AS Sociology

1. AS Sociology Key studies 7 and 10

3. Key facts • Focus for sociologists in recent years has been that of the relative failure of boys compared to girls in school, • Key theories suggest that boys have developed a lad culture, • Girls have in recent years been found to subscribe to the same culture and developing anti-school attitudes.

4. Methods • 2 research projects (Nuffield Foundation – Pilot and Economic and Social Research Council – ESRC); • Nuffield Project: • Questionnaire, • Semi structured interviews of 30 minutes. • ESRC Project: • 3 questionnaires (5 point scale), • Semi structured interviews, • Content analysis.

5. Key findings – social motives for ladishness • Seen in terms of popularity, humour, sportiness, hardness and hanging out, dress codes, seen not to make an effort in school. • Academic work seen as feminine. • Girls felt under pressure to be popular and put on a show to avoid being seen as SWOT. • Teachers found ladettes to be a lot more troublesome than the lads as they presented a new and dangerous form of femininity.

6. Key findings – academic motives for ladishness. • Teacher and pupils under increasing pressure to improve results. • Better to be seen as avoiding work rather than a failure so boys hid work and effort. • Girls rejected traditional good girl image and instead sought out a sassy image which didn’t go with studying hard.

7. Key findings – pressure to succeed • Performance goals used to encourage school success counter productive in generating student success. • Strategies used in order to generate student success such as competitions between students led to embarrassment and stress. • Boys and girls felt that it was important to be seen as clever but uncool to be seen as hard working.

8. Key findings – uncool to be a geek • Social status was judged on the basis of popularity. • No ethnic differences with regards to the view that being a geek is seen as uncool. • Students engaged in self handicapping behaviours which created self inflicted barriers to educational achievement such as drug and alcohol use, sleeplessness, and misbehaving in lessons.

9. Key findings – balancing act • Students succeeded in balancing workload and behaviour required in order to maintain cool persona. • Strategies used with friends in order to hide hardwork taking place by revising in secret. Class differences in strategies, middle class pupils with access to the internet and private computer ability to chat online and do work at the same time.

10. Links with key debates • Youth culture, • Socialisation process through education, • Interaction between schools and subcultures, • Class inequalities impact on school achievement.

11. Evaluation • Mixes quantitative and qualitative methods effectively, • Representative by taking into account a range of ethnicities and gender within the study, • Research findings may only represent a specific northern culture, • Questionnaire assumes that all pupils will understand the same thing by the concept of ladishness • No certainty that ladishness was not exaggerated in order to gain status amongst peers

12. Read and write task • Using the study you have been given and your hand out complete the true or false section of your hand out.