CAIE Sociology (9699)

One social characteristic associated with the elderly is retirement, meaning many older people are no longer in paid employment and may depend on pensions or savings.

Another social characteristic is social isolation, as some elderly people may have fewer social contacts due to bereavement, reduced mobility, or living alone.

Positivists favour questionnaires because they produce quantitative data that can be easily coded and compared. This allows researchers to identify patterns and correlations, which fits the positivist aim of discovering general laws of social behaviour.

Questionnaires are also seen as reliable because the same questions are asked in the same way to all respondents. This standardisation reduces interviewer bias and makes it easier to replicate the research, which positivists value.

One limitation of field experiments is that they have less control over variables than laboratory experiments. Because the research takes place in a natural setting, it is harder to isolate the effect of the independent variable, which reduces validity.

Another limitation is that ethical issues may arise because participants may not know they are being studied. This can involve deception and a lack of informed consent, which makes field experiments problematic.

The cultural deprivation view argues that deviant behaviour is mainly caused by individuals not being properly socialised into the norms and values of mainstream society. As a result, they may not learn acceptable behaviour and may be more likely to act in ways defined as deviant.

This perspective often suggests that people from deprived backgrounds may lack strong parental supervision, positive role models, or educational support. These factors can lead to weak commitment to conventional values and greater involvement in deviant subcultures or delinquent peer groups.

It may also be argued that cultural deprivation creates frustration and failure in school or work, which can encourage deviance as an alternative response. In this way, deviant behaviour is seen as a product of social disadvantage and the absence of shared cultural norms.

One argument against the view is that deviant behaviour may be caused by labelling rather than cultural deprivation. Interactionists argue that people become deviant when others define and treat them as deviant, and this can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Indicative model answer: Peers are important in shaping identity because they provide approval, pressure, and opportunities for role experimentation, especially during childhood and adolescence. However, family, education, media, and wider social structures may also be equally or more important depending on age, class, gender, ethnicity, and context. A full evaluation would consider interactionist, functionalist, feminist, and postmodern perspectives, and assess whether peer influence is strongest in all stages of life or only in particular settings.

Indicative model answer: Scientific methods can be valuable in sociology because they can produce reliable, comparable, and systematic data, especially through questionnaires, structured interviews, and experiments. However, critics argue that social life is too complex and meaningful to be studied scientifically in the same way as the natural sciences. A strong evaluation would compare positivist and interpretivist approaches, consider issues of validity, reliability, objectivity, and ethics, and judge whether scientific methods are useful for some sociological purposes but limited for others.