Use the following past papers to practise your exam writing techniques and aid your revision.
Make sure you look at the mark scheme for each question to assess your answer.
Also check the ‘model answers’ from students to see where good AO1 and AO2 marks were scored.
Crime and Deviance
Different theories of crime, deviance, social order and social control.
The social distribution of crime and deviance by age, ethnicity, gender, locality and social class, including recent patterns and trends in crime.
Globalisation and crime in contemporary society; the mass media and crime; green crime; human rights and state crimes.
Crime control, prevention and punishment, victims, and the role of the criminal justice system and other agencies.
The sociological study of suicide and its theoretical and methodological implications.
The connections between sociological theory and methods and the study of crime and deviance.
Sociological Methods
Quantitative and qualitative methods of research; their strengths and limitations; research design.
Sources of data, including questionnaires, interviews, observation (participant and nonparticipant), experiments, documents, and official statistics; the strengths and limitations of these sources.
The distinction between primary and secondary data, and between quantitative and qualitative data.
The relationship between positivism, interpretivism and sociological methods; the nature of ‘social facts’. The theoretical, practical and ethical considerations influencing choice of topic, choice of method(s) and the conduct of research.
Theories
Consensus, conflict, structural and social action theories.
The concepts of modernity and post-modernity in relation to sociological theory.
The nature of science and the extent to which sociology can be regarded as scientific.
The relationship between theory and methods.