HookParsons said industry shrank the family. The parish registers disagreed.
In the 1950s Talcott Parsons offered a tidy story. Before industrialisation, he argued, Britain lived in large extended families that farmed together and cared for their own. Then factories demanded a geographically mobile workforce and a socially mobile one, and the extended family gave way to the isolated nuclear family — two generations, breadwinner and homemaker — because that unit 'fitted' the needs of industrial capitalism. It was elegant, influential, and, when historians finally checked, largely wrong. Peter Laslett and the Cambridge Group opened parish registers going back to the 1500s and found that pre-industrial English households were already predominantly nuclear, with a mean household size of about 4.75 and only around one in ten containing extended kin — people simply died too young to form three-generation households. Michael Anderson's study of the 1851 Preston census then found the opposite of Parsons' claim: early industrialisation sometimes extended families, as relatives moved in to pool wages and share childcare.
That gap between a neat theory and messy evidence is the whole topic in miniature. Sociologists disagree not just about what the family does but about whether it is even in decline. Functionalists see a well-oiled institution; Marxists see a servant of capitalism; feminists see a site of patriarchy; the New Right sees a fragile ideal under threat; and postmodernists and the personal life perspective see not decline but diversity — a spreading menu of ways to do family. Every 20-mark essay you will write is a version of the same question: is family life today a story of breakdown or of choice, and whose interests does the family really serve?
ModelFour perspectives, one institution — what the family is for
Functionalism starts from function. George Murdock (1949) surveyed 250 societies and claimed the family is universal because it meets four needs — sexual, reproductive, economic and educational (socialisation). Parsons narrowed this to two 'irreducible functions' that survive in modern society: the primary socialisation of children and the stabilisation of adult personalities (the 'warm bath' that soothes the stressed worker). The weakness examiners want you to spot is the rose-tinted view — it ignores conflict, abuse and the dark side of family life.
Marxism reframes those functions as services to capitalism. Engels argued the monogamous nuclear family arose with private property to guarantee legitimate heirs; Eli Zaretsky added that the family is a prop for capitalism — it absorbs workers' frustrations, reproduces labour power for free, and is a unit of consumption sold 'the ideal home'. Feminism sharpens this onto gender: liberal feminists see gradual progress toward equality, Marxist feminists (Fran Ansley) see the wife as a shock-absorber who 'takes the toll' of her husband's alienation, and radical feminists (Delphy and Leonard) see the family itself as patriarchal, exploiting women's unpaid labour. Against all three, the New Right (Charles Murray) defends the married nuclear family and blames welfare for creating a lone-parent 'underclass', while the Personal Life perspective (Carol Smart) rejects grand theory altogether, arguing we should study the meanings people give to their own relationships — including pets, friends and fictive kin — rather than assume one family type is 'proper'.
DataMarriage down, divorce up, diversity everywhere
The raw trends are the AO1 backbone of leaf two. Marriage rates are at historic lows and people marry later — first-marriage ages have risen past 30 — while cohabitation is the fastest-growing family form and most couples now cohabit before, or instead of, marrying. Divorce transformed after the 1969 Divorce Reform Act (in force 1971), which allowed 'irretrievable breakdown' rather than requiring proof of a matrimonial offence; the number of divorces in England and Wales roughly doubled in the years that followed and peaked in the early 1990s.
Why? Ronald Fletcher pointed to higher expectations of marriage — we now demand emotional fulfilment, so we are quicker to leave when it is absent. Add secularisation (marriage loses its sacred character), the growing economic independence of women (who file the majority of petitions), and successive legal changes that made divorce cheaper and easier. The result, argued Rhona and Robert Rapoport (1982), is not the death of the family but five types of diversity — organisational, cultural, class, life-course and cohort. Judith Stacey went further: the modern family is postmodern — fluid, chosen and varied — and she coined the 'divorce-extended family' of ex-partners and step-kin held together by women. The evaluative counter, from the New Right and functionalists, is that all this 'choice' still leaves children more likely to grow up outside a stable married home.
MechanismWho does the housework — and who holds the power
Parsons described a natural division: the husband is instrumental (breadwinner) and the wife expressive (nurturer). In 1973 Michael Young and Peter Willmott claimed this was dissolving into the symmetrical family — roles becoming more equal and home-centred — spreading down the class structure by a 'principle of stratified diffusion'. Ann Oakley demolished the optimism. In her 1974 study she found only about 15% of husbands had a high level of participation in housework and only 25% in childcare; 'symmetry' was a myth dressed up as fact.
Later sociologists sharpened the critique. Duncombe and Marsden argued women perform a triple shift — paid work, housework and emotion work — while Arlie Hochschild's 'second shift' captures the double burden of employed mothers. Power is not only about chores: Jan Pahl's research on money management showed men more often control household finances, and Dobash and Dobash's study of domestic violence exposed the family as, for some women, a site of coercion and fear rather than a warm bath. The material-progress reply — that the commercialisation of housework (ready meals, appliances) and rising female employment are slowly equalising things — is real but partial, because it is women who most often manage the outsourcing.
A strong 20-mark paragraph evaluating the march-of-progress view of domestic labour reads like this: 'Young and Willmott argued that the family had become symmetrical, with conjugal roles increasingly joint, and pointed to men doing more at home and couples sharing leisure. Applying material from the Item, the rise in female employment does lend some support, since dual-earner households have a material incentive to share tasks. However, Ann Oakley''s research undermines the claim directly: she found only around 15% of husbands had a high level of participation in housework, suggesting Young and Willmott exaggerated equality by counting any male contribution, however token, as ''symmetry''. This matters because it reframes the debate from housework to power — as Duncombe and Marsden show, even where paid and domestic work are shared, women still shoulder the emotion work, meaning the burden has been relabelled rather than removed.' Notice the moves the mark scheme rewards. The AO1 names the theorists and gives Oakley''s figure (15%), not a vague ''women do more''. The AO2 explicitly ties back to the Item''s hook about employment. The AO3 does not stop at ''Oakley disagrees'' — it explains why the disagreement matters (it shifts the question to power) and develops a second concept (emotion work) into a line of argument. That elaboration — point, evidence, why it matters, so what — is what lifts a paragraph from the middle band into Level 4.
CaseChildhood is an invention — and it may be changing again
The fourth leaf turns on a single, examiner-loved idea: childhood is socially constructed, not a fixed biological stage. Philippe Ariès argued that in medieval Europe childhood as we know it did not exist — children were treated as 'little adults', dressed like them and working alongside them once past infancy. The separate, protected, innocent childhood we now take for granted emerged only over the last few centuries, through compulsory schooling, child-labour laws and falling family size.
Sociologists then split. The march of progress view says childhood has steadily improved — children are healthier, better protected and better educated than ever. The conflict view disagrees: Shulamith Firestone and others argue that 'protection' is really control, and that children are a powerless group, dependent, segregated and surveilled. Others debate childhood's future. Neil Postman claimed childhood is disappearing as television and now the internet erase the information boundary that once separated the adult and child worlds. Sue Palmer warns instead of a toxic childhood — junk food, screens and marketing damaging children — while critics of the 'globalisation of Western childhood' argue we wrongly export one culture's model of childhood as if it were universal. For AO3, the strongest move is to notice that these positions disagree about the same facts, reading rising adult supervision as either progress or oppression.
DataThe demographic engine — Britain since 1900
The final leaf underpins all the others: population change is why family life looks the way it does. Since 1900 the birth rate has fallen sharply (from around 28 births per thousand to roughly 11), driven by reliable contraception, the falling infant mortality rate (so parents no longer 'over-produce' to insure against loss), the rising cost of children, and the changing position of women, who now delay childbirth for education and careers — pushing the total fertility rate below the replacement level of 2.1.
The death rate has also fallen, thanks less to medicine than to public health, sanitation, nutrition and housing (Thomas McKeown's argument), so people live far longer. Together these produce an ageing population: a rising median age, a growing 'old-age dependency ratio', more one-person pensioner households, and pressure on pensions and social care — plus the 'beanpole family', tall and thin, with more living generations but fewer children in each. Migration adds the final variable, lowering the average age of the population (migrants are typically young workers) and increasing ethnic and family diversity. Link demography back to structure and you can explain the shrinking household, the rise of the 'sandwich generation' caring for children and parents at once, and why the state now leans on families to provide care it once promised to fund.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
AQA Sociology marks three assessment objectives: AO1 (knowledge and understanding), AO2 (application) and AO3 (analysis and evaluation). On Paper 2 you meet two question types per topic. The 10-mark 'Outline and explain two...' question carries no Item, so it is pure AO1 and AO3: pick two genuinely distinct points and develop each with a chain of reasoning, because two well-explained points beat four listed ones. The 20-mark essay always begins 'Applying material from Item... and your knowledge, evaluate...' — that opening phrase is an instruction, not decoration. The Item is your AO2 lifeline, and examiners report that answers which ignore it are capped in the lower bands however much theory they contain; you must lift a hook from the Item and develop it in your own words.
For AO1, name the sociologist, the study and, where you can, a figure or date — 'Oakley (1974) found only 15% of husbands highly involved in housework' outscores 'women do more housework'. For AO3, the reliable structure is to stage a debate between perspectives: functionalism versus Marxism versus feminism versus the personal life perspective, always asking 'whose interests does this serve?' and 'is this decline or diversity?'. Do not point-and-run — each evaluation should reach a 'so what' and, in the 20-marker, build toward an explicit conclusion that weighs the evidence rather than sitting on the fence. A concluding line that judges which side the evidence supports, and why, is what separates a Level 4 essay from a competent Level 3 one.