Who gets to move?
Open and close a five-by-five mobility grid, draw samples with seven different techniques and watch representativeness break, then choose a method in context.
Open and close a society
FIG. 01 · 3.2.8 · MODEL, NOT DATADown: the family you were born into · Across: where you end up
Every row adds to 100%. In a perfectly mobile society every cell would read 20% — where you started would tell you nothing at all about where you finish.
Honest label: this is a model you are driving, not UK data. It exists so you can see what “closure”, “short-range mobility” and a “glass floor” actually look like in the kind of table an examiner hands you.
How strongly a quintile holds on to its own children. Weber's closure, in one dial.
When people do move, do they move one rung or right across the table? Turn this down and long-range moves become as likely as short ones.
The glass floor keeps the top quintile's children from falling; the same grip at the bottom is a floor nobody wanted.
What the exam wants. 3.2.8 asks about the “nature, extent and significance” of social mobility, and the marks come from reading a table like this properly: absolute mobility (people did move, because the occupational structure changed) is not the same as relative mobility (the odds of moving compared with someone else). The mobility index here is 1 for perfect mobility and 0 for none. Functionalists read a high number as evidence of meritocracy; Marxists point at the diagonal.
Who ends up in your sample?
FIG. 02 · 3.1.3 · SIMULATED POPULATIONPick a technique and draw. The upper bar of each pair is the population; the lower bar is the sample you just took.
Honest label: the population is simulated. Its make-up, and how easy each group is to reach, are assumptions written into the code — not measurements of anybody.
What the exam wants. 3.1.3 asks you to weigh practical, ethical and theoretical factors — and representativeness is the theoretical one positivists care about most, because without it you cannot generalise or claim to have found a social fact. Note what the readouts separate: a quota sample can match the population on class and still be badly skewed on who was standing there to be asked. That gap between “looks representative” and “is representative” is where the evaluation marks live.
Methods in context
FIG. 03 · 3.1.2 · 3.1.3 · TEXTBOOK ARGUMENTStrengths
Limitations
Honest label: the four ratings are the standard sociological argument about each method, put on a 1–5 scale so they can be compared. They are a summary of a debate, not a measurement of anything.
Methods-in-context questions are not about the method in the abstract. They are about the method in a school, with gatekeepers, timetables and children.
What the exam wants. The 20-mark methods-in-context question is marked on how tightly you tie the method to that setting. Generic evaluation — “questionnaires are cheap” — gets very little. “Pupils in Year 7 may not have the literacy to interpret the question, and the head will only release a class during PSHE, so your sample is whoever has that lesson” gets the marks. Use the context box above as the model for that move.