Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

The following are two articles on the same book published in two different newspapers:

How adopting an angelic five year old blew our family apart

Adopted Children: Sometimes you can’t mend them

Reading the two articles side-by-side gives two very different pictures of the situation experienced by this family, originally the headline for the Daily Mail article used the word “evil” to describe the child - this was removed after complaints - but gives a very different image to that painted by The Times article of a child damaged by conditions beyond their control.

So why have I pointed these out? - For several reasons:

• it is an interesting example of the way the media can mould our understanding and interpretations of situations and events. It raises the postmodernist question of whether the media moulds or reflects society - does it print what society want to see or does it create society’s tastes?
• even with the seemingly more balanced Times article there is the fact that it is the 30% of adoptive placements that fail that is pointed out - double that number ’succeed’. Obviously the use of the 30% links in with the topic of the article and 1 in 3 is a large proportion but it is still worth turning numbers round in your head when you see them in articles - often you find it gives a very different impression.
• Adoptive families are a family form that are often left out when we talk about family diversity. These articles also challenge the idea that families are always happy places - they remind us of the ‘dark side’ of the family.
• The articles also raise the questions of individuals’ power in society - the first article, published in the Daily Mail, was published 3 weeks ago - it was ‘adapted’ from the mother’s book and has clearly been written to pull out the most ‘juicy’ bits and to summarise the story in a dramatic way - something which the Daily Mail has a reputation for doing and which will probably have boosted sales of the book (I have also heard that authors may have very little control over what is published). The second article was published today in the Times - a paper which has a reputation as a ‘broadsheet’ for being more balanced in its evaluation of stories.  I do wonder whether the Times article is an attempt by the author of the book or their publisher/agent to ‘redress the balance’ of the original article (particularly given the fairly derogatory comments that were posted on the Daily Mail website by readers). If so, it suggests that agency does have a role to play in the machinations of society.
• the issue of different accounts also arises in research - talking to different people or looking at different sources about the same event can give you very different stories - this process of checking data for differing interpretations and meanings and inconsistencies can lead to more valid and reliable research.

So, I would advise you to read with care when you read accounts of events - sometimes it is worth reading more than one account in order to get a fuller picture.

Many apologies for the lack of posts over the last few weeks - I am deep in the middle of data collection for my PhD research and it is definitely keeping me busy.  Although all the methods textbooks tell you that qualitative research using informal interviews is time-consuming because of a long interviews and travelling time, what most of them don’t point out is that as well, as the lengthy analysis of huge amounts of data, it also takes HOURS and HOURS to transcribe all the tape recordings before you embark on in-depth analysis!  For every hour of interview I tape it takes me about 9 hours to transcribe - that’s a lot of time.
I am however enjoying the research process hugely - listening to people talking about their lives and then trying to puzzle out the links and patterns of things which people’s experiences do and don’t have in common is fascinating and my brain  is constantly whirring trying to work things out.

Hopefully I will be back to posting regularly in a few weeks time as data collection comes to an end.

BBC NEWS | Health | Teen drinking ‘remains a worry’

This article on teenage alcohol consumption is interesting as much for what it reveals about cultural attitudes towards alcohol and teenagers as for what it tells us about actual teenage drinking and health.

There is a suggestion that teenagers should not be drinking any alcohol at all, however, there is as yet no evidence as to the harm of alcohol upon adolescents as distinct from adults. This suggestion can therefore be seen to some extent as something which is a reflection of a culture in which childhood is seen as discrete and separate from adulthood and alcohol consumption is seen as a mark of adulthood - a pint of beer is one symbol of adult masculinity in particular. There are cultures where the consumption of alcohol is seen very differently - for example in many other European countries where children are given wine with meals from an early age and the consumption of alcohol is not seen particularly as a symbol of maturity.

I would suggest that these cultural differences in attitudes to alcohol have two effects - firstly it impacts upon teenage drinking behaviour - in the UK where alcohol is both a ‘forbidden’ substance for children and its consumption (and the associated drunkenness) is a symbol of maturity it encourages teenage drinking without adult supervision. Secondly it affects our reactions to teenage drinking - you can make links to Cohen’s ideas about moral panics as that is essentially what is happening in this article - there are allusions to crumbling families, irresponsible parents and anti-social behaviour.

The statistics are also unfortunately vague: “among pupils at 290 English schools who had drunk in the last seven days, the average consumption was 11.4 units” - so the average consumption of 21% of students was 11.4 units - was this per drinking session? or in the previous week?

It would also be helpful here to know the modal consumption of the 21% - the mean of 11.4 units makes it difficult to tell whether there is a very small group of teenagers among that 21% who are consuming a lot of alcohol or whether 1 in 5 teenagers is consuming 11.4 units of alcohol per week.

You may remember that in December I reviewed a talk given by Les Back at a conference I went to. Well last Thursday (22nd March 2007) I went to Goldsmith’s College in London to interview Les Back about some of the themes he raised in that talk. Les Back is best known for his work on ethnicity, racism and ethnic identities in the UK, but he was talking to me about his new book The Art of Listening which will be published this July and about the role of sociology in today’s rapidly changing society.

The interview covers issues around the media, politics, social change and challenges to sociology and can be listened to by clicking on the buttons below.

Introduction

Les talks about his new book, The Art of Listening

Les talks about how sociology can relate to our moral system

Big brother

The art of listening

The role of theory, the role of history, and individuals and structures

Dark times

To read an extract from the book just follow this link: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-11-15-back-en.html

Here is an image of the cover of The Art of Listening - look closely at the photo! If you want to pre-order a copy of Les’ new book you can of course do so - just click on the link below:

The Art of Listening

I’ve just read this article and it made me think about how we read the news and how it is written!

BBC NEWS | Education | Adults ‘wish for qualifications’

The article is about the findings of a survey of adults done by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) (ie a governmental body with the purpose of funding and promoting further education) looking at their views on their education.

Have a read of the article - it all sounds quite positive, doesn’t it?

The findings have evidently been presented by the LSC (and by the BBC) in a way designed to promote the importance of formal education and qualifications.  While there is obviously a serious point to be made about education and the fact that adult education schemes do have a positive impact, I did have some thoughts on some of the figures stated:
“The survey of more than 2,000 adults also found 27% regretted not making the most of the opportunities at school.” - which does raise the question about the other 73% (or 7 out of every 10 people) -

• did they make the most of their opportunities?  Or do they still think that a lot of what they were taught in school was irrelevant? - Tooley (2000) argues that a lot of what is taught in school is irrelevant to students’ later lives.
  
• Or do they feel that they weren’t given opportunities at school?  Neo-Marxist sociologists such as Althusser and Apple argue that school exists to reproduce existing social inequalities and that therefore schools often restrict the opportunities available to working class children, preventing them from achieving educational success.
  

“more than one in four (30%) of those who had completed retraining said it had made them more employable and 17% had got a pay rise.” - so 70% had found that retraining had had no effect on their employability. Oh dear! that’s not quite the picture the LSC would want to present when the government is encouraging more people to take up work-related training and to stay in education for longer.  Also, while there are statistics to show that getting a degree does significantly raise your earnings, less than 1 in 5 people who had undergone retraining found that they ended up earning more money.

The article then goes on to talk about the government wanting to promote more work-related training and how important it is.  All in all another interesting example of the use of official statistics to show what officials want them to show.

Short but sweet, this is a lovely illustration of some of the problems with official statistics in general and crime statistics in particular.  A study suggests that crime has increased rather than decreased during Labour’s term in office, the Conservatives accuse Labour of manipulating the statistics.

BBC NEWS | UK | Labour crime claims ‘misleading’

All sorts of issues are raised here, including:

• the reliability and validity of official statistics
• to what extent are official statistical measurements a reflection of political/official motives and viewpoints rather than of reality?
• the difficulty of operationalising the concept of crime (or even individual crimes) so as to make them objectively measurable - even though these are in Durkheimian terms “social facts” and therefore able to be studied using scientific methods to produce absolute measurements

So we’re still confused about what it means to be middle class or working class?  As suggested by other sociological studies, it seems that people have varying views on what defines their social class and what influences their social class identities.
BBC NEWS | UK | Most Britons ‘are working class’

However, you also have to remember that this survey was done by what is essentially an insurance company - we know almost nothing about the method and research design used - if you click on the link to the company you don’t find out anything more.  We know the sample size - 1000 people, and we know that they were asked questions about their perceptions of social class, however we don’t know:

• sampling technique - was the sample representative? how reliable and generalisable are the findings?
• the wider purpose of the survey - was social class the only aspect tackled, if not, how might this have affected the responses?
• were the questions asked leading? - what kind of bias might this have introduced? how valid is the data as a result?
• what method was used - self-completion questionnaires, pre-coded questionnaires, structured interviews, unstructured interviews?

In order to take this survey seriously you need to know some more about it - yes it could be useful evidence, but always remember that it has some real problems.

It is very noticeable that this article starts with statistics on which crimes have gone up. Good news rarely wins an audience for the media, and often people only reaad the first part of a news article. It could be argued that this kind of tactic influences the formation of moral panics and moral crusades in society.

It’s important to remember that the Home Office Statistics are a statement of crime that was reported to and recorded by the police - it is commonly acknowledged that not all crimes are reported to the police and that some crimes are more likely to be reported than others (e.g. people tend to report car theft because they need a crime number in order to make an insurance claim). The types of crimes reported also change over time, as do crime recording procedures.

The British Crime Survey is a victim survey and is often seen as a more reliable and valid than statistics on recorded crime as it surveys a representative sample of the population and asks them about their expereinces of crime over the previous year. However, even this has its drawbacks and leads us to the question of whether crime statistics are really social constructions.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Robberies up 6% but crime stable
This article looks at young people’s experiences of crime, the lack of quantitative research into it and the conflicting findings of those research projects that have been carried out.
BBC NEWS | UK | The hidden victims of crime?