Family Forms (AQA GCSE Sociology): Exam Questions

What term is commonly used by sociologists to describe partners who live together without either being married or in a civil partnership?

What term is commonly used by sociologists to describe a family consisting of parents, their children and other relatives, such as grandparents, aunts and uncles?

Identify and describe one factor that may have led to an increase in family diversity in Britain.

What term is commonly used by sociologists to describe when two adults with children from previous relationships remarry to form a new family?

From Item A, examine one strength of using statistics to research one-person households.

Describe the type of statistical data shown in box Item A. Identify the trend shown by the data and explain one factor which may account for this trend.

Identify and explain one disadvantage of using unstructured interviews to investigate one-person households.

Identify one ethical issue that you would need to consider when investigating relationships within families and explain how you would deal with this issue in your investigation.

Describe one example of a commune.

What term is commonly used by sociologists to describe partners who live together without either being married or in a civil partnership?

Item B

This table appears in a paper by the sociologists Robert and Rhona Rapoport published in 1982, they have used a variety of sources to identify class based differences in relationships within marriage and child rearing.

Sources: Bott (1971), Goldthorpe (1969), Newson and Newson (1970).

From Item B, identify and describe the research method used by the Rapoports including what you know of their perspective on the family.

Item B

Writing in 1976, Eli Zaretsky argued that the nuclear family had an economic function that served the interests of capitalism. He believed the family to be a key unit of consumption; in other words families bought and consumed the products of the capitalist economy.

He also believed that it was through the family that each social class reproduced itself over time. Through inheritance, the bourgeois family transmitted its private property from one generation to the next, whilst the proletarian family reproduced the labour force by producing future generations of workers.

Source: Zaretsky, E, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life

Discuss how far sociologists would agree that the nuclear family is still considered the norm in Britain today.

Item B

From their research on family life, Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard found that family life was not as symmetrical as Peter Willmott and Michael Young previously suggested. They view the family as a patriarchal institution that serves the interests of men.

Delphy and Leonard used data collected from previous studies. The studies suggested that women were exploited in the family. Women did the bulk of the domestic labour regardless of whether they did paid work outside the home too. Time at home for men was leisure time, whereas time at home for women was also work time. They argue that men benefit most from the family.

Source: Delphy, C, and Leonard, D, Familiar Exploitation, 1992.

Discuss how far sociologists would agree that family diversity exists in Britain today.

Discuss how far sociologists would agree that the extended family is still important in Britain today.