AQA Sociological methods

Hey, I'm doing my methods exam on Tuesday. I think either questionnaires or interviews will come up as an essay question and stuck for named studies using either of these methods. Anyone got any ideas please?

Cheers

Reply 1

Joseph90

I did Sociology A-Level but didn't take this as an exam unit, I did this as a coursework unit instead. Check out the Textbook (preferably Haralambos & Holborn) and read the section on Sociological methods.

Hope your exam goes well.

Reply 2

mikeybey

Unfortunately very few sociologists ever use Questionnaires. As for interviews... Willis? Hargreaves? They both did educational interviews. Lemmie go find some more. If you're studying something other than education though, I don't know.

Reply 3

mikeybey

Okay, Connolly did a study in 1998 on ethnicity and education. He used both observations and interviews with staff, pupils and parents.

Gillborn did interviews with staff about "the myth of the black challenge"

Willis did a study called "Having a laff" interviewing "lads" in a school to see if negative subcultures existed and how they prepared the W/C for work (he was a marxist)

Mac an Ghail did a huge study on sub cultures, interviewing a large number of students.

Reply 4

Chris.Livesey

Here's a kind of "revision list" I put together based around the AQA Spec.

Could be useful if you need to drop a few recent (and "classic") names...

http://www.sociology.org.uk/Methods_in_education.pdf

Reply 5

jamesr1989

You don't need to know studies in depth for this exam do you? As i've just been revising methods constantly the past few days

Reply 6

Chris.Livesey

In a word "no" - it's going to be more important that you understand and can, if necessary, apply your knowledge of methods to a question (e.g. advantages and disadvantages of questionnaires). However, if you know a study or two that used questionnaires you can always throw it into the mix as an example or to make a particular point.