Society and Social Structures: Groups, Family, Socialization, Stratification and Change
Domain 1 tests how societies are structured - how people are grouped, how they learn to be members, how they are ranked, and how those patterns shift. Tasks usually combine precise definitions with short data sets or quotations.
Groups and social bonds
- Primary group: small, face-to-face, affective (family, close friends). Secondary group: large, instrumental, formal (a workplace team, a lecture cohort).
- In-group / out-group, and reference group - the group whose standards a person uses to judge themselves, even without belonging to it.
- An aggregate (commuters on a platform) and a category (all 18-year-olds) are not groups: no interaction, no shared norms.
Family and socialization
Family functions: reproductive, economic, protective, emotional, socializing. Types: nuclear, extended, single-parent, reconstructed (patchwork), childless. Primary socialization happens in childhood, mainly in the family; secondary socialization later, through school, peers, media, workplace; resocialization replaces internalised norms (prison, migration, military service).
Stratification and mobility
Estate (legal status), caste (ritual purity, closed), class (economic position, open). Weber's three dimensions: class (market), status (prestige), party (power). Mobility is vertical or horizontal, intergenerational or intragenerational; migration is geographical and is not mobility.
Worked example
A survey of 1,000 adults: 400 grew up in working-class households, and 120 of them now hold professional or managerial jobs - 30% upward intergenerational mobility. Among those raised in professional households, 65% remained professional. A politician concludes: 'mobility is high, three in ten move up.' The reasoning is flawed: the aggregate figure hides the comparison, and the 30% versus 65% gap shows origin still strongly predicts destination. The defensible conclusion is 'mobility exists but is unequal'.
Traps
- Primary means emotionally close, not first in time.
- Stratification concerns ranked positions, not only income.
- Socialization never ends; adulthood brings new agents and roles.