity to enter ‘no sexuality’ as an option.

The results below are the latest responses from the August 2022 survey.

Only 35% of 18-24 year olds identify as ‘completely heterosexual’
87% of people aged 65 and over identify as ‘completely heterosexual’…

Sexuality as a Scale

The findings above broadly fit into the views the two different age groups have on whether sexuality is fixed or a sliding scale.

The results below are from August 2022, the latest from a second YouGov LGBTQ tracking survey.

74% of 18-24 olds think sexuality is a scale….
54% of 65 and overs think sexuality is a scale…

Analysis of Survey Results on Sexuality….

18-24 year olds are much less likely to identify as completely heterosexual compared to 65 and overs (35% compared to 85%)

Younger people are also more likely to see sexuality as fluid compared to older people, but the differences here are smaller (74% compared to 54%).

For younger people (18-24) these YouGov surveys suggest that gender fluidity is the new norm with the majority of young people now identifying as ‘somewhere between completely heterosexual and completely homosexual’ in August 2022.

It is also worth noting that relatively few 18-24 respondents identified as completely homosexual, offering further support for the new ‘gender fluid’ norm.

The fact that 75% of 18-24 years olds think gender is a scale offers more support for the view that people see gender as something fluid, and not as fixed by one’s sex for example.

And while a huge 85% of over 65s identify as completely heterosexual, a relatively low 54% of them believe sexuality is a scale, suggesting the majority of them accept the fact that younger people view their sexuality differently even if the over 65s themselves are much more likely to feel completely heterosexual.

Societal Change and Changing Gender Identities…

The most obvious interpretation/ explanation of the above results is that society has gone through a massive ‘sexuality shift’ over the last four decades. Today, in 2022 it is much more acceptable to be openly gender fluid and so this makes it easier to ‘come out’ and identify as such, and this is precisely what young people are doing.

In contrast, people who are today over 60 were born in a much more gender and sexuality repressive age – with traditional male and female roles still the norm and overt discrimination against gay people, thus their gender identities were channelled into more narrow conceptions of heterosexuality with which they are now stuck.

All of this seems to suggest that social context plays a large role in shaping gender identities and raises very interesting questions about the relative role of agency and social institutions and how they interplay to explain how there has been such a rapid shift in the changing gender identities of the young…

Once gender fluid always gender fluid…?

The above survey results don’t tell us whether the more fluid gender identities of the young will change to being more ‘set’ over the course of their lives.

It could be that ‘knowing one’s sexuality’ takes many years, even decades, and that by the time today’s 18-24 year olds are themselves 65, they are by then reporting higher levels of heterosexuality.

It may have been that more of today’s 65 year olds would have identified as gender-fluid when they themselves were younger.

Relevance to A-level Sociology

The above data suggests that most people see gender as a scale, something which Sam Killerman has explored through his concept of the GenderBred person which I outline in this introductory post on sex and gender.

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A Merry but Secular Christmas!

A YouGov Poll conducted last year in 2020 shows that the majority of those who celebrate Christmas (and Easter) in the UK do so in an entirely secular way.

The survey results provide some useful evidence to support the view that religion does not play a significant role in British society, as this traditionally Christian and religious event seems now to have lost its religious meaning for the majority of people.

These findings are mainly relevant to the beliefs in society module, especially the secularisation debate.

Below I share some of the findings from this recent survey. NB the Survey looked at both Christmas and Easter, but i only report on XMAS below, ’tis the season, after all!

The Declining Significance of Religion at Christmas

According to YouGov’s sample of almost 2000 people, 61% of them celebrate Christmas in an entirely secular way.

And while 31% say they ‘combine the religious and secular’ at Christmas, if you look at what people actually do, only 20% of them go to Church with 10% reflecting on the meaning of the Birth of Christ, and there must be some kind of overlap between these, so some of those 30% above may say they mix the secular and religious, but at least some of them don’t actually do anything to express that religiosity!

I quite liked this alternative way of measuring ‘religious attitudes at Christmas’ – 71% pay no attention to what the Pope or Arch Bishop of Canterbury say at Christmas…..

Although this doesn’t necessarily measure people’s level of belief, because you can be religious and yet no believe in religious authorities, but this does show us low levels of interest in formal religious hierarchies.

TBH I’m surprised that 27% of the population do pay some attention, I expected that to be lower.

Finally, the perception people have is that Christmas is becoming less religious….

While it’s interesting to know what people think, remember that questions about perceptions don’t tell you what’s actually going on, just what people think is going on!

Sources/ Find out More

You can find out more about the results from this YouGov survey here.

Are one in five people really disabled?

According to official statistics 19% of working aged adults, or one in five people self-report as being ‘disabled’, and this figure has been widely used in the media to promote pro-disability programming.

How do we Define Disability?

According to the formal, legal, UK definition under the 2010 Equality Act someone is disable if they ‘have a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and ‘long-term’ negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities’.

That 19% figure sounds like a lot of people, in fact it is a lot of people – that’s 13 million people in the United Kingdom.

But maybe it’s only a lot because when we think of ‘disability’ we tend to immediately think of people will physical and very visible disabilities, the classic image of a disable person being someone in a wheelchair, which the media generally doesn’t help with its over-reliance of wheelchair users to signify they are ‘representing the disabled’.

In fact there are ‘only’ 1.2 million wheelchair users in Britain, or less than one in ten people who classify as disabled.

How do we measure disability ?

The 19%, or one five figure comes from the UK’s Family Resources Survey, the latest published result coming from the 2018/19 round of surveys.

This is a pretty serious set of surveys in which respondents from 20 000 households answer questions for an hour, some related to disability.

The Questions which determined whether someone classifies as disable or not are as follows:

  • Have you had any long term negative health conditions in the last 12 months? If you respond yes, you move on to the next two questions:
  • Do any of these health conditions affect you in any of the following areas – listed here are the top answers: mobility/ stamina, breathing or fatigue/ mental health/ dexterity/ other 
  • Final question: do any of your conditions or illness impact your ability to carry out your day to day activities -the responses here are on a 4 point likehert scale ranging from a not at all to a lot.

Anyone ticking YES/ YES and either ‘my illness affects me a lot or a little’ is classified by the UK government as disabled.

Validity problems with this way of measuring disability

The problem with the above is that if you have Asthma and similar mild conditions you could be classified as disabled, and this doesn’t tie in with the government’s own definition of disability which requires that someone has a condition which ‘substantially’ affects their ability to carry out every day tasks.

Stating that you have asthma which affects your breathing a little, does NOT IMO qualify you as disabled, but it does in this survey.

The government doesn’t publish the breakdown of responses to the final disability question, but it’s roughly a 50-50 split between those answering ‘a lot’ and ‘a little.

In conclusion, it might be more accurate to say that one in ten people is disabled.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This short update should be a useful contemporary example to illustrate some of the validity problems associated with using social surveys, especially for topics with a high degree of subjectivity such as what disability means!

NB – I gleaned the above information from Radio Four’s More or Less, the episode which aired on Weds 10th Feb 2021.

What the public thinks of Boris Johnson

YouGov recently published a post outlining ‘Everything they know about what the public think of Boris Johnson‘ – these are basically the results of various opinion polls carried out in recent months and are a great example of secondary quantitative data.

The polls clearly show that most people think Boris will be a strong leader, and a different type of leader to previous PMs, but not in a good way: most people don’t trust Boris and think he’s going to make a terrible Prime Minister….

Most people think he’ll be a different type of leader…

Boris new PM.PNG

But almost 60% of people don’t trust Boris

public opinion Boris Johnson.PNG

One of the more creative questions was what Hogwarts House Boris Johnson would be in – no surprise that 42% of the population put him in Slytherin – which values ambition and cunning.

Boris Johnson Slytherin.PNG

Relevance of all of this to A-level Sociology 

These polls are a good example of the problems with validity in quantitative social survey research.

We need to treat these results with caution: the negative responses may be because of the lack of say most people have had over Boris being elected, or about the lack of any kind of progress over Brexit.

In other words, people may not be expressing their dissatisfaction with Boris in particular, but possibly at the whole of the inept political class in general!

Having said that, I’m not going to dismiss criticism of Boris: he is an Eton educated millionaire who seems to be prepared to lie and spin his way to the top, always putting his own personal ambition ahead of anything else.

Do 25% of children really have their own mobiles? Invalid Research Example #01

This is a ‘new thread’ idea… posting up examples of naff research. I figure there are two advantages to this…

  1. It’s useful for students to have good examples of naff research, to show them the meaning of ‘invalid data’ or ‘unrepresentative samples’, or in this case, just plain unreferenced material which may as well be ‘Fake News’.
  2. At least I get some kind of pay back (in the form of the odd daily post) for having wasted my time wading through this drivel.

My first example is from The Independent, the ex-newspaper turned click-bait website.

I’ve been doing a bit of research on smart phone usage statistics this week and I came across this 2018 article in the Independent: Quarter of Children under 6 have a smartphone, study finds.

invalid research.png

The article provides the following statistics

  • 25% of children under 6 now have their own mobile
  • 12% of children under 6 spend more than 24 hours a week on their mobile
  • 80% parents admit to not limiting the amount of time their children spend on games

Eventually it references a company called MusicMagpie (which is an online store) but fails to provide a link to the research,  and provides no information at all about the sampling methods used or other details of the survey (i.e. the actual questions, or how it’s administered.). I dug around for a few minutes, but couldn’t find the original survey either.

The above figures just didn’t sound believable to me, and they don’t tie in with OFCOM’s 2017 findings which say that only 5% of 5-7 year olds and 1% of 3-4 year olds have their own mobiles.

As it stands, because of the simple fact that I can’t find details of the survey, these research findings from musicMagpie are totally invalid.

I’m actually quite suspicious that the two companies have colluded to generate some misleading click-bait statistics to drive people to their websites to increase advertising and sales revenue.

If you cannot validate your sources, then do not use the data!

The relationship between religion and social class

The relationship between social class and religion is not straightforward: the middle classes are, in general, more likely to attend church, but they are also less likely to believe in God and more likely to be atheists and join both world affirming and world rejecting NRMs.

The working classes are less likely to attend church, yet more likely to believe in God than the middle classes. There are also certain denominations and even sects which might appeal specifically to the working classes: such as Methodism, for example.

Church attendance and social class

The ‘middle classes’ have higher rates of church attendance than the ‘working classes’

  • A 2015 YouGov survey of 7000 adults found that 62% of regular church goers were middle class and 38% working class.
  • The same 2015 survey found that twice as many married working class men had never attended church compared to middle class men (17% compared to 9%).
  • Voas and Watt (2014) conducted research on behalf of the Church of England and made three observations not directly about social class, but relevant to it. Firstly, church attendance is higher in rural areas compared to urban areas. Secondly, church attendance is higher in the South of England compared to the North. Thirdly, they noted growth in church attendance in areas which had high performing church primary and secondary schools. All of these indicators suggest higher church attendance in middle class compared to working class areas.
  • Ashworth and Farthing (2007) found that, for both sexes, those in middle class jobs had above average levels of church attendance. Conversely, those in skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled working class jobs had below average church attendance. Welfare recipients had the lowest levels of church attendance.

Religious belief and social class

  • A 2016 YouGov Survey revealed that 48% of those in social grades ABC1 described themselves as ‘Atheist’ compared to 42% of those in social grades C2ED.

  • A 2013 review of >60 research studies on the relationship between IQ and religiosity found that people with higher IQs are more likely to be atheists. (High IQs are correlated with higher levels of education and higher social class).
  • Lawes (2009) found that ‘lifelong theists’ disproportionately come from unskilled and semi-skilled manual backgrounds, and were less likely to have academic qualifications. Conversely, lifelong atheists disproportionately come from higher professional and managerial backgrounds, and are more likely to have experienced higher education.

NB – It’s worth noting how this contradicts what’s above in terms of church attendance

Social class, religion and deprivation 

There is some evidence that those suffering deprivation (the lower social classes) are more likely to turn to religion…..

  • Churches in deprived inner city areas tend to have higher rates of attendance.
  • Methodist, Pentacostal and Baptist denominations  tend to be more working class.
  • Catholic Churches are more likely to attract Irish, Polish and African immigrants who have typically experienced higher levels of deprivation.

New Religious Movements and social class

As a general rule, the middle classes are more attracted to both World Affirming NRMs (and the New Age Movement), and World Rejecting NRMs, at least according to Eileen Barker’s classic study of ‘The Moonies’.

Problems with identifying the relationship between religion and social class

  1. Andrew Mckinnon notes that there has been a ‘dearth’ of research on the relationship between religion and social class, meaning there is something of a data gap.
  2. Because of the above, we are often stuck with relying on indicators which might not actually measure social class.
  3. Even if the data suggests that church attendance and belief are higher among the middle classes, this doesn’t necessarily mean the middle classes are actually more religious. They may just be attending church to keep up appearances or to get their children into the local church school (which tend to have high academic performance); or they  may feel under more social pressure to state they are religious than the working classes

Sources: 

Chapman et al, as well as the good ole’ t’internet.

What is Normal?

The concepts of ‘normal’, and ‘normality’, and the question of what counts as ‘normal behaviour’ has long been of interest to sociologists. Sociologists from different perspectives have very different approaches to answering the basic, but fundamental question, ‘what is normal’?

For the early positivists such as August Comte and Emile Durkheim, uncovering the existence of social norms (or typical patterns of behaviour) was central to their early positivist sociology. However, contemporary sociologists are more likely to question whether or not there is such a thing as ‘normal’ in our postmodern society.

Source: Google Ngram’s viewer

Interest in the word ‘normal’ started to grow in line with early Positivist sociology, peaked during the ‘heyday’ of structuralist sociology in the 1940s-70s and has been in decline since the (contested) shift to postmodern society from the 1980s… 

What is Normal?

‘Normal’can be defined as any behavior or condition which is usual, expected, typical, or conforms to a pre-existing standard.

‘Normal behaviour’ may be defined as any behaviour which conforms to social norms, which are the expected or typical patterns of human behaviour in any given society.

It follows that in order to establish what ‘normal’ behaviour is, sociologists firstly need to establish what social norms are present in any given society.

This is actually more difficult than it may sound, because social norms exist at ‘different levels’ of society (at least for those sociologists who actually believe social norms actually exist!)

Some social norms exist at the level of society as a whole, known as ‘societal level norms’, which tend to be very general norms, such as ‘obeying the law most of the time’ or ‘children being expected to not talk to strangers’.

Other norms are context-dependent, and are specific to certain institutions – for example the specific norms associated with sitting a formal examination within an educational setting, or those associated with a funeral. (In some respects the two examples are quite similar!)

Social norms can also vary from place to place, time of day, and different norms may be expected of people depending on their social characteristics: their age, or gender for example.

Given all of the above problems with establishing the existence of social norms, postmodern sociologists have suggested that we need to abandon the concept of normality all together, and just accept the fact that we live in a society of individuals, each of whom is unique.

However, many contemporary sociologists disagree with this postmodern view, given then fact that there do appear to be certain patterns of behaviour which the vast majority of people in society conform to.

The remainder of this post will consider a range of examples of behaviours which might reasonably be regarded as ‘normal’ in the context of contemporary British society….

How might sociologists ‘determine’ what is ‘normal’?

As far as I see it, there are a number of places sociologists can look, for example:

  1. They can simply start out by making observations (possibly backed up by ‘mass observation’ data) of daily life, which will reveal certain General norms of behavior.
  2. They can use statistical data to uncover ‘life events’ or actions that most people will engage in at some point during their ‘life-course’.
  3. They can look at statistical averages.
  4. They can look at attitude surveys and field experiments to find out about typical attitudes towards certain objects of attention and typical behaviours in specific contexts.
  5. They can simply look at the most popular tastes and actions which the majority (or ‘largest minority’ of people engage in.

Below I discuss the first three of these…

Normal behaviour in daily life….?

Simple observations of daily life (backed up with a few basic surveys) reveal there are several social norms that the vast majority of the public conform to. For example:

Wearing clothes most of the time

Despite the fact that according to one survey as many as 1.2 million people in the UK define themselves as naturists (which is about as many as there are members of the Church of England), only 2% of people report that they would ‘get their kit off too’ if they came across a group of naked people playing cricket on a beach while on a coastal ramble’.

[poll id=”2″]

Brushing your teeth at least once a day

96% of Britons brush their teeth at least once a day, with only 2% of people saying they don’t brush at least once daily, and 2% of confused people saying they don’t know how often they brush.

Ignoring other people on public transport….

You probably don’t think about it very much, but nearly all of us do it – ignoring other people on public transport. So much so that if you type in ‘avoiding people on public transport’ to Google, then the first search return is actually a link to ‘how to do it‘… from ‘sitting by yourself and putting a bag on the seat next to you’ to (most obviously) using your mobile phone or eating something. There’s even advice on how to ‘disengage’ from conversation, just in case some deviant is socially unaware enough to talk to you.

The limitations of establishing ‘normality’ from such ordinary, everyday behaviours…

While most of us engage in such behaviours, is this actually significant? Do these ‘manifestations of similarity’ actually mean anything? Most of us brush our teeth, most of us ignore each other on public transport, most of us wear clothes, but so what?

All of these manifestations of ‘normality’ are quite passive, they don’t really involve much of a ‘buy in’, and there’s still scope for a whole lot of differences of greater significance to occur even with all of us doing all of these ‘basic’ activities in unison…

Life Course Norms…?

It’s probably not as simply as ‘normal life in the U.K.’ as equating to having a 9-5 job, a mortgage, a fuck off big television, walking the dog, paying taxes and having a pension….

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/W9ZNKGrpnKM&#8221; frameborder=”0″ allow=”autoplay; encrypted-media” allowfullscreen></iframe>

But it possible to identify some ‘life-events’ that the vast majority of people in the United Kingdom (or at least England in some of the examples below) will experience at some points in their life. All of the examples below are take from across the A-level sociology syllabus…

Most children in the United Kingdom will go to school….

According to World Bank data, 98.9% of children in the United Kingdom are enrolled in school, so it’s reasonably fair to say that ‘it is normal for children in the UK to go to secondary school’.

NB – it’s probably worth pointing out that ‘secondary school enrollment is much more common in the UK compared to the United States, and especially Uruguay, and various other less economically developed countries.

Of course the fact that nearly 99% of children are enrolled in secondary school in the UK tells us nothing about their experience of education, or how long they actually spend in school, but nonetheless, being enrolled and being subjected to the expectation to attend secondary school in the UK is one of the most universal experiences through the life-course.

Most people in the U.k. will engage in paid work or live with someone who has engaged in paid work at some point in their lives

Only 0.8% of 16-64 year olds live in households where all members have never worked. These figures don’t actually tell us how many people have never worked, but we can say that 99.2% of the adult population has either worked, or is currently living with someone who has, at some point in their lives, worked.

Most people will live until they are over 50

Source: ONS, based on registered deaths

‘Only’ 9.2% of men and 5.7% of women will die before the age of 50, according to ONS data averaged over the last 20 years.

Limitations of establishing ‘normal’ behaviour from these trends 

The limitations of deriving an idea of ‘normality’ from life-course data is that you are much less likely to find norms across the generations rather than in one specific age-cohort. More-over, one of main reasons postmodernists argue that it is no longer appropriate to talk about social norms today is that there is a trend away from shared norms in many areas of social life and a movement towards greater diversity.

Social Norms based on statistical averages 

A third method of determining what is ‘normal’ is to look at the ‘median’ value of a distribution, that is the value which lies at the midpoint.

In social statistics, it is very like that the median will provide a more representative average figure than the mean because a higher percentage of people will cluster around the median compared to the mean.

Median disposable household income in the UK in 2017 was £27,300

average household income ONS data 2017

Source: Household disposable income and inequality in the UK: financial year ending 2017. 

Average household size in the UK in 2016 was 2.4 

Source: ONS

Limitations of establishing ‘normal behaviour’ from medians or means

Is the median the ‘best’ way of establishing ‘what is normal’? Even though it’s the figure around which most people cluster, there can still be enormous differences in those at both ends of the distribution.

As to the mean, as with the household average above…. this might be useful for establishing trends over time, but surely when we look at ‘today’, this is meaningless… there are no households with 2.4 people in!

So… is there such a thing as normal?

While it is possible to identify ‘norms’ using various methods, hopefully the above examples at least demonstrate why postmodernists are so sceptical about the concept of normality today!

 

 

 

How equal are men and women in relationships these days? Student survey results

Women who do the lioness’s share of the housework, but men and women seem to have equal control over the finances, at least according to two surveys conduct by my A Level sociology students last week.

This acts as a useful update to the topic of power and equality within relationships, especially the ‘domestic division of labour’ aspect.

I actually did two surveys this week with the students this week, both on Socrative.

For the first survey, I simply asked students via Socrative, who did most of the domestic work when they were a child (mostly mother or mostly father – full range of possible responses are in the results below), with ‘domestic work’ broken down into tasks such as cleaning, laundry, DIY etc…

For the second Survey, I got students to write down possible survey questions on post it notes, then I selected 7 of them to make a brief questionnaire which they then used as a basis for interviewing three couples about who did the housework.

Selected results from the initial student survey on parents’ housework

These results were based on students’ memory!

Housework survey 2018

Housework survey 2018 DIY

Selected results from the second survey

based on student interviews with couples

Domestic labour questionnaire 2018

men women finances survey 2018

Discussion of the validity of the results…..

These two surveys on the domestic division of labour (and other things) provided a useful way into a discussion of the strengths and limitations of social surveys more generally….we touched on the following, among other things:

  • memory may limit validity in survey one
  • lack of possible options limits validity in survey two, also serves as an illustration of the imposition problem.
  • asking couples should act as a check on validity, because men can’t exaggerate if they are with their partner.
  • there are a few ethical problems with the ‘him’ and ‘her’ categories, which could be improved upon.

Postcript – on using student surveys to teach A-level sociology

All in all this is a great activity to do with students. It brings the research up to date, it gets them thinking about questionnaire design and, if you time it right, it even gets them out of the class room for half an hour, so you can just put yer feet up and chillax!

If you want to use the same surveys the links, which will allow you to modify as you see fit, are here:

 

Evaluate the Strengths of Using Social Surveys in Social Research (20)

‘Evaluate the Strengths of Using Social Surveys in Social Research’ (20)

This is an essay plan for a possible essay for the AQA’s A Level Sociology paper 3: Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods. This essay plan uses the TPEN structure which covers the theoretical, practical, ethical and ‘nature of topic’ factors relevant to this research method.

You might like to review this post which introduces social surveys and this post on ‘the advantages and disadvantages of social surveys‘ first. 

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  • Theoretical Factors: Positivists/ Interpretivists – Positivists generally like social surveys because the data from Structured Social Surveys is easy to put into graphs and charts – it is easy to make comparisons, find trends and uncover the ‘laws’ of human action
  • Theoretical: Representativeness/ Sampling – It is generally easy to obtain large samples
  • Theoretical: Reliability – Surveys generally have good reliability because….
  • Theoretical: Validity – Validity should be good for simple topics and it is less likely that the researcher’s opinions will affect the research process as with more qualitative methods
  • Practical Factors: Social surveys are one of the cheapest methods for collecting data from a wide, geographically dispersed sample of the target population; they are generally one of the quickest ways of collecting data
  • Ethical Factors: There are few ethical issues with this method compared to more qualitative methods.
  • Nature of Topic: Social surveys are best used for simple, straightforward topics.
  • Conclusion: Social Surveys are good for gaining an ‘overview’ of social trends