Should you pick sociology as a subject in A-Level?

As a sociology graduate, my answer is definitely a yes.

I have studied sociology since high school and honestly, I find it very attractive subject to study. It is challenging because some of the sociological journals and readings are quite difficult to understand. But if you are interested in understanding the power relationships between the social structures within the society, sociology will be a suitable subject for you.

Anyway, the school I was studying at the time selects AQA as the Sociology exam board. There are not much differences if the exam board for your sociolgy study is different, the context which you will be learning will be the same, excluding the exam style, how questions are asked and the range of topics.

For AQA learners, you will be learning a range of topics from family and households, education, health and disability, research methods and much more, you can have a look of here for the topics that are available on AQA Sociloogy in A-Level. And out of these topics, I have studied family and household, education with theories and methods in AS, and Crime and Deviance with theories and methods in A2.

To give you some gnereal idea of what sociology is and what it is like to study it as a subject in A-Level, I will briefly introduce the topics I have studied below, with a few hyperlinks you can look at as part of your decision in the subject selection for your A-level study.

If you have any question about this, please do not hesitate to contact me via the private message or wall message.

As it says on the tin, family and household is literally studying the patterns and roles of family and households within the UK (and sometimes families in various countries) with different sociological perspectives. Although you may already know, it is important to note that there are differences between family and household. A household is a group of people living together, whether there are networks or kinships between them whereas a family is a type of household.

In the first and second lesson of your AS Sociology study, you will be introducing with the different types of family and household that exist in the UK and the world, then studying the role and impacts of family in the society sociologically and the relationship between family and social policy in a circular manner.

Functionalism is one of the sociological perspectives you will study a lot regardless of whatever topics you are studying. It is a macro structural perspective beause it studies the society with the 'analogy of society' (Durkheim 1895) rather than studying the society individually. Durkheim (1895) believe the society is like a human body, because the society itself is made up with various institutions and social structures, just like the human biological body is made up from various organs and cells, For more information about the analogy of society, read here.

As you may notice from the name 'functionalism' and the article you just read, the words 'function' and 'functional' come quite a lot when study the perspective of functionalism, that's because functionalists believe everything exist for a reason (functional), otherwise they wouldn't exist. So in comparisons with other sociological perspectives, functionalism is a consensus sociological perspective because it sees everything as positively functional (yes, they even see the existence of crime and deviance as functional, but we can discuss about this later if you are interested).

In the context of family and household, functionalists see family has 4 functions, include sexual, reproduction, economic and educational (Murdock 1949). Here, educational refers to the socialisation of children, Parsons (1951) views the family as the primary socialisation where the parents and family are responsible for socialising the children with the consensus norms and values, and preventing the adult from behaving dysfunctional ways by stabilising their personalities, otherwise the dysfunctional behaviour may disrupt the society.

Here is a little PDF I found online which you can have a read about how family is studied from the functionalism
Sociology and Family: A very brief introduction (.pdf)