Sociology key terms

The roles and responsibilities of spouses within a marriage, including paid work, domestic tasks and decision-making.

Broad agreement about accepted norms and values within a society or group.

A sociological approach that explains social order through shared values, cooperation and agreement.

An approach which explains social order mainly through shared values, agreement and cooperation.

An area whose voters elect a representative to Parliament.

A desire to improve living standards by obtaining goods and services.

A group that purchases and uses goods and services. Marxists argue that families act as consumer units that generate profits for capitalist businesses.

Quantitative analysis of documents or images by defining categories, coding material into them and counting occurrences.

Stability in social norms, values, behaviour or attitudes over time.

A method used to prevent pregnancy, allowing greater control over whether and when to have children.

An approach which explains conformity through the controls and rewards that discourage offending; crime becomes more likely when these lose their influence.

A family ideal which Oakley defined as a nuclear family consisting of a legally married couple who voluntarily choose to have one or more children.

A formal finding that a person is guilty of a criminal offence.

Crime committed by employees on behalf of their company, such as illegally producing and selling unsafe products.

An association between variables: they vary together, but this does not necessarily mean that one causes the other.

Bowles and Gintis's Marxist idea that school organisation mirrors workplace relationships, so the hidden curriculum prepares pupils for employment under capitalism.

Bowles and Gintis’s argument that the social relationships and organisation of schooling mirror those of the capitalist workplace, preparing pupils for employment.

A set of shared values and behaviours which opposes the dominant values of an institution or society.

A pupil group’s shared values and behaviour that oppose the school’s expectations, such as valuing defiance rather than academic effort.

A pupil subculture which rejects the school's authority, norms and values and replaces them with its own anti-school expectations.

Observation in which the people being studied do not know that research is taking place.

Research in which those being studied do not know that research is taking place or that the person observing them is a researcher.

An illegal act punishable by law.

A recurring difference or distribution in crime data, such as differences between age groups or types of offence.

The number of incidents of a particular crime per specified number of adults over a stated period, such as robberies per 1,000 adults in a year.

A survey asking people resident in households in England and Wales about their experiences of crime, including experiences not reported to the police.

The direction of change in crime figures over time, such as an increase, decrease or relatively stable level.

The agencies involved in enforcing criminal law and dealing with offenders, including the police, courts, prison service and probation service.

The legal process through which an alleged criminal offence is dealt with, potentially involving a trial and a sentence.

A group whose shared norms, values and behaviour involve breaking the law.